Had to share this bit XD

 

Yeah, a decent wip finally happened, right? The chest part is going to look great when I add the feathers and I was quite happy with how the legs look. Then...my friend stepped in. To be utterly fair, I really did ask him for help in making a bird's feet work out. So I suppose this should not have been utterly surprising.

But alas. He was fully entertained by how buff she looks in the WIP:

Then he absolutely had to add insult to injury with this:

I did scratch out a term here but I'm sure you know what I scratched out. XD But then! THEN! On Discord, I'm in an art chat who had to add their thoughts into things:

A flex reaction? XD FLEX? ...to be fair, AnnBirb looks exactly like she's been spending some time at the gym. 

Had to share this fun little bit with you (as well as sharing my current WIP). Thanks for dropping by and have a lovely day!

Stone formation sketches!

Super yay! I now have my new tablet!
By everything that I can tell right now? It works quite like the Huion that I have, except that the pen doesn't have to be charged. On testing most of everything, the pen pressure claims to go to 8191--whether it does or doesn't, I'm still very happy with how everything is right now.
Also? The tablet feels lighter than the old Huion version did. 

That's nothing especially special but I'm just thrilled about everything at the moment. 

Can't wait to get some experiments on Clip Studio. Did I show these before? Either way;

V.1 stone formation

V.2 stone formation

 

...I may have just gotten a bit hungry before the end of that last image. XD And no matter if I got the ground level right, these would almost look great in a sketch of my own. So there's at least 6 more stones to draw.

Can't wait to play with the others with my new tablet!

Final Mountain Lake Reflection and chatter

I'm half certain that I've posted this image before, but I'm too tired to poke around. So just in case. Here is the final "Mountain Lake Reflection" image!

 
Thanks so much to all of y'all for being so great to keep checking on/giving tips while I worked!
As of now, though, I'm about to head off to get some sleep. Have a sinus infection that's going on and...well. No wonder I've been so exhausted and unfocused. XD Have had this thing for at least a month or so!

Have to say that I hope to see y'all on the 12th. You'll love my next feature!

What happened to the Feature? And Norux Anihes WIP

I...kinda missed Feature 86, didn't I? And there was such a streak going!
My apology on that. I was so busy Monday that I didn't get a chance to really settle down. Good news, if you're interested, though! Neurologist thought that things were currently going pretty well so I'm happy!
Feature 85 will be posted on Monday of next week, on the normal schedule. Hope to see you there!

Norux is coming out fairly well, thank goodness. I'm normally awful about 3D but this clothing is trying to work out properly. His armor is proving to be difficult but what else is new for a person who has trouble seeing 3D if there's no color? XD

References for this image:
Pose
Hair

 

Sooooo... What I see about his boots? I need to get those laces to circle around the front of the boots. Maybe re-sketch them some! But oh my stars, I dread getting to his armor. It's leather armor around his waist...The front part would be most likely gathered between his legs in some form. 

The back will very likely be falling straight down too in some form.
His chin is also incorrect! I knew it! ...I just have no idea right this moment how to correct it. Maybe bring the chin up a bit more? Well, all that will be a lot of fun to work on. Wish me luck! XD

Critiques are such gorgeous treasure!

Let's speak about drawing critiques. I absolutely love them! So my tutor has given me some critique on the Norux image, yesterday. The bad part? I've been all kinds of exhausted and sleeping too much. >>;

So please excuse me that this is all I've actually got to show at the moment. Updates will come each week!

The dagger has been moved so I can show where this goes on Norux's belt. And I have more work to correct all the boots we see here. Not to mention this trouble I keep having to show small things like the hand guard of the blade (in his hand) as 3D instead of simple 2D!

There's some good news about all this, though!
Tutor wants me to show him how much I know about light and shadow once I've fixed up this bit of linework. Which, of course, means the dreaded fire on the fire pose. It ought to be pretty fun to get the fire to go from his hand and around him.
Double so for actually showing the light and shadow for the thing!

As I state all of this, it hits me again. Why is it that the fun part of artwork is all of the work we do in it? Maybe it's my unfailing interest in puzzles. Maybe it's that I like playing with things that pretend to drive me insane.
But gosh, it's got a hold on me and I keep begging it for more!

Wish me luck, please, as I take you on this trip of madness with me.

Videos page? Oh I'm trying!

Since I'm going to be posting videos from YouTube, it'll make perfect sense to put them on their own page. At least I think so! They won't be squeezed between the features and my own posts, at least.

But of course my own brain is standing in the way of how to accomplish this idea. >>;

I don't remember for my life how to make a new site to become a new page. Sheeez. It doesn't help because everything I can find is how to get a new page on the old way Blogger was working. It's going to be locked to the new set up sometime pretty soon so I hope the instructions will hurry up and straighten out.

But onto my projects!

1. I'm working on painting this picture while recording: 

It'll be another video to add to my YouTube library. If only I could stick to one thing at a time, this would have been finished a lot sooner and I could just be working on the other thing! But it's still very fun to see it all come out.

2. I've already shown this one before, right? 

My apologies for posting the same thing twice. I've just been so trapped in playing an Assassin's Creed game that a friend gave me. Why did no one tell me how good that series is? It's eaten so many hours of my time...

Hm. To be fair, even if someone had told me how good it is, I probably wouldn't have had a computer willing to play it. You don't have to have a "gaming" computer to play them! Just don't buy the cheapest computers in the world and things will be just fine.

Edit:
Thanks to Ace Edmonds for his help getting my Videos page up and running! He was able to figure out what made the most sense for the idea that I was trying to put together and helped me get everything set up for it.
I linked to his blog Dream Classier there at his name. Go check his blog and everything!

Gesture sketches and relief

         

I'm half certain that these are going to post in a horrible website translation of what order I've asked it to do. Because how can a website understand what is intended as simplicity? XD That said, I'm going to be posting more phone images of these things (hopefully without putting my medicine front and center again!). My tutor has suggested a good type of paper to use when I'm going to be going through them as quickly as gestures require and I'm going to try to keep buying them--in my store, the pad of paper was only about 5 dollars for 100 sheets? Hopefully, I find more the next time I go by!

Anyway. Expect many more of these gestures in the future.

And the day this blog posts will have been my last appointment at therapy! It feels like I've definitely gotten more stable with my balance and I'm not getting exhausted so easily. ...now let's hope that I get my sleep schedule back in order. Everything will be right again when that happens!

Scanner's giving me hell

I have things to post and the scanner isn't behaving for its life. Bet the darn thing has finally gotten to the 'nearly dead' stage that 10+ year old computer pieces tend to reach. That's annoying.

But, when I can get my pages scanned or photoed, I have some thumbnails for a new picture to show everyone. This one is going to be fun. I'm going to have Cera and a friend of hers sitting at an outside coffee shop, sipping on drinks and eating some kind of pastry as they talk.
Then the events of Find the Way happen. I always imagined that Valeon was being quite loud during that scene, so it's going to be fun to figure out how to draw the reactions from Cera and her pal.

...speaking of, I need to come up with a name for her friend. For the past four or five days, it's just been 'Cera's Friend'. XD Right. It's official now. Cera's Friend is going to be Haley from here out! (Until I forget that I wrote it here, anyway. Then we're back to square one...but a name will stick before you see the thumbnails!)

Website changes and what I plan

Sure that most people have seen it by now but it seems that I forgot to mention. The links to my pages have changed--they are now what the site says they are. This page is the 'blog' of rachburns.us, the About page is 'about' rachburns.us, so on and so forth.
...you know, what I had planned to do for ages and never had it all set up at the same time. >>; So this is just a note that says everything should work fine now. If you have any problems at all, feel free to leave me a note under the post. ^^

I'll keep working on the Leana &Valeon picture but, soon, I'll start tossing up thumbnails and such for the hummingbird and flower picture. (Those are coming out fairly well. Can't wait to post the best ones!)
Homework for my tutor is going well. I've got an assignment on drawing a cube as if the 'camera' is pointing at different spaces all around it. It should also be posted soonish, whenever I'm happy with it.

Sorry for the lack of images this time around--life has just gotten in the way, as it's usually happy to do. See y'all later!

The puzzle of phone cases...

Did you know it was impossible to find a phone case in store? >>; I mean, sure. Everyone else would buy them up. But I had to get home and order mine online.

Not that there's a problem with that! It might have wound up a little cheaper than if I'd had to buy it in store! And the best part is that I've finally found a case that appears to look like the back of my phone!
And I don't think I could have asked for it to be any cheaper, what and having to match up for the exact type of phone I have...Thank goodness for the guy running the smartphone section at walmart today or I'd have never gotten this far. XD

Still wish that I could have been certain about another case. It's a little prettier (and somehow a little cheaper?!) but, since it says nothing about a thing my phone's specific about, I'd rather be sure I'm only paying for one case instead of two. ^^;

No idea how good this is going to work out right yet. BUT when the case is delivered and I've had time to figure out how to squeeze the phone into it, I'll attempt to give a small idea about how well it does its intended job.
...not that it'll be a special thing, it's a phone case. But y'know...

Also, in a couple of days, I'll have a little more to show for this drawing project:

Tutor mentioned I forgot to use the perspective in trying to sketch her out...and yes I did. Such an obvious thing to forget! Can't wait to get it fixed up. XD

Room layouts! How fun.

I wish I could get up to drawing like I should. >< I am supposed to be playing with layouts for an imaginary bedroom--and it looks relatively easy!--but everything is just keeping me so busy right now. And I need to do about five or ten of them so we can decide which one to keep.
(...warning about that link, by the way. It's just a google image search for layouts.)

I have a pretty fair idea about what I initially want, too. It'd be easy to mimic one or two of these til I get a better idea! And I certainly will get a better idea when playing with these layouts. It's just when in the world will I get the burn to pick up the tablet again?!

That's probably just a personal problem anyway. That or I'm simply lazy but it sure can't be that now. >>;

What I would do...

...if my memory were just a little more connected to my ideas!

It's not surprising that the study I shared about last week (week before?) won't have the program's mannequins in use. I didn't share last week's image with the intent to keep them, at least! I just forgot how hard it was to start from the bottom up...it's not going to be difficult so much, but I need to do a crash course on how to get gestures to work.

If I'm remembering correctly, it's going to be pretty fun to get them in position! But, for today and tomorrow, it's another search on Proko's site for his gesture instruction. ^^; From there, it'll be playing with the picture and then turning the sketch in to my tutor.

May the remembering come quickly!

Well then. I've been lazy!

Haven't picked up my tablet the past week or so, isn't it sad. Feels like I'm getting the itch to work on things again, at least...Especially since I'm getting the idea to rework Horseman's Field! Not even done with Lea and Val and this new idea decides to start itching me...

And it makes me think I'm absolutely insane. 

You lot know the work I like putting into my pictures lately. Can you imagine if I turn my eye to that old piece now? But then I get to thinking that it could be another spot in the field, Horseman and his brother chatting on the other side of the fence while their horses are in the grass...there's no doubt that there are more trees in the area.

There's also the glaring problem of not really knowing how to draw horses. Can't forget that one.

...Yeah, I think I'm not going to escape myself this time. It's always the hard stuff that gets me excited for projects. This is why artists are often called insane!

Ugh. Fourth character

Maj, the oldest in the bunch I've already drawn and posted, is being so fussy! I'm sure he'll eventually behave (that's a benefit to knowing he's oldest!) let me draw, once he's pleased with the pose.
As of now, he seems pretty happy with the doll I've posed that has its hand to his forehead as if saying, "And I have to be related to them!"

...maybe he'll let me pose him a little better before I have to start drawing. The doll I'm working with right now is pretty funny.

Plus, Clip Studio's ability to show a lightsource on the dolls is quite nice, hopefully I'll color things right. Shading has also been woefully missing for quite a long time and I have little idea when it fell. I don't think it has to do with my taking up a study, so it's gotta be something I've been overlooking lately.
...kinda shameful, seeing how I used to be somewhat decent with painting shadows and making a character stand out. ^^;

So my work is set out. I love the difficult stuff! XD

Would anyone be interested in a color commission?

I'm not ready to take one, as of right now, but I've been tempted to offer a sale for coloring a piece.

BUT, I'm not at all sure how to do this. Does it necessarily have to be for the linework AND color, or do sales for just coloring work?
On top of that, coloring is just about the most fun thing to do with an artwork. Would anyone want to give that up for pay?

Just a thought since most everyone seems to point out my coloring over my linework. It'd be pretty interesting if there's a market for this. (And maybe I should do a separate priceline for Background, Character, and Color. Mercy, I make things so much harder for myself. *facepalm*)

Two weeks of sinus infection

Well...two weeks is exaggerating, at the second. It's barely been a few days. Blegh. Enough is enough is enough of being ill, I want to practice some more! Hope the pixelovely site I linked has helped a few of y'all.

Should stop hiding from practice, I think...here's a handful of gestures. Need to work better and do some more sometime, these are fun. Can't wait til I get to the point of drawing "gesture people", with a few more lines.