art

[egypturnash]

"I have occasionally kicked around the idea of doing a coffee table-style book: The History Of Furry Porn." - ursulav
"Dude. This is a perfect opportunity for a group effort. I think Arphalia and me are going to have to battle it out for the Noveau-era porn..." - me
"(link to glamorous noveau porn drawn a few hours later)" - arphalia
"(draws this)" - me

(excerpted from comments on this friends-only entry in pseudomanitou's LJ)


The Seduction of a Metaphor
(bandwidth:vcl)

This is the first time I've done a finished piece with outlines in forever. You really have to have outlines to nail the Art Noveau Hair, and having strong outlines printed in a color besides black is also good for a lot of points of Noveauness.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I like raccoons. They're the only kind of critter I have more than one example of as an active character I play on a muck, unless you count the two sequential variations of a crazy butterfly. This does not mean that any girl raccoon I draw is Me, though this one has much the same arrangement of sexual characteristics I do. I have a nicer ass, though.

The sketch started out as a cheetah, for no immediately obvious reason, and got revised into a raccoon. Weird.

(Addendum, May 27: removed from DA. OH NO PORN. *shrug*)

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Linework is something I consider one of my weak spots, to be honest! A while back, I made a conscious decision to give up trying to learn how to do Nice, Controlled, Friendly Brush Inking like every comics-influenced artist does; once I made that choice, it was easy to move on to just abandoning line altogether. (A choice partially influenced by a little bon mot in an nth-generation Xerox of some notes on inbetweening. Something about being concerned with the masses of color, not the lines that hold them in.)

I've had the same attitude referenced in my work. Most people who do this stuff come from a fantasy/SF documentary tradition - they want to make the unreal seem Real, make it plausible and Right. But we treat the "fabulous" content as given, and explore stylization and abstraction. Most of the people whose art I enjoy do this to some degree. It says a lot that the Big-Name SF Artist I'd most like to swipe the style of is the very expressionistic Richard Powers.

Lines feel... weird... to me. They're an additional element to have to manage in terms of color and overlap issues. More paths to pull out, almost doubling the amount of work. I'm not used to lines at all for anything beyond a quick doodle. I have to manage the line-weights, something I kinda botched here - there're certain line-weight rules I see in most Noveau stuff, that I completely failed to adhere to in some important parts.

The palette, however, I think I nailed. It's a nice, simple, faded thing.

(Pseudo's post was some ruminations on the artistic failings of most furry porn. It was locked to, pretty much, Other Furry Artists Who Read His LJ. Ursula went off on a silly tangent with the 'porn through history' idea, and this was a result.)

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Weakness or not, you can sure do it when you want to! Me? I LOVE lines. I've been told I love them too much and not enough. For me, that's where the drawing starts and a good deal of where it ends as well. The flat, lineless color area thing is an approach I've made few times. And even then, for me, there's lines. I'll admit; working with an old copy of AI, lines aren't as fun as they are in the more recent versions. I'd love to be able to brush digitally as I do manually.

Still, know that you can do lines if you want to!

Thanks for the hints on Pseudo's LJ. I wouldn't have known otherwise. :"D