Chit-Chat: "L'art pour l'art" - DCC

Amaruuk said:

Ah, imgur. I don't have an account but I lurk it a lot at work when I'm being a lazy butt. The community there seems nice and very "human" (for lack of a better description), and I have certainly considered joining eventually. Photobucket did come back a bit ago but I reeeeeeally need to get to bed.

EDIT: Dunno if you can double post in this thread but I'mma just edit this instead to be safe. Anyway, I underestimated how long I still had to go. Like holy **** there's a lot of writing (I am a wordy birdy when try telling anything about my life because MOAR CONTEXT) and I keep finding stuff to include and... yeah. I still have 3 more years to do so it should actually be tomorrow or Thursday that it'll be all up, as I can only really work on this in the evenings because day job and whatnot.

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Eh, a double post here or there never hurt anyone. Don't fret. :)

I used to be a diehard Photobucket user until the Great Undoing of 2014. Which was, to say, the day Photobucket decided I no longer had any bandwidth and disabled all of my images permanently and block my entry into my account. The day after, my computer crashed. So I had absolutely no way to restore all of the art I had lost from Photobucket or my computer. Those were sad times.

Luckily though, I recalled my year old Imgur account and began uploading everything as if it were going out of fashion. So, I preserved all of my old artwork and most of my computer, got a new computer so I could resume my moderator duties, and have since been loyal to Imgur. I went ahead and paid for the year-long subscription; best decision I've ever made. It's so clean and organized!

Anyway, as long as all of your writing is focused solely on your art, in one way or another, the length of the writing doesn't matter. But, if your writing is starting to overshadow your art, FF&W might be the best place for it.

It'll work out I'm not worried. :)

Ah well I'm not writing a novel or anything, it just looks long because it's

[year]
[text blurb for context about influential life events, subject matter, and what media was used]
[spoiler or 3 depending on how I sorted things]

Rinse and repeat 10 times, so there's no way around it being long. There are over 200 pictures and each blurb is 1-3 paragraphs in the style of my intro, and the section itself has its own intro explaining the purpose.

Oh my, that reminds me of ImageShack. It was the first thing I used before Photobucket, and while nothing went wrong before I switched, I kept what was there where it was, and since it's been years I no longer know my login, and now that ImageShack has overhauled itself completely for no apparent reason, it seems that I can't even retrieve that info anymore and it appears that whatever I had there was deleted because anywhere I've put those images way back when, they just show that "image doesn't exist" thing or whatever. Thanks ImageShack, part of my history down the toilet.

I was quite an ImageShack fiend back in the day. There was another website similar but I can't for the life of me remember what.

Finished work early today so I can spend all afternoon doing more important things, such as PC. So happy I'm quitting soon to do some university though!

Sweet mother of something! The retrospective is done and appended to the opening post of my gallery. I have never done (or seen) something so long in one post so I dunno if it's breaking any rule or is just questionable in some way based on that but I can always change it. It's more of a proof-of-concept at this point anyway.

New avatar and signature awoohoo.

Really enjoyed reading through your retrospective, Amaruuk. It was really unique and well done, I really think there should be a pinned thread for all A&D users to contribute theirs. It'd be a cool feature.

VeranithasVI said:

New avatar and signature awoohoo.

Really enjoyed reading through your retrospective, Amaruuk. It was really unique and well done, I really think there should be a pinned thread for all A&D users to contribute theirs. It'd be a cool feature.

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Thank you so much! I really at times didn't even know what compelled me to do something so needlessly big in such a small place, but I guess once you start something ya just gotta go through with it and see what happens, even if my general history on the internet tells me interest is inversely proportional to effort. If just one person read through it, it's more than I could ever have expected.

As for a pinned thread, I agree, and if that became the case I'd move mine into there instead and make room in my gallery for actual new things I do :3

Hellooo^{hellooohellooo}. Is anybody here^herehere?

Got a few big pieces to go in my gallery this week, and I'm rather excited about them so I thought I'd drop in and get you guys all amped up and whatnot. There's been an amazing surge of activity here recently, with galleries and shops opening up left right and center, not to mention all of the sprite resource threads! Positive steps forward for A&D.

So I actually got around to turning the retrospective into the thread where y'all can post your own bios. It's possible that it could instead become a prefix for people to make bio threads in the future but for now it's just the one thread for them to do it in a post.

So, uh, we might get a new gallery soon, as I'm trying to do commissions so you're probably gonna get a lot of pieces popping up from me.

A guy requested pixel art, which I'm rusty at, so I'm trying to get back into it. Any critique would be welcome, as I want to get to the point where people will actually bother coming to me instead of me coming to them.



Just in case you couldn't tell, it's supposed to be a Greek bust. Simplistic shading comes from doing Pokémon sprites for way too long. Might do the Moonlight Greatsword from Dark Souls for more practice later.

I'd say you're off to a good start, but have some reference open as you work to see how light affects marble, and also anatomy, especially in the neck. You have the clavicles out too far, the sternocleidomastoid muscles (the ones projecting down in the front) should form a V shape meeting at the dip in between the clavicles. I have no idea what is going on with the throat. For the face, I would suggest looking at sculptures and images which have the face broken down into planes, which helps with lighting and with getting the forms and proportions right without having to worry about detail until you need to. This is actually how sculpture generally works, so it'd help even more in "selling" the look of one. Best of luck to you! You do seem to have a handle on pixels in general, so just grab some reference and do studies and you'll nail the other stuff in time :)

Amaruuk said:

I'd say you're off to a good start, but have some reference open as you work to see how light affects marble, and also anatomy, especially in the neck. You have the clavicles out too far, the sternocleidomastoid muscles (the ones projecting down in the front) should form a V shape meeting at the dip in between the clavicles. I have no idea what is going on with the throat. For the face, I would suggest looking at sculptures and images which have the face broken down into planes, which helps with lighting and with getting the forms and proportions right without having to worry about detail until you need to. This is actually how sculpture generally works, so it'd help even more in "selling" the look of one. Best of luck to you! You do seem to have a handle on pixels in general, so just grab some reference and do studies and you'll nail the other stuff in time :)

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Thanks dude. I'll try and fix it up later on if I get the chance, although it's mostly just practice for lineart. If you don't mind, can you point out what each of these are? I don't really have the best grasp on human anatomy or sculpturing (always been a 2D visual art guy, focusing more on drawing and painting).

Gigadweeb said:

Thanks dude. I'll try and fix it up later on if I get the chance, although it's mostly just practice for lineart. If you don't mind, can you point out what each of these are? I don't really have the best grasp on human anatomy or sculpturing (always been a 2D visual art guy, focusing more on drawing and painting).

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Right now, although it doesn't seem like it, you've already got too much unnecessary detail. Bring it back to the very basics and start working your way up. I highly recommend looking up a 3D model of a generic human, male head. Any kind of standard bust is going to be helpful for you, in this case. Here's a couple of YouTube videos that will help you get started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSW6ALspyZI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEiBYgBmhH0

Though they are geared more towards sculpture and 3D modeling, it's going to be good for you overall to get these basics of facial anatomy down.

Second, and I know you're probably not at this part yet, but please be careful when pixeling the texture! It can be very challenging, trying to capture that old school Greek bust feel, and sometimes it's easy to make a lot of unnecessary pixel noise while trying to capture all of the mono-color tones. Damn, I'm sure I remember reading something about good pixel texture creation.. I'll post it here if I find it.

Hope this helps you! Please post the final product when you get a chance! :)

So I've more or less been dead for the past week or so. Trying to sort out real life issues and some online ones too, not good for the body or soul. But I'm back now, with all of my issues ironed out and the like. Hopefully I'll be able to start doing art again once Photoshop has installed onto my new PC.

Anyone art good over Thanksgiving? :>

Mmm....May I ask what is thy saying?

Fairy said:

Anyone art good over Thanksgiving? :>

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I'm not fully understanding that sentence, haha.

There seems to be quite the dip in activity in this sub. Any ideas why?

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. Personally I've just been lazy/apathetic (holidays do that) but after being all hype about the art journey thing, nobody's posted one, even those who were all excited and said they would. Story of my life, the longer I spend on something the less people care :/

I have a whole mess of some stuff I've been doing for a couple months and been meaning to add to my gallery in its own section (it's an ongoing project) but I've been to lazy to bother adding it, even more so since noticing the whole section's activity grind nearly to a halt.

I wanted to post, but I kind off new before hand that I've lost too many work to post in the thread. I could only retrieve like 14 pieces that I've made before my dex, and those only span 2 years. I try to comment in every gallery once they've updated, because I like to get comments on my work, so I assume most people do, but staying active is hard, because of my health and the fact that I'm still massively behind on my schoolwork because of my evilness.

Ah, well it doesn't matter how long the post is. I know I did way overkill on my own, haha. Good on you for commenting. I sometimes try to if I am struck with the right thing to say but that doesn't always happen and I don't like being redundant. Good luck with your health and your studies! Having been through college myself, I know at least what some of that is like.

I voted for MotY and I noticed that we really don't have that much regulars here, atleast in the last couple of months...