Life/Announcements,  Work in Progress

Escaping into art

Warning: long post ahead!

Hello everyone!

I’ve been feeling down lately, actually for a while now, and sadly this is why my gaming posts here suffered (or rather – I didn’t add any new ones in a couple of *cough* months), as well as later the gaming itself.

Gaming can and is often used as an escape from reality and its problems but what if the gaming becomes one of them? Well, in my case I buried myself in art – and having a commission and a painting to finish definitely helped with putting myself in the right mindset.

My latest finished manga commission

One of the things I got myself recently was an internet cable so my connection could be more stable, so I decided, since I’m burying myself in art and I have a commission to finish anyway (AND I need a distraction from thinking about some stuff), that it is a good moment to test the cable and record and upload some drawing process videos.

So, I recorded the colouring process of the commission and its YouTube uploading went surprisingly well. It also motivated me even more to further lose myself in the art world – watching the drawing or painting process videos was always very inspiring to me, and even watching my own videos would always make me want to create another one.

Delving fully into art (and probably feeling down too) made me decide to get some art supplies that would make my life easier. And believe me, I was extremely happy when my latest “toys” arrived. One of them is a lightbox, or a led tracing pad which I dreamt of as soon as I learned of their existence, so for about… 15 years. Why did I get it just now? If you dream of something for a long time knowing you can’t have it, you just accept it as a fact that you’ll never get it. Until something on someone makes you realize that you CAN, actually.

So, I finally got my lightbox! Just putting my hands on it almost made me cry – I felt like someone gave me a sparking star straight from the night sky. I didn’t have much time to test it yet as there is a lot of big changes at my work now and I can’t take my week off at the moment, but SOON™!

Today though while preparing some sketches for later colouring I realized that the lightbox will be more useful than I initially thought, so I’m actually looking forward to every little piece of free time to discover more things the lightbox will help me with.

Trying out my new lightbox!
A sketch I’m preparing to colour it with markers

The face to the right on the upper photo is the little face that I tested my next “toy” on. And that’s another dream coming true – with the new, kind of professional tripod I got, now I’m able to record my traditional drawing and painting in at least a semi-decent setting. I was hesitant to buy an actual tripod for a long time because in my little studio room there’s no space to put it there for recording my painting process. I also was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to set it to record my desk drawing process either. Well…

A longer while ago I got myself a monopod (a.k.a. selfie stick) with a little tripod-ish attachment and it was ok. Or rather it would be, if it was more stable. It wasn’t the cheapest monopod out there so I expected a little more of it but the feet attachment was of very bad quality and unstable and the one meter stick with a heavy phone put at the top of it to record videos didn’t help either – the whole thing was so unstable that I had to support it with my legs to get a good angle of recording, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t very comfortable while painting.

To be honest I haven’t tried the new tripod to record my acrylic painting YET, but I did test it on recording marker colouring and it worked like a charm… after putting some work into a proper setting and losing and regaining my faith twice on the way. But finally I found out the way that it was supposed to be put to hover over my desk and finally I could record this video:

Unfortunately, even though editing this video was very fun, it took me long hours to do it, so I didn’t have any more time to take a proper photo or scan of the sketch I was colouring in the video. Also, I might have confused our current scanner with the old one, so there is that 😉 I had the opportunity to scan the drawing today though and you can see it below. I adjusted the colours of the scan so they resembled the original ones as closely as possible.

I’m writing this post on Thursday and tomorrow, on Friday, I should get the next batch of my Copic markers and some other various art supplies (including mixed media and painting paper suitable for acrylic paints!) so most likely I’ll add another art related post here soon. I think more videos are coming soon too, so stay tuned!

~LW


2 Comments

    • LadyW

      Mnie też zawsze fascynowały takie nagrania, hypnotajzin much, temu też zawsze uwielbiałam je robić. Chyba oekaki i Open Canvas mnie zepsuły 🙂

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