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I've been doing a lot of art on the website and not a whole lot of writing about it. This might give people the impression I'm happy with how it's turning out, which is patently absurd most days. My goal most days is twofold: First, just do something. I'm a useless shut-in so any action is an improvement over nothing. Second: since all of the drawings I'm making are basically disposable and of little inherent value, and since I'm not exactly making any money off of any of this there's no point getting too attached to ~*~my style~*~. I'm using the daily drawing as a space to mess around with construction and different approaches.

The point of showing it off even though it's bad is to have a brutally honest record of the process, because I like seeing other people show off their bad sketch pages and want to reciprocate. I think some people write those sorts of bad days off as "artist's block", but that seems like cope to me. If my process isn't robust enough to stand up to days where I haven't had the divine breath imparted on me then my process is bad and needs to be reevaluated. Right now my process is inconsistent and doesn't produce 'good' art most of the time but it's sufficient to get something out most days and puts me into a better position to take advantage of the better days. Additionally, even on bad days I think there are some parts that I like and might wish I could try and capture again. I'll try to write something about the days' work here when I have the time to go back and look over it. To refer to the drawings I'm writing about, refer to the drawing on a given date on the daily beni drawing page.

writing about the day's art

2024-06-23

Today I was a bit more slapdash with my line widths. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I think it could help with readability if I could figure out how to apply it right.
I noticed that in more chibi styles the hands don't really get that far above the head when the arms are raised. I think the hand turned out okay, as did the feet.

Unrelated to any of that, I've been thinking I should reevaluate my thoughts on edgy art styles. I don't do them myself but for a long time I think I would have said I really like them. I started thinking maybe I should reevaluate them a while back, elsewhere, where I was staring at some artist or other's gallery and thinking, while the aesthetic was cool, I'm a bit bored by art whose premise is "what if reimu had a gun" or something of that ilk. Art like that relies to some extent on shock value, but it's been overdone, and whenever I look at work like that I find that the artist themselves is usually not especially transgressive in their personal life, seeming instead to be instinctually contrarian more than anything else. I don't know that my thought here is fully-formed yet, but I think I'm just tired of trying to be contrarian. Having weird tastes has advanced my understanding of the arts a fair bit, but it makes the communal experience harder.

2024-06-20

I've been trying to start with a gesture line and build around that, and I like the sort of arc I've got here. The hands are still out of proportion and look a bit wrong since I'm still not sure how to approach that, and the feet are still a bit weak, and the legs should probably be closer together and the sleeves look wrong and the board has the wrong perspective and I forgot to finish erasing some lines.

2024-06-19

Went back to a kind of basic chibi style here. More basic shapes help here. I like the way the little flame on her left sleeve (viewer right) got simplified. The eyes feel a little bit off. The legs feel a little bit too thin but everything's so exaggerated it doesn't feel too out of place. I don't like how the feet turned out. The hat feels a bit off.

2024-06-18

I like the hat. The pose feels stiff. Her right hand (viewer left) and the sleeve is a disaster. Her face feels too blank. The body feels like it should be thinner. I have no idea what's happening on her right shoulder. The shoes are a mistake. The arc on her left foot (viewer right) should probably be concave instead of convex. I think her left sleeve is fine. I kind of like the legs.

2024-06-17

I kind of like the movement on this one. Her right sleeve and hand is a disaster. Her left sleeve and hand are serviceable but not great. I don't really like the look of the feathers. There's a decent sense of anticipation to everything. The body is too thick. The hat is angled wrong. I think the face is fine. The legs have passable movement.

2024-06-16

I like the movement on this one. It's really energetic, and the face looks solid. The anatomy's a trainwreck, but it's at least in service of the composition and making everything feel fluid.

2024-06-15

I like the movement on this one a bit. The right sleeve's a bit short, but it's to help keep things moving. I like what I did with the eyes, using a low opacity eraser for the more variable parts of the pupil. The face looks fine enough. The hat has a nice little :> face. I don't know what's happening with her left sleeve at all. I like the way the line on the second fold of hair from the right side of her face (viewer left) looks. The hand is a disaster but it conveys the motion decently enough if you don't look at it too closely.

2024-06-14

This was drawn in about six minutes and is a mess all around. There's not a lot of value here.

2024-06-13

I don't like this one. It's sitting in the uncanny valley for me. The head is too large, the face is too small, the arms are too short, the body looks bad, the little cheek bump looks bad. The eyes don't fit with the rest of the style. Can't stand it.

2024-06-12

I like the movement on the feathers, but that's about it

2024-06-11

This one's pretty minimal and light on motion but I like the way she's looking at the camera, and the quizzical look the hat has