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Jan. 8th, 2026 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressYesterday I was in a bad mood after my meeting, and also I'm a little sleep-deprived and I've been in a weird mood for a couple days anyways. Also, the band Seeming, who I'd just gotten pretty into one of their albums1 right before winter break, did a "all our pre-2025 music free" as a special, and it felt prudent to nab it2.
Sometimes we can do things the right way though, and so instead of playing mindless phone games, I just put the song du jour on repeat, and got my sketchbook, and drew a picture:
Write the song you need to hear. And draw it, I suppose.
I'll start with the just-before-inking rough version:
I am trying in general to ink more, but my very sketchy lines-on-lines style worked _really_ well for me in this self-portrait. So I made a unique-to-my-art-so-far decision of *not* erasing the pencil lines after inking the picture. It works for me!
The loose pencil-sketch method really hides my sins as an artist. When things are *supposed* to be loose and unfinished and giving more the impression of the shape than the details, you can get away with a lot of things like no actual real training and not nearly enough practice. If I'm going to do more inkwork, I need to be aware of what I can and can't hide.
Mostly that means leaning into the very cartoony parts of my style. The feet are semi-circles and I think that's fantastic because it does exactly what I need it to: have feet. But the hand is actually part of the picture, and making sure it's clearly a hand and the palm of thus is...more challenging. There were points in the draft-work where it looked better and worse, the final is far better than I could expect, as long as I don't look too closely at how I completely whiffed the thumb.
It was also really nice to get to play with words-as-art. I am _so_ word oriented in general, it was really satisfying to pull out my favourite lines and then figure out how to arrange and what else to add. Actually, that's worth grabbing the earlier rough photo:
So obviously I started with "write it on the palm of your hand". That's sorta the...central theses of the picture. From there, I got the lyrics immediately before and after, and I liked setting up the main diagonal from top-left to bottom-right. One of the other things I like is that "write the song you need to hear" appears multiple times in the song, which is where I got the idea to add the other immediately-after lyrics. So from the top left corner, you've got a flowchart going across to the right-top, or down to the left-middle, or diagonally! That's neat!
I also fairly early decided I like including the title. It didn't stay in the top-right, but I _really_ liked the concept of it "fading out" by getting smaller and smaller in that bottom-left corner. Fun fact! It's written eleven times3, because that's how many times the phrase is said in the song! It was real fun to get to very intentionally use my different sizes of microns for that part. I'm not always this thoughtful about nib size, but it felt really meaningful to think about what needed to be what line-width in order to draw the attention in the right directions.
Anyways, that's what I did last night, and I'm pleased about it! Maybe I will draw other things sometime this year, I would like that.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Specifically, Madness and Extinction. BDan recommended it, on one of the times I was looking for Bandcamp Friday recs. After the third time of tossing it into the "after school album rotation" and being all "damn this is really good I should go tell BDan", I finally took actual notice.
2: Technically I did pay-what-you-will at a dollar per album, since that way they get put into my Bandcamp account and I can stream them, instead of just being emailed the mp3s. I really like this set-up! And I went ahead and put the 2025 stuff into my cart to nab at above-cost on the next Bandcamp Friday.
(I appreciate so much that Bandcamp hasn't fully enshittified yet.)
3: Different fun fact! "The Earth is radiantly suicidal" is written three times because it was too off-kilter when I inked it once, and so I wanted to rebalance the picture. I sorta wish I had stuck with twice, since that's how they do repetitions of it in the song, but it's fine.
Sometimes we can do things the right way though, and so instead of playing mindless phone games, I just put the song du jour on repeat, and got my sketchbook, and drew a picture:
Write the song you need to hear. And draw it, I suppose.
I'll start with the just-before-inking rough version:
I am trying in general to ink more, but my very sketchy lines-on-lines style worked _really_ well for me in this self-portrait. So I made a unique-to-my-art-so-far decision of *not* erasing the pencil lines after inking the picture. It works for me!
The loose pencil-sketch method really hides my sins as an artist. When things are *supposed* to be loose and unfinished and giving more the impression of the shape than the details, you can get away with a lot of things like no actual real training and not nearly enough practice. If I'm going to do more inkwork, I need to be aware of what I can and can't hide.
Mostly that means leaning into the very cartoony parts of my style. The feet are semi-circles and I think that's fantastic because it does exactly what I need it to: have feet. But the hand is actually part of the picture, and making sure it's clearly a hand and the palm of thus is...more challenging. There were points in the draft-work where it looked better and worse, the final is far better than I could expect, as long as I don't look too closely at how I completely whiffed the thumb.
It was also really nice to get to play with words-as-art. I am _so_ word oriented in general, it was really satisfying to pull out my favourite lines and then figure out how to arrange and what else to add. Actually, that's worth grabbing the earlier rough photo:
So obviously I started with "write it on the palm of your hand". That's sorta the...central theses of the picture. From there, I got the lyrics immediately before and after, and I liked setting up the main diagonal from top-left to bottom-right. One of the other things I like is that "write the song you need to hear" appears multiple times in the song, which is where I got the idea to add the other immediately-after lyrics. So from the top left corner, you've got a flowchart going across to the right-top, or down to the left-middle, or diagonally! That's neat!
I also fairly early decided I like including the title. It didn't stay in the top-right, but I _really_ liked the concept of it "fading out" by getting smaller and smaller in that bottom-left corner. Fun fact! It's written eleven times3, because that's how many times the phrase is said in the song! It was real fun to get to very intentionally use my different sizes of microns for that part. I'm not always this thoughtful about nib size, but it felt really meaningful to think about what needed to be what line-width in order to draw the attention in the right directions.
Anyways, that's what I did last night, and I'm pleased about it! Maybe I will draw other things sometime this year, I would like that.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Specifically, Madness and Extinction. BDan recommended it, on one of the times I was looking for Bandcamp Friday recs. After the third time of tossing it into the "after school album rotation" and being all "damn this is really good I should go tell BDan", I finally took actual notice.
2: Technically I did pay-what-you-will at a dollar per album, since that way they get put into my Bandcamp account and I can stream them, instead of just being emailed the mp3s. I really like this set-up! And I went ahead and put the 2025 stuff into my cart to nab at above-cost on the next Bandcamp Friday.
(I appreciate so much that Bandcamp hasn't fully enshittified yet.)
3: Different fun fact! "The Earth is radiantly suicidal" is written three times because it was too off-kilter when I inked it once, and so I wanted to rebalance the picture. I sorta wish I had stuck with twice, since that's how they do repetitions of it in the song, but it's fine.
no subject
on 2026-01-09 04:03 pm (UTC)