LIKE SILHOUETTES IN DREAMS

Wow who are you anon? What’s with people asking me personal things all of a sudden?! Don’t get me wrong, I love this, I’m just curious. Ahahaha. First of all, thanks! And it’s alright to be anon as long as you don’t say anything mean. :))

After graduating? I still have 5 terms left, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be going abroad for masters. Probably Singapore or London or New York… but I’m leaning on Singapore more cause it’s nearer to the Philippines (which means my family and my boyfriend can visit me whenever the hell they want cause it’s cheap). I don’t know what I’m going to major in yet! Yes, I’ve been studying all these different mediums for more than two years now, but I’m still unsure! It’s a big decision so I’ll have to think about it real hard. But yes I’m sure I’ll be going to graduate school because let’s face it, in this day and age, simply completing a 4 year college course doesn’t make you much competition to those who have masters degrees and some companies are even requiring it now.

Thanks for the question, anon! :)

I can’t exactly speak for everyone who’s taking/taken my course, but if you ask me, it’s because I think the four years I spent in high school wasn’t enough to make career and life changing decisions. I knew I was going to lean on an art related course, but I wasn’t entirely sure which. That’s why I decided to take a general art course instead.

I wanted to take fine arts at first, but in this day and age, it’s really hard to get yourself noticed as a painter/sculptor/something. Hell, there are people who studied the craft for years and years but they still sell their work for the flat rate (which is P1000-P5000) there are people who end up being art teachers in secondary schools instead. You know what they say, you’ve hit rock bottom once you become a teacher of your profession… but that’s just what they say okay. I’m not saying I think that way. It’s just a fact that people say this.

I’m glad I didn’t take fine arts or communication arts or something like that, because if I did, I wouldn’t have known that I had a knack for video editing, art direction, photography, sound design, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being an illustrator and a painter, but knowing that I can do these things pretty well makes me sure that no matter what happens in the future, I’ll have something to do.

I hope you get it now. :)

Wow hey ho hi anon! I’ve been really busy that’s why I haven’t posted in ages. I’m sorry anon! But if you really wanna know why I’ve been a ninja for a while…

1) My classes are eating up my personal drawing time :C My 2d teacher’s really strict and he makes us do so much work all at once! My other teachers are okay but I have to do extra extra well starting this term cause I wanna graduate a scholar and a consistent dean’s lister.

2) I just joined the Benildean Press Corps (that’s our school’s press office) a couple of weeks ago and I’ve devoted 70% of my time on all the assignments and stuff cause despite how important school is to me I love BPC so much more YOU HEAR THAT PAT? I HOPE YOU SEE THIS :)) Plus I’m not allowed to post my works for the publications until the publications are actually published… so… guess I have to wait a while :))

3) I’ve decided to join two major art competitions: Petron and Shell. I’m submitting two works for two categories for each of these competitions. I’ve spent a lot of my free time conceptualizing for that. It’s a lot harder to win this time cause I’m against the whole nation (I just imagined myself going against an army of painters and digital media artists with a paintbrush for a sword and my laptop for a shield… I’m scared now. HAHA OH NO.

Oopsie I think I said too much.

Well I use a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet for my digital drawings. But even with that, you still need a lot of practice to get a hang of the strokes and stuff. My base sketch is really messy actually. I clean it up using a thicker brush on a new layer. Depending on the level of detail of the drawing, I usually add more layers just to avoid mistakes and repeating an entire area cause of the undo limit. Even then I have to keep repeating strokes to get the look I desire. Oh! And I also rotate the canvas from time to time to achieve a certain stroke. I hope this helps! :>

I took fine arts classes for like 8 years I think and then I started learning everything else on my own ever since. Thank you so much! Wish you weren’t anon though so I can say thank you better.

Hey no problem! I really hate it when people cyber bully. Oh wow thanks! Well actually I just found all that out by playing with all the tools. I usually use a different technique for each work so I can’t really type all of them here. Which particular work of mine are you talking about?

Oh! If you’re talking about the one you reblogged, practically the entire color palette was set to 30% opacity. I first added the basic skin tone color, then I adapted a watercolor technique and selected an opposite color for shadow (that color being moss green in 30% opacity) and used a round hard brush to apply it - this would be in a new layer. I built up the shadows a bit and then when I was happy with the depth I selected the shadowed area using the magic wand tool, got a similar color to moss green (I chose a pale bluish grey, also 30% opacity), changed my brush to the soft round brush and randomly mixed the color in with the green. That’s also the same technique I used for the hair actually but of course with different colors in mind. :)

Hi there! I guess it depends on what kind of illustrations you’re going for. If you don’t see yourself doing any realistic illustrations (like the one I posted), you probably don’t need to learn it. If you are curious and you want to learn how to use the mesh tool, I gotta tell you, it’s a lot of fun but it’s a whole lot of work. It’s more of trial and error since you have to keep adding mesh guides and using the eyedropper tool. After a while, it gets kind of confusing, but if you study well and view enough tutorials, you’ll still be able to make the illustration you want in the end. It’s probably good to practice with creating small and simple objects first and build up the difficulty once you’re confident that you understand what to do with the mesh tool.

Here’s what my illustration looks like with the mesh lines visible.

So yeah, you can see where it gets complicated. :))

Also it’s important to have a clear understanding of depth and layering since any sort of error that you make or any misplaced shapes are hard to track once you’ve forgotten about it. :)

There are several tutorials on how to use the mesh tool on YouTube, but once you start watching all the videos, you’ll realize that every illustrator has their own style when it comes to building up a mesh and selecting colors and etc. With that in mind, it’s best that you watch all the videos and look for a style that you think you’ll be comfortable with and go from there.

I hope my answer helps! :)