Suuper's Artworks & Illustrations

[Coryn]

Ooh. Any particular influence on the suit design?

[Wild]

Keep up the good work Suuper-san!

Oh and...I hope you enjoy your holiday here in Greece!

[Suuper-san]

@Coryn well the theme is "your favourite colour", so I'm going with a yellow "lava punk" powersuit, I want to make something more armoured than the last one and I figure I have the skills to do it thanks to the experience from the last one.

@wild for real!?!? What crazy timing to just find that out!
You should totally pop down I'm in Roda, Corfu! XDXD
Edit: after looking at a map, I mean *pop up XD

Oh and an update on my massive holiday art plan: I very quickly realised that quantity is the least of my worries. I know that I can easily output lots of rough sketches already, so setting a record would do nothing but be a checkbox for me. So I've opted for quality instead and I'll be focusing on core skills and especially ballpoint skills since I'm working traditionally. That will actually benefit me more in the long run than just churning out random pages of nothingness.

[Coryn]

Cool to hear that you're refocusing your goals! Sounds like you've made a key realization about what you need to work on.

[Suuper-san]

yup, and it was indeed a just-in-time realization as I would have wasted a fair bit of time otherwise on non-key stuff.

well, I am back from my hols. there's good news and bad news.

the good news is that I was able to do a bunch of drawing, some of which was really nice stuff, and also relax and de-stress with my family
the bad news is that as a family and me personally, we were just so badly needing a holiday we crashed for like a week or more (very unusual for us), so I didn't really get much art done and we mostly just lazed about much more than normal.

we are normally quite active in our holidays, travelling to different towns by bus or walking long distances, even renting bicycles, but this time round we mostly slept, didn't do much walking or travelling around or adventuring until the last couple of days when we were starting to perk up.

so all in all, holiday served its purpose, but a tad disappointing it took so long to unwind. but consider us un-wound. I'll be posting my artworks and giving a little discussion on skills learned and new plans for my art direction.

glad to be home as always you start to get homesick after about 2 weeks. home is where all my stuff is, after all.
and, of course, glad to be back to MR. the other home

[Suuper-san]

Well since I didn't quite finish my grand plan for my holiday, I'll finish it off at home and then talk about it in more depth.

Basically I did a more regimented set of sketches, like my 1000 hands regimes, but just 100, of different things. Instead of randomly drawing stuff on each page and getting lucky with a few illustrations, I was a bit more determined to work towards "always being able to produce a good sketch"

A lot of it was the same as the usual stuff I'm always doing, but on paper instead of digital :P

Such as hands:


Or detailed headshots:


I'll mention each individual project when I've finished the lot, should take a month or two maybe depending on how much free time I put into it, and how complex some of the steps might end up being. But I think it's quite crucial to developing my next level skills, interestingly enough.

Previously I mentioned that I had discovered a nice ballpoint sketch style, but that was just the beginning of a true sketch style. I could only draw in my comfort zone. But now I'm pushing to increase the range and complexity of ideas that I can draw in ballpoint, without needing to have lots of sketch lines underneath, as well as actually coming up with fresh ideas to begin with.

Improving this ballpoint style in turn helps me to improve my efficiency digitally, and so just like always, the skills all converge and can be used in other areas.

[Coryn]

Sorry to hear the holiday was a bit of a let down, but as you say it served its purpose. Sometimes you just need to take it easy, and I can definitely think of worse places than Greece, lol

Neatthat you've advanced on your ballpoint style. Definitely sounds like you made measurable gains from the trip.

[Suuper-san]

I wouldn't say it was a total let-down, but yeah it was just an ultimate crash. we enjoyed ourselves of course, but it was far more laid back than we've ever been before. And yup Greece is definitely one of the good places to crash ahahaha :P

I'd say that I'm on the verge of a breakthough with my ballpoint style, at the moment I'm semi-resting on my muscle memory and habits rather than pure brain control, and forethought/planning, which I much prefer. But it's much more taxing to plan so many steps ahead in one go, and that's the wall I'm currently trying to break through, hopefully by removing as many unnecessary steps in the creative process as possible. And that's what my current traditional project plan is trying to resolve, hopefully within a few months.

[Wild]

Suuper-san, I only now saw your reply. Sorry! (and I thought you missed my post or something but it turns out, I did.)

Anywho, I doubt you're still there but I wouldn't be able to come anyway. If some day you happen to be in Athens, send me a message. That being said, you can definitely find more fun people than me. xD

Edit: Btw, I just saw your latest sketching post. Keep up the good work! :)

[Suuper-san]

yeah it was just a short holiday, although my dad is rather keen on retiring to greece XD

and thanks! I've gotta get my act together to get to the next level of art /(@_@;)\
haven't spent as much time as I would have liked doing art lately but I seem to be pushing past the block now.

[Suuper-san]

Finally got a chance to do some of my own work for a change, been really out of it. Sort of a mix between not having the mental energy and also not having the time, and also being ill on and off.

Found some super old half coloured sketches that hadn't been processed, these were the best ones. I was trialling out a new coloured sketch method but ultimately my idea merged with my normal coloured sketch project and this project got discontinued.
 

And some resolved sketches. I got really lost with these as I'm increasing the quality and the level of detail massively compared to before and this has made me realize once again how much I can't draw. I went into a bit of a depressive episode trying to figure out how after all this time and effort I could be so far from my goal until I stabilized back into the grind-and-skill-will-come mentality. But it was a bit tough to shake this time.
I'm hoping that after doing a couple 100 sketches at this level I'll have broadened my ability a bit and gain some confidence in tackling new genres and more complex illustrations.

 

I get the feeling overall that my style is starting to change, can't say whether it's for the better or not, but I'm definitely making progress in a number of areas. Still hopelessly behind in my writing skills, which I hope I'll finally get around to working with soon.

[Coryn]

Well, I think that you should embrace the style change. Like Michelangelo carving out David, it's the old sculptor's addage about how the stature always existed, they just took away the rock that encased it. It's the same with artistic and writing styles I think. So best of luck!

On a somewhat separate note, is that a moonlight greatsword I spy? 

[Suuper-san]

As someone who has always aspired to be able to work with many styles, finding my *own* style is a sort of misnomer I think. Like I just want to be good, even if my art looks like another artist who I like. Having a uniqueish style is certainly welcome but it's not something that I've ever chased as a priority. I think in my mind, once I get good enough I can just pick out the style I want and I'll have enough skill to make it work

And sadly nope that's just a regular random magic sword lol. Although a quick glance tells me it's a very close shape to what you thought it was XD

[Slammy]

Your art is so insane these days. Wonderful structure to it all. WOW

[Suuper-san]

haha thanks I appreciate the comment :P
tbh I'm trying to be even more insane as far as variety and complexity go, really bump up the detail and uniqueness of each piece. I'm getting there but still a long ways to go >_<


since I'm here here's one of my latest sketches, not a great one though, the last set of 12 were basically all failures as I was working out some kinks in my workflow. I think the next set should be better now. Depending on my mindset the quality varies a great deal so that's an issue I'm facing at the moment.




Oh and I suppose while I'm here I should also ramble a tad about my years goals.
Obviously getting better at art and writing is always the game but my methods vary quite a bit as I discover more about my own learning style and more about the skills I'm trying to learn.

I definitely need to get some short oneshot mangas done this year. I say short but doesn't really matter how long as long as it isn't a whole volume. The reason being is I'd like to try out quite a few genres and so a short story in each would be nice to see what genres I like working with as well as to give a blanket level of experience in everything.

With that in mind I'm considering revamping my serial manga workflow to work with different short stories, I've made some progress but not quite sure how to deal with it yet. Even if I dont get as many done as I want, to get anything out would be pretty good. I'd also like to improve the quality by a couple of steps compared to my serial mangas I did a while back. With the art quality too low, you dont really experience much of a challenge and dont really learn much when you're rushing and just doing low quality sketches.

Second to that, I lost a fair bit of momentum last year for some unknown reason, at a guess I'd blame work being stressful and contributing to my oversleeping, which led to a lack of productivity, which led to a minor case of depression, which led to even more inactivity. Fortunately I've still been chiselling away at my art bt nowhere near the high level I need to reach my endgame. So I'm aiming to revive my missed goals from last year and pump out a lot of sketches in the mid-high quality level (such as the one above). i'll be working on resolved sketches and linearts to about a 3 or 4:1 ratio, so I expect to get some sort of quality stuff out this year.

Getting through my old WIPs is always a fun but arduous challenge, so I'd like to see a lot of those processed, especially from 3+ years ago. I can fix up a lot of old issues such as proportions and so on, but I don't get as much of a challenge as I would working on my more adventurous pieces. But I'm much more able to change my concepts and improve the illustration, which is a skill that will always be useful. Not sure how many of my lower level sketches I'll do as I'm quite confident in that quality level and I've generated so many of them it's caused a bottleneck as I try and clean them up and finish them. Also also there's coloured sketches and some other fringe sketch projects that I never really got going, so I'd like to get a few of them done at the minimum.

I won't put any targets on number of pieces generated as the year will no doubt throw some problems into the way, but time-wise I need to be back at my old 5+ hours a day target. As long as I'm spending time drawing it doesnt matter too much what I'm actually doing, is the idea. I've drawn up a schedule that gives me around 120+ hours a month, with a minimum 2 hours a day. And I've also sort of split up the schedule into types of art/study, which we'll see if I stick to or not.

I'm also aiming to get a following on social media, so which ever platform(s) I choose I'll be giving that a swing. Probably DA, which despite its issues is still a large platform, and probably Instagram. I'm unsure about twitter at the moment. A patreon or kofi would also be useful, but I'm not prioritizing that at the moment.

So I'm aiming at a nice active year with a vague increasing-my-oline-presence goal as well.
I'll probably post a tad more often on MR as that helps to keep me on track as I often muse over what has been going well or not, which helps me refocus quite a bit. So probably once every 2 weeks like I used to would work well.

onwards and upwards!