made0fmoss / TheBaker art thread

[made0fmoss]

I just made so many more stickers
i digitized the first of many sketchbook pages, and I'm very pleased with how they turned out!

 

[made0fmoss]

another one (this was actually the previous page to the post above, and i delayed doing it because i didnt like it as much) almost everything on this page has been cut/colored like the metagross here.
the big skull with tentacles is an oc from my game/world, Fighty Monsters, called Overseer. The bug next to it is called Radimex. I'd like to do character sheets for all of my fighty monsters at some point, all the lore is in my head, and it would be good practice to externalize it.

 

[made0fmoss]

another one!

 

[made0fmoss]

My relationship to and understanding of Art
This is going to be a long post, kinda bloggy but kinda resource-y maybe, idk just gonna type and see where it takes me. Disclaimer that I am very art-uneducated and may be using some terms incorrectly, my b


I have only ever taken one "real" 2D art class, in college in 2016, and after seeing the amount of progress in skill I made over such a short period (30 day summer class) I had this big drive to continue improving. (Specifically that experience and learning to waveshine in melee gave me the eureka moment of "practice makes perfect")
One line that stuck out to me in that class was my teacher saying "Draw what you see, not what you think you see."
We did still life studies almost everyday and until that point I was just drawing whatever for any little tabletop game I was making to play with my friends. So to actually sit and practice the act of drawing something accurately was a pretty foreign concept to me, and in hindsight, its pretty obvious that I would noticably increase my skill after the experience. That line really really stuck with me, and I used it to continue doing studies at home, usually of characters from whatever game I was playing, but eventually I would get around to...


My POV era
I've been drawing with ink instead of graphite for a few years now, around 2018 I was inspired by Kim Jung Gi (RIP king) to do POV drawings and I started making the transition away from pencil so that I would be more mindful with my strokes. It requires a bit of planning to draw without any form of ctrl+z and I kinda relied on the depth of value that ballpoint pens have access to to sort of sketch still, not fully commiting to the lines, but still they couldnt be erased and it was a step in the direction I wanted to go.

I knew studies were good, I always wanted to draw something, but wasn't always inspired to draw anything in particular. POV drawings are perfect for this, you just do a study of everything in front of you, no thoughts, head empty, just "Draw what you see, not what you think you see."start with things far away, build a frame, continually compare what is connected to what and where they are connected. This could be its own thread tbh. The key part for me was knowing that I was doing them to practice and not to make something flashy and presentable. I was investing in myself. The first few were scribbly nonsense while I was figuring out how to do them, but I kept at it, and they became more and more clear, and some of them are at a level that I don't think I could reproduce today without really practicing it for at least a straight week or two, I fell off (half joking)
POV drawings forever changed the way I see the world, genuinely no line is a straight line, our eyes are spheres and we see 5 point perspective and our brain does a good job of convincing us we don't, but depth perception is literally the difference between the default field of view setting and quake pro. That one's for the minecraft gamers out there. This also may be untrue nonsense, but it is my understanding of sight.

I was confident in my ability to do POV drawings in ink, but whenever I tried to draw characters, they fell short of my expectations. There is a big difference between doing a study and drawing something on your own. With a study, there is a reference that's being recreated, creating something on your own is a totally different skill. Also, POV drawings and Creatures are two very different subjects to draw. I hadn't practiced them, and without thinking that they are very different (though there is some overlap) I would get frustrated and experienced a bit of burnout. Instagram certainly contributed to this, trying to post flashy things for likes and doing it consistently is bad for ape brain.

All 2D drawings are: Cubes, Cylinders, and Cones. POV drawings spread them out in an area. Characters are all as one subject.

In 2022 (technically over the course of years) I made a card game full of creatures whose designs/renders I'm not super confident in, but they are my babies and I love them. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was fun to make, but I got a little too in my head about the gameplay and art, and abandoned it for a few years. (I'm actually getting back into it and working on another expansion, but that's for another post!) Due to life circumstances, these years were kind of rocky for me so I wasn't drawing as much, but at some point I uninstalled instagram and started drawing just for me. I ditched my "grind for greater skill" mindset and played a lot of video games and casually drew stuff with my mouse on my computer. My mind naturally thinks in terms of games and I have some obsessive compulsion to making sure every action I take contributes to some project or whatever, so these drawings were made into cards for a fantasy game I called

MOST MAGICAL

"Done is better than perfect."
Drawing because its fun is something I kind of lost sight of during my "grindset" years. MOST MAGICAL and stickey note doodles drawn at work made art fun again. Fall of 2023? is around the time that I started getting into playing showdown on my phone, and this slowly led to me drawing or some other gen3OU pokemon almost daily. If I had every stickenote doodle I made in the last 3 years, I could cover at least one of the walls in my bedroom. They're fun, its a small piece of paper so there's no overwhelming pressure to fill in a ton of space, and they're flimsy so there's no pressure to create some lasting masterpiece. Similar to animation (another ramble for another post) they encourage putting time into many drawings instead of just one. Pressuring myself to draw high quality stuff paralyzed my ability to draw and I didn't even really realize it. It just got less fun and so I did other things. Ironically, leaning into drawing in a silly and less serious style made me more confident in my art anyway.

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Visual Communication / I'm back on my grindset. (But this time in a healthy way.)
On to the resource portion of the post.

Sometimes I beast, sometimes I throw.
I don't care, I just like to draw.
Here are some ideas I keep in mind while drawing/things I've learned over the years of using ink that may be useful.
This next part is kinda specific to drawing with micron pens which are my primary medium,

Line Confidence

I think ink teaches this very well.
-plan where the line should be, the shape of the object it's communicating, and do it one time.
-multiple passes look messy.
-too slowly and it will be wobbly, too quickly and it will be innaccurate
Line confidence can let you get away with drawing the subject in a way that isn't 1:1 with the actual subject being referenced. If the drawing looks right, it looks right. It doesn't matter if its not mirroring what's actually in front of you.
I know that's contrary to the quote from earlier. But some drawings are done for practice and some are done for presentation and sometimes they're both. This is where an artist expresses their unique style. Exactly this is what defines that.

Being able to communicate an idea visually, drawing an apple for example, can be done in infinitely different ways. It could be rendered 1:1 as its seen, it could be a red circle with a tiny green triangle on top, it could be stretched really tall or wide to the point that it's not even recognizably an apple anymore.
Some artists, like my goat Douglas Henderson, do incredible realistic landscape paintings.
Some make heavily stylized fanart.
Both are beautiful. I think anyone who only has respect for realistic art styles is a huge dork and needs to grow up.
Since the advent of ai generated images, and observing many people not notice what images are/aren't ai generated, it has become very clear to me that visual literacy is a skill. (I want to be clear that this is not intended to be a jab at anyone, I see this as no different than like a d&d character stat.) My honest take is that people with a low visual literacy skill tend to conflate high level of rendering with high skill, therefore low amount of rendering = low skill = bad art. And that the more a person practices their visual literacy, the more they will be learn to appreciate cartoon-y or whatever art styles. A more broad palette? Or something? idk, this is my first time putting these thoughts into words.
Moving on, a good silhouette is one that is very clear even to those with less practiced visual literacy.

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Silhouette
With a medium like ink, the art exists as two tones aka negative space. In that art class, one of the lessons was on this, and to do a study of a plant but we could not use pencil to sketch, we just had an oil pastel to fill in the empty space around the plant. During this lesson the teacher said something like "Focus on the space between the object and the space around it." which was immensely helpful when working to find the outline of objects when eventually switching over to ink linework.
A subject with a good silhouette is one with few overlapping details. Where the rendering isn't doing all of the work to describe the shapes.
If it makes a really obvious "Who's that Pokemon?" it has a good silhouette.
The three previous posts in this thread are sketchbook pages that really taught me the value of a good silhouette, and what to aim for/avoid when drawing with ink.

A silhouette not only communicates the shape of the subject, but when drawing characters can also tell details about that character.

here

are some pokemon that I've drawn with an intentional emphasis on their silhouettes;
zapdos: spiky cause big damage, (also it looks cool, been loving drawing spiky zap)
swampert: defensive piece, that can also threaten with its own big hits
skarmory: sharp because spikes(the in-game move) with a sturdy base.
aerodactyl: noodly and long to show that its fast and frail(could have done better on this one, a space between the wings to show its spine and give it a more fragile look would have helped a lot)
flygon: big and round and capable walking into Rock Slide

un-edited version

2D line art is made of round and/or sharp edges, therefore all of it exists on a spectrum between these two things
Angular = cool
Round = cute

Here

is a quick doodle for another example of this.
EvilZap is big and round with a 200HP 252+SpDef shaped belly, and Thunder Lead Zap is so sharp that just looking at it cuts your HP in half.
I like to exaggerate proportions to communicate these kinds of ideas. It's not only fun to lean into the silly style, its practical when it comes to visual communication.
You don't need to play competitive Pokemon to look at these and answer the question "Which one deals damage, and which one soaks it up?"

Silhouette version

Bit of room for interpretation on the round zap, but the sharp one less so. Both are a good example of exaggerated features to describe a character's traits, and of the difference between a good/bad or strong/weak silhouette.

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Line of Action or Composition or something idk
I don't know the term for this next concept sorry lol
Mindfulness of guiding the eye.

Here

is a Lurantis work in progress. I wanted it to look cool and catch the eye. So every part of it points generally toward the same area. If the viewer's eye strays to any edge, it is guided back to the face.

Each line works to do this

Red are the major ones, blue are more minor. Major parts are noticed first, blue after looking at it for a little bit.

Another example

I am not a painter, my focus has been linework for most of my time with art
I focused on motion forward, so all of Jolteon's spikes point forward. Pretty simple when put into words.
This one's really clear, so I feel a little silly making the lines pointing it out on this one, but

here

it is anyway, just to be as clear as I can. Purple lines are majors, cyan is minor.

Two good things to check for in any drawing are;
-the silhouette
-heavily gaussian blur it(or squint really hard) and see if it can still clearly show what it is

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I've had the vague thought of typing out some ideas about drawing lately and eventually decided this was the best way to do it, I hope this helps and was fun to read
-moss

 

[made0fmoss]

ADV World Cup US Midwest logo

Stepped away from my usual style for this one, felt like painting one night and then decided I would try that for this logo, which I ended up spending like ~17hrs on.
Ooops
This was fun, and I will probably do more paintings like this in the future!

Its an homage to the St. Louis Cardinals logo (i live there :)

 

[DaWolfKid]

ADV World Cup US Midwest logo

Stepped away from my usual style for this one, felt like painting one night and then decided I would try that for this logo, which I ended up spending like ~17hrs on.
Ooops
This was fun, and I will probably do more paintings like this in the future!

Its an homage to the St. Louis Cardinals logo (i live there :)

Pure fire, looks amazing c: