Yuletart reveal: MCR fanart
The yuletart masterlist is up! You can check out all the art by fandom here, and you should because there are beautiful things there :-)
The piece I drew was Killjoys Never Dye for idktbh. Drawing, like photography, is both easier and harder than it looks, and I am still learning the ropes as I go along. For anyone interested, I've written about the process of how I did it below the cut:
So I had the idea of drawing Frank dyeing Gerard's hair in the desert, Killjoys-'verse. I googled photos of people sitting down and people dyeing hair and Killjoys costumes and, okay, apes picking fleas from other apes (I was desperate!), and ended up sketching this:
I then emailed
nogah for some beta advice:
Attached is the very rough sketch of me trying to figure out where Frank and Gerard's bodies would go. I took Gerard's pose from this dude: http://www.posemaniacs.com/?p=634, but Frank is killing me. I know I drew him a little large, so I need to make him small in the real one -- that I can do -- but a) what do I do with his haaands? and b) how to I draw the hand and leg that are on the other side of the drawing?
I think maybe if he's not sitting as close to Gerard as I drew him there'll be more room for actual hands. I could make him not lean forward as much? Although I think he's leaning forward okay, and I just screwed something up with the shape of his head.
I also asked for help in drawing Gee's flaily hand in the back, which I had no idea how to work in.
nogah is amazing and replied with two sketches:
The most important thing she pointed out was that Gerard didn't exactly have the posture of a model and that he should be slouching, which, DUH *facepalm*. Yay betas :D
bell offered some advice as well, most of all providing help with encouragement and handholding and sending me reference photos of people dyeing hair, like this:
The problem was that none of the pics we could fine gave me the angle I was looking for, and I am not skilled enough to invent this kind of stuff, I need reference for what I'm drawing! I also looked up various "how to draw hands" tutorials, and face tutorials, and browsed through art books, but I couldn't find what I was looking for.
Eventually I ended up taking photos of myself for reference:
...yeah, I didn't have any convenient hair to pretend to dye, so this is me with a paintbrush and a feather quill.
And then spent like an hour trying to draw what I was seeing:
Frank's hands, Gee's hands, profiles, and mouths. God, Gerard's mouth killed me, I had no idea how to draw a mouth that looked like it was talking excitedly. You'd THINK it would be easy -- just two lines! but APPARENTLY.
After googling more Killjoys costumes, cacti, and California desert backdrops, eventually I had a sketch!
Which I then inked over:
It was at this point that I got back
glockgal's beta of my initial sketch, which I sent totally last minute so it was my fault, and sadly I ended up being unable to use it, but I'm posting it here because it's so pretty and she is so talented <3:
Look! She shaded the background limbs so I could figure out where they should go! Even if this ended up not being used, having the comm artbeta really helped by teaching me that fanart can, you know, be beta'd! I'd never really known that before.
Anyway, so finally I colored it in! I used the markers
nogah had lent me:
The markers can't smear, so for the red paint stains, I moistened a makeup sponge, colored the tip red, and smeared some on Gerard's neck and arms. Then I drew a hand on the sponge and stamped it on his thigh; you can see it's a little outside the lines, but ah well, did my best. The sky's uneven and the ground's a little splotched in the left where it shouldn't be, but all in all I think it went fine. And like, I see flaws in the pic -- mostly Frank's head and face, which I haven't entirely figured out yet -- but all in all I love how it turned out :D
So I sent it to the mods, and then I realized that I could a) try to take a better quality photo in different lighting (my scanner, it is broke), and b) I'D FORGOTTEN FRANK'S TATTOOS. So I googled some, and thankfully/creepily there is a fandom refrence guide to Frank's tattoos, as well as articles like this, and it took way too much time and I wish I could just squiggle a few lines on his arms and settle for that but I CAN'T. So I drew those in -- without the black pen, unfortunately, which I couldn't find at that point -- and resubmitted, and that was that :-)
In the end, the final version was this:
TL;DR. Yuletart: highly recommended :D
comments on Dreamwidth.
The piece I drew was Killjoys Never Dye for idktbh. Drawing, like photography, is both easier and harder than it looks, and I am still learning the ropes as I go along. For anyone interested, I've written about the process of how I did it below the cut:
So I had the idea of drawing Frank dyeing Gerard's hair in the desert, Killjoys-'verse. I googled photos of people sitting down and people dyeing hair and Killjoys costumes and, okay, apes picking fleas from other apes (I was desperate!), and ended up sketching this:
I then emailed
nogah for some beta advice:
Attached is the very rough sketch of me trying to figure out where Frank and Gerard's bodies would go. I took Gerard's pose from this dude: http://www.posemaniacs.com/?p=634, but Frank is killing me. I know I drew him a little large, so I need to make him small in the real one -- that I can do -- but a) what do I do with his haaands? and b) how to I draw the hand and leg that are on the other side of the drawing?
I think maybe if he's not sitting as close to Gerard as I drew him there'll be more room for actual hands. I could make him not lean forward as much? Although I think he's leaning forward okay, and I just screwed something up with the shape of his head.
I also asked for help in drawing Gee's flaily hand in the back, which I had no idea how to work in.
nogah is amazing and replied with two sketches:
The most important thing she pointed out was that Gerard didn't exactly have the posture of a model and that he should be slouching, which, DUH *facepalm*. Yay betas :D
bell offered some advice as well, most of all providing help with encouragement and handholding and sending me reference photos of people dyeing hair, like this:
The problem was that none of the pics we could fine gave me the angle I was looking for, and I am not skilled enough to invent this kind of stuff, I need reference for what I'm drawing! I also looked up various "how to draw hands" tutorials, and face tutorials, and browsed through art books, but I couldn't find what I was looking for.
Eventually I ended up taking photos of myself for reference:
...yeah, I didn't have any convenient hair to pretend to dye, so this is me with a paintbrush and a feather quill.
And then spent like an hour trying to draw what I was seeing:
Frank's hands, Gee's hands, profiles, and mouths. God, Gerard's mouth killed me, I had no idea how to draw a mouth that looked like it was talking excitedly. You'd THINK it would be easy -- just two lines! but APPARENTLY.
After googling more Killjoys costumes, cacti, and California desert backdrops, eventually I had a sketch!
Which I then inked over:
It was at this point that I got back
glockgal's beta of my initial sketch, which I sent totally last minute so it was my fault, and sadly I ended up being unable to use it, but I'm posting it here because it's so pretty and she is so talented <3:
Look! She shaded the background limbs so I could figure out where they should go! Even if this ended up not being used, having the comm artbeta really helped by teaching me that fanart can, you know, be beta'd! I'd never really known that before.
Anyway, so finally I colored it in! I used the markers
nogah had lent me:
The markers can't smear, so for the red paint stains, I moistened a makeup sponge, colored the tip red, and smeared some on Gerard's neck and arms. Then I drew a hand on the sponge and stamped it on his thigh; you can see it's a little outside the lines, but ah well, did my best. The sky's uneven and the ground's a little splotched in the left where it shouldn't be, but all in all I think it went fine. And like, I see flaws in the pic -- mostly Frank's head and face, which I haven't entirely figured out yet -- but all in all I love how it turned out :D
So I sent it to the mods, and then I realized that I could a) try to take a better quality photo in different lighting (my scanner, it is broke), and b) I'D FORGOTTEN FRANK'S TATTOOS. So I googled some, and thankfully/creepily there is a fandom refrence guide to Frank's tattoos, as well as articles like this, and it took way too much time and I wish I could just squiggle a few lines on his arms and settle for that but I CAN'T. So I drew those in -- without the black pen, unfortunately, which I couldn't find at that point -- and resubmitted, and that was that :-)
In the end, the final version was this:
TL;DR. Yuletart: highly recommended :D
comments on Dreamwidth.