May 4-5, 2025
I’m getting closer to the end of Scott Harris’ Character Art Course. I started in 2020 and tried to do as much of the homework as I could. As I learned more, I realized how difficult the homework would be to do legitimately. I wrote down the time commitment he was suggesting and it is massive. Here I’ll do a bit of the math just for fun. See below. If you want to become a good artist, you need to have a lot of muscle memory. Where does that muscle memory come from? From drawing, painting, and so on. If you have time and want to get to it, the homework is a pretty powerful tool. Along with the course which explains why bad drawings look bad, how to improve your character art, and so on, this course is something else. This blog post goes into my experience.
I’m not going to say it’s perfect. If it was, I would’ve finished the course and by now I’d be a skilled artist.. Oh wait. I think it makes sense to draw to show you what I mean. You see M1A1, the first assignment (module 1 assignment 1) tells us to draw a character so that we can look back over time to see how much our art has improved. This is helpful in getting a mindset of growth – that you most certainly need. Because if you’re taking a drawing course, you probably think that your character art looks bad. How do we go about understanding good vs bad?
Read more »I handwrote you a blog with my good hand using my tablet. It's much higher resolution than can be displayed in this blog template, so click and zoom to read it as originally intended.
Lecture 6 of QM seems like a forgone conclusion. I'm watching ElysiaGriffin because TVGBadger is offline.
She's talking about sleep and energy and meditation. She uses InsightTimer, second person I have heard talk about it in a few days. Weird. She has ~42 viewers.
Read more »I made a quick cutting mat this morning with Inkscape, so I thought I'd share. It probably won't print on a normal printer, but because it's an SVG, it is pretty easily modifiable (I removed a row and column myself in a few minutes). I based it on the many cutting mats I saw when I searched for cutting mat on Google. That's kinda how this sort of thing works. I'm releasing it Creative Commons Attribution license. If you copy it, you're suppose to find a way to attribute me like say "by Javantea". Or don't, I mean... Where did this come from in the first place? I was inspired by others to create this.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
July 17, 2010
A long time ago I described a method of creating realistic anime hair with The GIMP. Today I reproduce that method with a small limit: 30 minutes or less. Most people want hair done in less than 30 minutes. Anime or manga artists want it done in seconds. But once you've done this style once, you'll have good reason to put in a few minutes. Shojo comics and ren-ai games use this realistic style on very rare occasion to portray texture, depth, emotion, or something else. The reason why I find myself using it instead of my normal style of outlining sharp tufts of hair is for dramatic effect, showing people not a green haired mahou tsukai (魔法使い) but a living breathing shaded person. Even if they are fictional I like my characters to have some sort of reality because it improves my ability to tell a story.
Minutes 1-3
Enough with the art, let's get down to the tech. The first thing to do is to draw the shape of the hair with large or medium size brush as seen below. This should only take you a moment because you should know what shape the hair will look. It's important that you draw this on a separate layer and never draw on it because you'll need it later. Trust me.
