Ask the Artist: artmetica

[artmetica]

Hello!

Thank you so much, oxoniensis, for inviting me and guiding me to be a part of an "Ask the Artist" session in spnroundtable. Just... Wow, it's a really great honor! Thanks again! :D

I'll just put some questions I often get here, feel free to ask more! And sorry for my bad English ^^;


About me

I'm an Indonesian, living on the island of Java (yes, the coffee :p). People call me Nana, it's my actual RL nickname given by my mother :) I have several screen names for online games and other sites, but Artmetica is my main one.

What do you do?
My background/line of work is corporate & government education. I'm a boring salarywoman who does a lot of overtime and travel ε=ε=┏( >_<)┛

Do you have any formal art training?
No, it's kind of a hobby, I don't know art theories and stuff. Drawing has been my distraction from boring classes in school and now in meetings (makes it look like I'm taking notes :p). Basically it's a way for me to keep myself sane-ish and have fun (＾▽＾) ♥

How did you find SPN?
First it was because of Jensen and Smallville. His SV character [spoiler] suddenly turned evil and then died, I was about ready to smite something (# ゜Д゜) ...But not long after that, I saw his SPN poster. So I gave SPN a try, although I only watched some of the early episodes.
What brought me back were Castiel's wings (▰˘◡˘▰) In late 2010, I stumbled onto a pic of Castiel's wings' shadow. A simple pic, but it made me so curious about what was going on in the show. So, I caught up with everything I missed (｡･ω･｡)


Style

Where do you find inspiration?
When I listen to songs, play video games, watch movies etc, I like to imagine SPN characters in them ;D
Fics and dreams/daydreams are great sources too. I'm an inattentive person whose mind wanders a lot, to the point that it sometimes becomes a problem.

How did you get/evolve your style?
My style is probably a combination of manga and... something. I don't know, I didn't draw this much before SPN anyway. There were several years where I immersed myself in multiplayer games and didn't even doodle anything :p
When I was a kid, my doodles were usually of muscly Saiyan men from Dragon Ball Z, or just random beefcakes in general. Yeh... For some reason I just liked drawing muscly men (｡◕‿◕｡) Shoujo manga has also been very prevalent in my country, so I drew bishies too.
All my school books have been donated so I don't have samples of my early drawings anymore >_< Here's a few between 2005 and 2010, these are from before I got into SPN (except the PoP one):


This was my first digital art, drawn in 2005. I didn't have a tablet and I had just found Photoshop, it took like a whole month （≧▽≦）

(DotA fan art)




Sometimes I replay video games and draw the characters whom I find amusing.

(KH: Birth by Sleep,
Dynasty Warriors 6,
FF8, Prince of Persia)
My first slash drawing, also the first time I drew on paper that's not from a notebook :p This was drawn in 2006.

(The X-Files fan art)




When I was going to draw my first SPN pic, I tried using references in drawing the character's faces. The resulting style is probably because of my being indecisive. I'm not patient enough to draw realism. On the other hand, I don't want to draw SPN characters as complete bishies. So the result is somewhere in between: not very cartoon-y, but not very realistic either :p

My tendency to draw big muscles has bled into SPN too, but I've been trying to keep things down ^^; And I developed a wing kink grew fond of wings thanks to the fics I read, so I sometimes include them in my drawings.

Some people who can distinguish my drawings (even when I use a different style) say that the tell is in the coloring. I probably use bright colors too much :p and I'm lazy, my base color swatch is always the same every time I start coloring the skin, no matter what the background color is ミ(ノ;_ _)ノ This is my usual base skin color:      #ebb68e

Do you prefer certain ships/genres?
For SPN pairing, I've been mostly into Dean/Castiel. The maestro petite_madame got me into J2 too, her amazing art has that effect XD But I'm not brave enough to draw RPS yet (I didn't even know what RPS was before getting into SPN ^^; /newbie).
As for genres, I can enjoy reading/viewing most of them. But in drawing them myself, I find AUs especially a lot of fun because there's a lot more space to experiment on. That said, I'm not really into drawing high-school AUs... Mature people FTW (*>ω<)

I saw NC-17 pics that I could swear were yours! Are they?

Er... maybe...?
...I haven't drawn many mature pics (and only 2 of SPN so far), but I don't openly associate them with my main account due to personal reasons.


Technique

What are your equipments?
2B mechanical pencil, Wacom Graphire4 (A5 size), Adobe Photoshop CS2.
I also used Autodesk Sketchbook Express for Android once or twice during travels, it's free and quite handy :D

Do you use custom brushes?
Yes. I make my own brushes in Photoshop, which are available for download over here. Here's a preview of where I use them:


The brush I use the most, from blocking to shading and finishing.
This brush softens the area it touches.
A brush for detailing hair.
To draw stubble quickly.
Adds some texture.
A brush for detailing feathers.
This was made to draw spiky dragon mane. Nice for quick texturing too.
This one was made to draw scales.
Quick chain. TIP:

• Try using more soft brush when coloring women's skin.
• Try changing brush settings, you can make multiple effects out of a single brush.

What is your process?
The basic process is to draw on paper, scan it, and then color it using Photoshop.

• Drawing

1. My first step in drawing a scene is making thumbnails on the paper to decide how the pic is going to be. This step is skipped when I just want to draw a close up of a single character.
2. I then draw stick figures in very thin lines before fleshing them out in thicker lines. I do this while watching SPN episodes and pausing it here and there (I find this helpful in observing the planes of a character's face), although I often just end up watching the episodes instead of drawing anything XD
3. When the basic lines are finished, I stop and look at the drawing to decide if it actually has some resemblance to the character I'm trying to draw. Most of the time it doesn't, so I usually have to redraw it. Some drawings of mine took A LOT of tries, with the record so far held by Balthazar with 6-7 tries. I probably won't draw him again （￣へ￣）
4. If it's settled, or if I'm just fed up of redrawing, it's time to scan it.

TIP:

• Flip the paper and put it against a medium/strong light source to check for mistakes.
• If the drawing is going to be colored digitally, try to keep the drawing as clean as possible (makes the next step easier).

• Coloring

To me, coloring is where the fun is o(≧▽≦)o♪ Coloring can make a bad drawing look good, or make a good drawing look bad.

This is my usual coloring process (summarized):

1. I scan the sketch and clean it by adjusting the Levels.
   My lappie is a dinosaur, so I often use small resolutions to ease the load (72 dpi and dimension below 1800 px)
2. I put the base colors in a Layer below the line art.
3. Backgrounds -_-
4. I shade the skin and clothes.
5. Time to add highlights and erase some lines.
6. Some Noise filter is added to the pic.

And here's a step-by-step of a random pic I drew a few days ago for Chinese New Year:

1. Pic scanned.
2. Base colors under the line art.
3. Detail the backgrounds a bit.
4. That was too dark for me, so I added light.
5. Time to do Dean (heh). He's quite far, no need to go into details.
6. Draw the dragon's fur (I used my #3 brush)
7. More lights and detailing.
8. More details on the fur, and done!

TIP:

• Use hot keys to save time.

There's another coloring technique that I use whenever I don't have much time. This one is a lot quicker than the above method:

1. Scan and clean the line art.
2. Shade the pic in grayscale.
3. Make a new Layer on top, set the blending mode to Color.
4. Put all the colors in this Color layer.

This grayscale technique was used in these pics:





How long does it take to finish a drawing?
I'm quite slow ^^; On a good day (a.k.a a day when my mind mostly stays in place), my line art usually takes about 30-45 minutes per character. Most of that time is spent on the character's face (not including redraws, which can take just as long for each attempt).
The coloring stage can vary greatly from 2 hours to 10 hours for each character, depending on complexity and again, how present my mind is @_@

What are your strong points and weakness?
Ehh... Not sure about any strong point >_< But I do have a lot of weaknesses, here are some of them:

• Anatomy. I lack the knowledge of proper anatomy and proportions (_　_|||) In my drawings they're just mostly made up from fleshed-out random stick figures instead of proper references, and I also tend to draw too-broad shoulders and too-big arms.
• Fashion. Haha I have no sense of fashion. If you see my drawings, well... Dean pretty much never changes his clothes except for total AUs ～(￣、￣;)～ Even then, I usually have trouble imagining them.
• Traditional art. I know nothing about this; the pencil line art is as far as I go. I don't even know how to use watercolors or markers p(´⌒｀q)
• Backgrounds. It's one of the necessary elements that enhance a scene drawing, but the lazy me finds it tiresome...
• Mechas. These are even worse than backgrounds. Robotic thingies are very confusing and time consuming for me...

That seems to be all I can think of right now. I hope that wasn't too long... +_+
Most of my SPN drawings can be found via my LJ masterlist or my deviantArt.
Thank you for reading :D Feel free to ask questions or discuss things, they're much welcome! :)