I have been meaning to do a post on this for a little while now, but as some of you may have noticed I am now an artist on NFT Showroom! I am a tad excited about this as I never expected to be considered that kind of artist, but over the past two months, I have been completely obsessed with creating digital art and playing with my new drawing tablet (review to come).
My big inspiration to have a real go with art, is that I have started writing more of my story and as I write I can picture things so clearly in my mind it's like I'm actually there, the people, the places are real in my mind and whilst I think I can describe things well I want to ensure my story flows and the images work perfectly with the text rather than searching for a vague image that has free rights.
It has long been a dream of mine to be able to let people see what I see in my mind, but I felt I seriously lacked the skill and ability to pull it off to any kind of decent standard. I was convinced that no matter how long I work I would never be able to recreate what I see so vividly in my mind, I am more of a sculptor than artist, but what I was seeing would be so difficult to remake as physically made items, it just wasn't practical.
But I decided to bite the bullet and start trying and just see if I have any ability at all, and at first, it was shocking, everything I created looked as I feared, just bloody shocking. But after some time, playing with the Krita (image editor) and my tablet I started to gain some confidence (confidence does not mean skill!).
So my big plan has been to recreate moments, people, and places from my story as I see them with this new tablet. So far I have published aka tokenized 3 pieces, 3 editions of each, and 2 of which are set in my story and will be used when I publish that section of the story on-chain.
This would have to be the piece I am most proud of (so far at least), I can honestly say I have never seriously attempted to draw an eye before and my first efforts were just abysmal, I eventually got to what I thought was an alright effort and started to colour and learning about blending and layers.
This is also the very first piece I tokenized and the first piece I sold, that's right I'm already a paid artist baby!
I thought I was done I thought I had created something pretty decent and then I left things for a day came back and realised it was nowhere near as good as I had hoped, I started doubting if I should have even pursued this, and I even moved on to other projects for a while thinking I might just leave it indefinitely.
But then one day I was feeling inspired by the story again and I knew this was the image I wanted to use to convey this moment, so I decided I would look up some tutorials on how to draw an eye digitally. I struck gold and actually found a really brilliant step-by-step process and I just did my best to follow the rules she set out and suddenly my rather shitty eye became far more realistic.
I also took some advice on shading and colouring, highlighting, and reflections, I didn't know there were so many things to take into consideration honestly but spending some time learning really changed the quality considerably, not to mention how shading helps make things look more 3 dimensional something I have always seriously struggled with when attempting art in the past.
Lord Evanvar Finds Mila - first sketch attempt
This was one of my very first attempts at drawing an eye back in February, I didn't finish the final piece until mid-March, but I have to say I think my skill has improved tenfold in just a short amount of time with literally the only help being a couple of video tutorials, I am really excited to see how much more I can improve with time, practice and a whole lot more knowledge and understanding of how to use the tablet and Krita, I might actually be able to pull off some of the more ambitious ideas that I have wanted to attempt.
As you can see early on I didn't realise that one of the biggest mistakes was to join the ends of the eyes, just didn't have a clue that doing that immediately set you back a bit, and really looking at it now it seems so obvious but I really hadn't thought about it in such detail and upon hearing it suddenly things start making sense. Just learning to break down the anatomy into smaller and smaller fragments worked miracles for me, focusing on the one line then the next.
I also really have to credit using the tablet with keeping at it until I ended up with the final product, if I hadn't been using the tablet and computer I never would have been able to undo all of my atrocious mistakes so easily, I swear cntrl z became my best friend throughout this entire process.
Basically, I have learned it's so much easier to fail many many times on the computer, but still bounce back like nothing has happened, whereas in real life I would have destroyed my materials with the amount of redo's I eventually endured, but in my mind, this all comes back to practice makes perfect, I had to fail to learn to do what was necessary and eventually I got there, I managed to do so much more than I ever thought possible and now I'm just excited to see what else I can create!
I am about to tokenize my fourth piece of art, which is also a part of my story and will also be published on-chain alongside the story.
