shrimpchipsss' fanart year in review
Dec. 20th, 2022 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shrimpchipsssFor posterity and also because it’s hard to see how you’re coming along in a craft sense when you’re in the thick of it. 
If you've read all the way here I hope you've enjoyed the introspection. While I enjoy comments from people gushing over a character or ship, or even the idea behind a drawing, there's nothing that hits quite like qualitative statements about your craft. I'm still riding the high of the person on tumblr who told me at the beginning of the year that they liked my sketchwork. All these months later and it's still one of the best compliments I've gotten all year. I want to do more of that when I comment on other people's stuff too. This was a fun exercise and maybe I'll do it next year!
I feel like something has solidified in my art overall this year. Notably, I’ve gotten way more comfortable with lines, which is something I’ve been specifically trying to work on over the past few years. I’ve long felt good about my shapes but lines…. the real hard mode aspect of drawing which is yet another reason I’ve so much respect for such friends as pyrzqxyl and eggburial who have VASTLY different styles but linework I’m obsessed with. Pyrzqxyl the pixel master with the specificity of a surgeon. Eggburial’s lineart operates almost as a container which is very egg / coffin honestly.
pyrzqxyl and eggburial who have VASTLY different styles but linework I’m obsessed with. Pyrzqxyl the pixel master with the specificity of a surgeon. Eggburial’s lineart operates almost as a container which is very egg / coffin honestly. Now to things that are coming along with my drawing. The blocking of characters and general space they take up feels satisfying to me in a way that honestly makes me wonder if I should make a nsfw account to really try to challenge myself when it comes to bodies interacting with bodies. If I did it would have to be on Twitter and not Tumblr where nothing can be deleted in a way that matters. Blocking examples I feel good about here:
I did a lot of character work this year, same as any other year. But this year I did character work for series with no official character designs or multiple and even sometimes contradicting character designs. The funniest thing to me is the way artists will sometimes come to the same conclusion about how a character should look even having avoided looking at other fanart (the way I did with the queen’s thief books). I guess there’s something to having a handful of descriptions and archetypes galore and everyone showing up having separately evolved a crab.
Comics / sequences. I’d like to keep doing more of them! I don’t know if I’ll ever be insane enough to do a full on animatic or a comic longer than any of these but man is it fun to run with an idea for this long.
The fandom highlight of my year that Megan Whalen Turner SAW much less reblogged this. I think I started approaching consistency with this one and I'm happy with the paneling and use of black space. (link)
If you've read all the way here I hope you've enjoyed the introspection. While I enjoy comments from people gushing over a character or ship, or even the idea behind a drawing, there's nothing that hits quite like qualitative statements about your craft. I'm still riding the high of the person on tumblr who told me at the beginning of the year that they liked my sketchwork. All these months later and it's still one of the best compliments I've gotten all year. I want to do more of that when I comment on other people's stuff too. This was a fun exercise and maybe I'll do it next year!
