[Practice] Proud King by Plumpig on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

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Yoooo! New DeviantART, new me! Sorry for the lack of activity I was busy with finals and college in general~

I know I haven't been very present these last couple of months in terms of posting but I log everyday here soeven though I post nothing you can still send me comments and notes or whatever. ^^

About this drawing now: I've been working on several WIPs lately, including a portrait of Tsuki which I interrupted to paint this portrait of Mufasa. Yes, Tsuki's portrait will also be lineless work and I'm actually almost done with it~ I just need to tweak some parts and to finish detailing her mane and teeth.

I've always admired Aaron Blaise and artists of the like because they master light and shadows and can digital-paint, except I never got the guts to practice these on my own. Lately, I've felt like I had the necessary skills to produce some lineless work that could look good enough to be posted, so I got myself into learning digital-painting techniques through experimenting with tools and brushes. Believe it or not, most of the piece was created using the airbrush tool in Paint Tool SAI.

I added fur textures coming from real lions, but kinda gave up on detailing the mane more because 1) I lack skills and 2) I got kinda bored and lazy.

I think my "Portrait of an Exotic Prince" (I posted it not long ago) was a cornerstone in my artistic journey, as it is the first big lineless work I have done, and even though it could be improved now, it really helped me get secure about my art and skills.

Also want to say a little something about character design and art styles: I see waaaay too many artists drawing existing characters in "their" styles but who change the drawn character's proportions and I wonder why. If a character has a certain type of eyes, or nose or whatever feature, why change that?? Mufasa for instance, has a big wide nose and chin, a dense mane and rather small eyes and is quite stocky, so when I rough-sketched my portrait (in my own style), these are the features I tried to get right first. I asked my community on IG if they recognized the character (while the thing was still veeery messy haha) and people recognized it easily because of the features, regardless of style.

So pleeeaaase, when you're drawing a cannon character in your own style, try to respect the original creator's design, because character design has almost nothing to do with style! I once saw a drawing of Kiara here, on which she almost looked like a skinny dog (no offence, it's just a comparison so you can picture the mistakes in the proportions), and the artist told me it was "his style". Well, don't mistake anatomy errors with style. Whatever your style, the character must be recognizable beyond the use of colors, and whatever you draw in whatever style must feel right (even though it doesn't have to be over-realistic). I hope I'm clear enough so you can understand my point and I hope you agree with me on this.

Don't get me wrong though, it's totally fine to make mistakes, I make a lot daily in my art, but don't interprete your mistakes as "style" please. It's only bad faith and you'll never improve if you think your style is a style full of anatomical impossibilities.

By the way, I'll soon be recording my process to show it to you guys, so stay tuned for upcoming tutorials!! I don't feel confident in my skills enough to do it now, but I'm seriously thinking about it though.

Hope you like my Muffy~