A painting reward for @fromgie for donating to my ongoing Medical Aid for Palestine fundraiser

His name is Baby... I definitely think it fits.

Donate $5.00+ USD and DM me the email receipt for an animal drawing or painting!

A painting reward for @mistbjorn for donating to my ongoing Medical Aid for Palestine fundraiser

She looks very wise - ω -

Donate $5.00+ USD and DM me the email receipt for an animal drawing or painting!

I actually originally wanted to get into concept art! I wanted to go into the games industry so I spent a lot of my time training in both learning how to draw and paint in a realistic style and edit photos.

A lot of the really realistic and intricate concept art you see released for AAA games are made using a process called 'photo-bashing' where the artist takes elements from multiple different photos and edits them together into one big piece and paints over it to make a cohesive illustration.

So when I just have a single reference image to directly work from, it is kind of easy mode to go into photoshop and edit the colors, lighting, etc.. into something which I think would make a good painting. Original (left) --- Edited (right)

A lot of my realistic painting training was learning how to: 1.) invent a believable form from imagination (learning how light and color work on a technical level and reproducing it in a 2D image) 2.) simplify elements that exist in the real world so they trick the viewer's eye Obviously I cannot paint every single strand of fur, so I use wider blocks of color. When you really zoom in they don't really look like anything, but by using texture and directional strokes they read as fur when viewed from a distance as part of a larger image.

Through learning to invent forms that do not exist in reality, I can then take my knowledge to add colors and lighting to make a more dynamic and visually pleasing painting!

At the end of the day most of it does come back to studying from real life. Once you practice enough both directly from images you can see (ie still lifes) and creating forms that don't exist (character illustration, concept art, etc...) these things eventually become subconscious and you can apply them to all kinds of different art. In my case, cat portraits!

Sorry for rambling a bit, art style has never really been something i consciously worked on. Hope this makes sense!

Hmm. Tumblr says I have multiple messages in my ask box but none of them are showing up for some reason. So if you sent me an ask and I haven’t replied feel free to send it again, tumblr must have eaten it :/

Speedpaint process of my @straycatj fanart

Mr @straycatj chilling cool style (⌐ ▀ᆽ▀ )✨

Hmm, a lot of it is an unconscious collective of my years of digital painting experience, so it's a bit difficult to put into words but if I had to say,

1.) Get a good reference image. I do all of my paintings from photo reference so I don't usually invent light sources, just reinterpret what's already in the photo. I find the most effective ones to be pictures with strong directional lighting with distinct shadow shapes

2.) Learn the underlying anatomy of cats. Understanding the actual shapes that make up a cat allows you to recognize the how and why the shadows and highlights in the reference image work the way they do. 3.) The way I do fur is I get all of my colors and shading down and as final step go over certain areas with a textured blending brush, following the contour of the fur. (I use my own custom brushes in Rebelle 7 but I believe other programs have similar 'mixer brush'-like tools)

I also recommend petting your cat to get a tactile feeling of the planes of her face, what direction the fur goes in where. What kind of movements would disrupt the direction?

As for color-picking I usually go into photoshop and mess with the lighting and color adjustments until I get something similar that I'd like in the final painting. Then I filter > noise > median to get rid of a lot of the details so I'm left with mostly blocks of color and color pick from there. idk if other programs have this specific blur type, but your standard gaussian blur works just as well

In my experience, when you do a lot of painting you eventually are able to see colors in areas of photos that aren't technically captured by the camera but could be perceived by the eye in real life. For starters you can focus on adding more saturated colors in areas of shadow or plane changes.

If you add a color in one part of the fur try and have it, or a similar color, in at least another part of the fur so it looks like more of a cohesive image.

As for other resources I never really did any specific studying for drawing cats in-particular, it was just something I started for fun and honestly haven't really been able to find many resources on it I found super useful.

This video on reflected light did completely rewire my brain when it came to coloring though

If you (or anyone!) has any pieces they'd like me to look over and give direct feedback on I'd be happy to help! Might be a bit more useful then trying to verbalize the specific painting neurons that possess me whenever I'm working on a piece. :)

Hi all! The software I use to paint, Rebelle 7, is on super sale for USD $9.99 if any of my artist followers have been looking for an alternative art program 🤔