Ask the Artist: slinkymilinky
Hi Guys!
I'm slinkymilinky and have been a fan of SPN since it first aired over here in the UK, but I've only been in fandom since mid season 5.
Thanks to oxoniensis for inviting me to do this months Ask the Artist. I'm honoured! I was a bit stumped on what to talk about, so my lovely flist have given me a host of questions to get me started:
Have you had any formal art training?
Yes - I did my Art Foundation after school - which is basically a year of playing around with all types of art; sculpture, fine-art, illustration, graphic design, photography, print, fashion and textiles.
After that I did a degree in fashion design.
Tools of the Trade:
Photoshop CS2, a Canon SLR digital camera and a little Wacom Bamboo tablet.
I have a few custom brushes, but mostly use these at varying opacities:
Where do you go for inspiration?
Hmm, all over really. I listen to a lot of music, watch natural history documentaries and trippy films. I play a lot of video games. My previous fandom was an anime fandom so I think elements of that are quite obvious in my work. (Not the anime style, but more how I approach a piece.)
Colour the Blind was inspired by this film of sea birds diving (about 1:10 in)
The Children’s Crusade that I did for gabby_silang's fic of the same title was inspired by this animation.
…Erm anything with angels in that predominantly features the colour gold was probably inspired by The Fountain.
As If You’d Said Nothing was done after I watched this.
Do you do traditional art?
Not really, I don’t have the space to work traditionally. I still sketch and hash out ideas in pencil or biro sometimes, but I get frustrated with scanning images or photographing them only to loose details and colour saturation. Also It’s easier to fix mistakes working digitally, so I stick to that!
What’s your opinion on manips and paintovers?
I have no problem with either. Good maniping takes a ridiculous amount of skill - I personally really struggle with it - You’re starting off with several complete images that are sometimes low quality or the light sources/colours vary from image to image, or the sharpness, or a hundred other factors. I find breaking those complete images down into the elements I need and then stitching them back together again really difficult.
I think the effect of a good paintover/manip mix can have a really nice nostalgic quality to it. A lot of the fanart for older fandoms like the X-Files was done in that way. Maybe because graphics tablets were harder to come by and that 'smudge and smooth' technique can be done with a mouse.
So yeah, generally I don’t mind how an image has been made (tracing, manip, paintovers, griding, pixel by pixel…); I’m more interested in the end result.
Do you feel doing fanart or fanfic detracts from your 'dignity' as a creative?
Not at all. At the moment fandom is the only thing stopping my skills going totally stagnant. And plus it’s a great sandbox to explore new things. I’d never made a vid before, or even looked at editing software before I joined fandom. I’d never made a movie poster, or a book cover, or tried to say something about myself in a 100 x 100px jpeg, or written something for fun. I’d never collaborated with someone. Fandom's awesome; everybody is creating things that they want to create, so overall I find it a great learning environment. I’m not shy about my involvement in fandom either - most of my RL friends have some knowledge of my fandom activities.
Who are your favourite characters to depict and why?
Ha, well, Cas. He’s in 90% of my masterlist. Why? Well, I like his face, I like angels in biblical mythology and I love his character - But I really like drawing him because he has so many symbols that make him Cas. The trenchcoat, the blue tie and eyes, the messy hair, the cool lines under his eyes…they’re all things that when I see them I’m like ‘oh look it’s Cas!’ -That’s something you don’t see often outside of animation and superheroes.
Can you talk about vidding please?
I’d by no means class myself as a vidder…I’ve made two and a half vids so it’s not something I feel like I know a lot about, but I watch a lot of film and TV and I have a pretty good memory for scenes and visuals which is handy.
Castiel the Motion Picture took upwards of 40 hours because I needed to learn the programs, which was a jumbled mess of teaching myself and having my partner tutor me. It was a fairly ambitious first project and definitely ate a lot of my time. It also went through several incarnations - I did a cool title card with the Supernatural text dissolving into gold ash which took about 8 hours…and then decided not to use it.
Out of the Mountain quite obviously didn’t take me that long. Maybe 6-8 hours? But that was a quick little project for august_monsoon’s birthday. I was very proud of my use of ‘Trawler Men’ clips in that vid though. :P
Just get on with it and draw something:
I feel like drawing Cas (always) being a BAMF and lighting up demons. I've had these scenes stuck in my head:
And want to do something a bit like that.
So I make a list of things I want this pic to do;
*Movement
*Cas being awesome
*Demon getting pwned
*Wacky perspective
My drawing process usually involves me having a list of bullet points and then trying to work out the kinks in a series of badly drawn thumbnails (which always manage to look a bit kinky - IDEK):
I play around with angles and shapes and try and work out how much negative space I want in a picture. Is it going to be really close up? Is it going to be pulled back with a more distributed focus? How many characters are there? That kind of thing.
I pick the third one, blow up the thumbnail and do a quick scribbly sketch over it.
I want the main focus to be in movement and atmosphere. I haven’t drawn snow before and trying to do a snowy white fight scene at night seems like it’ll be a good challenge.
I splodge some rough colour on it to get an idea of my palette and use this as a guide so that I stay focused on what I've set out to do.
Then I hide that and start refining my sketch. I’m not going for a realistic looking piece, so I’m not going to bother sourcing references. If I’m going for a ‘quiet’ vibe I’ll usually use a lot of references which I try to take myself when possible (having my boyfriend pose for me - poor thing). In this case though I want it to be energetic and aggressive and quite graphic, so I’ll sacrifice good anatomy for that sake.
Now I flesh it out. I nail the background first so that I don’t get hyper lazy about it later, add some flat colour and then some rough snow and light on new layers so that I can turn them on and off.
Now I start layering up some colour. I keep my lines on a seperate layer and do all the character colouring on the layer below that.
So already there are some major issues - Cas’s face looks cool but nothing like him and it’s a bit blank for the chunky style I’m going for. Also his left arm has ‘wet noodle’ syndrome - he looks more like he’s stroking the demon in an affectionately drunk manner.
So I’m gonna break his arm and try to establish more of a ‘dance box’ between their bodies and then anime up Cas's face. I also colour-pick the light from the demon's eyes, start a new layer and build up some highlights.
I’ve been trying to draw the angel sword with a fish eye bend on it, but it’s just not playing. It keeps coming out like a cutlass and at this point I’ve drawn and redrawn it about 5 times. So I’m going to swing it behind him. Although it’s a compromise, I like it facing that way, it creates a really defined ‘S’ shape across the picture.
To finish I add a bunch of blurry snow and fiddle with his face a little more to try and get more of a balance between the last stage and my initial sketch. Ta Da!
So thats kind of it!
You can see more piccy's over at my Masterpost, or my DeviantART Gallery.
Please ask me lots of questions! :)
I'm slinkymilinky and have been a fan of SPN since it first aired over here in the UK, but I've only been in fandom since mid season 5.
Thanks to oxoniensis for inviting me to do this months Ask the Artist. I'm honoured! I was a bit stumped on what to talk about, so my lovely flist have given me a host of questions to get me started:
Have you had any formal art training?
Yes - I did my Art Foundation after school - which is basically a year of playing around with all types of art; sculpture, fine-art, illustration, graphic design, photography, print, fashion and textiles.
After that I did a degree in fashion design.
Tools of the Trade:
Photoshop CS2, a Canon SLR digital camera and a little Wacom Bamboo tablet.
I have a few custom brushes, but mostly use these at varying opacities:
Where do you go for inspiration?
Hmm, all over really. I listen to a lot of music, watch natural history documentaries and trippy films. I play a lot of video games. My previous fandom was an anime fandom so I think elements of that are quite obvious in my work. (Not the anime style, but more how I approach a piece.)
Colour the Blind was inspired by this film of sea birds diving (about 1:10 in)
The Children’s Crusade that I did for gabby_silang's fic of the same title was inspired by this animation.
…Erm anything with angels in that predominantly features the colour gold was probably inspired by The Fountain.
As If You’d Said Nothing was done after I watched this.
Do you do traditional art?
Not really, I don’t have the space to work traditionally. I still sketch and hash out ideas in pencil or biro sometimes, but I get frustrated with scanning images or photographing them only to loose details and colour saturation. Also It’s easier to fix mistakes working digitally, so I stick to that!
What’s your opinion on manips and paintovers?
I have no problem with either. Good maniping takes a ridiculous amount of skill - I personally really struggle with it - You’re starting off with several complete images that are sometimes low quality or the light sources/colours vary from image to image, or the sharpness, or a hundred other factors. I find breaking those complete images down into the elements I need and then stitching them back together again really difficult.
I think the effect of a good paintover/manip mix can have a really nice nostalgic quality to it. A lot of the fanart for older fandoms like the X-Files was done in that way. Maybe because graphics tablets were harder to come by and that 'smudge and smooth' technique can be done with a mouse.
So yeah, generally I don’t mind how an image has been made (tracing, manip, paintovers, griding, pixel by pixel…); I’m more interested in the end result.
Do you feel doing fanart or fanfic detracts from your 'dignity' as a creative?
Not at all. At the moment fandom is the only thing stopping my skills going totally stagnant. And plus it’s a great sandbox to explore new things. I’d never made a vid before, or even looked at editing software before I joined fandom. I’d never made a movie poster, or a book cover, or tried to say something about myself in a 100 x 100px jpeg, or written something for fun. I’d never collaborated with someone. Fandom's awesome; everybody is creating things that they want to create, so overall I find it a great learning environment. I’m not shy about my involvement in fandom either - most of my RL friends have some knowledge of my fandom activities.
Who are your favourite characters to depict and why?
Ha, well, Cas. He’s in 90% of my masterlist. Why? Well, I like his face, I like angels in biblical mythology and I love his character - But I really like drawing him because he has so many symbols that make him Cas. The trenchcoat, the blue tie and eyes, the messy hair, the cool lines under his eyes…they’re all things that when I see them I’m like ‘oh look it’s Cas!’ -That’s something you don’t see often outside of animation and superheroes.
Can you talk about vidding please?
I’d by no means class myself as a vidder…I’ve made two and a half vids so it’s not something I feel like I know a lot about, but I watch a lot of film and TV and I have a pretty good memory for scenes and visuals which is handy.
Castiel the Motion Picture took upwards of 40 hours because I needed to learn the programs, which was a jumbled mess of teaching myself and having my partner tutor me. It was a fairly ambitious first project and definitely ate a lot of my time. It also went through several incarnations - I did a cool title card with the Supernatural text dissolving into gold ash which took about 8 hours…and then decided not to use it.
Out of the Mountain quite obviously didn’t take me that long. Maybe 6-8 hours? But that was a quick little project for august_monsoon’s birthday. I was very proud of my use of ‘Trawler Men’ clips in that vid though. :P
Just get on with it and draw something:
I feel like drawing Cas (always) being a BAMF and lighting up demons. I've had these scenes stuck in my head:
And want to do something a bit like that.
So I make a list of things I want this pic to do;
*Movement
*Cas being awesome
*Demon getting pwned
*Wacky perspective
My drawing process usually involves me having a list of bullet points and then trying to work out the kinks in a series of badly drawn thumbnails (which always manage to look a bit kinky - IDEK):
I play around with angles and shapes and try and work out how much negative space I want in a picture. Is it going to be really close up? Is it going to be pulled back with a more distributed focus? How many characters are there? That kind of thing.
I pick the third one, blow up the thumbnail and do a quick scribbly sketch over it.
I want the main focus to be in movement and atmosphere. I haven’t drawn snow before and trying to do a snowy white fight scene at night seems like it’ll be a good challenge.
I splodge some rough colour on it to get an idea of my palette and use this as a guide so that I stay focused on what I've set out to do.
Then I hide that and start refining my sketch. I’m not going for a realistic looking piece, so I’m not going to bother sourcing references. If I’m going for a ‘quiet’ vibe I’ll usually use a lot of references which I try to take myself when possible (having my boyfriend pose for me - poor thing). In this case though I want it to be energetic and aggressive and quite graphic, so I’ll sacrifice good anatomy for that sake.
Now I flesh it out. I nail the background first so that I don’t get hyper lazy about it later, add some flat colour and then some rough snow and light on new layers so that I can turn them on and off.
Now I start layering up some colour. I keep my lines on a seperate layer and do all the character colouring on the layer below that.
So already there are some major issues - Cas’s face looks cool but nothing like him and it’s a bit blank for the chunky style I’m going for. Also his left arm has ‘wet noodle’ syndrome - he looks more like he’s stroking the demon in an affectionately drunk manner.
So I’m gonna break his arm and try to establish more of a ‘dance box’ between their bodies and then anime up Cas's face. I also colour-pick the light from the demon's eyes, start a new layer and build up some highlights.
I’ve been trying to draw the angel sword with a fish eye bend on it, but it’s just not playing. It keeps coming out like a cutlass and at this point I’ve drawn and redrawn it about 5 times. So I’m going to swing it behind him. Although it’s a compromise, I like it facing that way, it creates a really defined ‘S’ shape across the picture.
To finish I add a bunch of blurry snow and fiddle with his face a little more to try and get more of a balance between the last stage and my initial sketch. Ta Da!
So thats kind of it!
You can see more piccy's over at my Masterpost, or my DeviantART Gallery.
Please ask me lots of questions! :)