Niv's art! - July 31st, lots of RP arts, yooo

[MissMurderPaws]

Do you have a DeviantArt? I love the way you draw, I hope I can be as good as you in a year or so, if I practice really hard

[Niverdia]

Do you have a DeviantArt? I love the way you draw, I hope I can be as good as you in a year or so, if I practice really hard

I do! Same username.
Practice is good, but please remember that art isn't a competition, you evolve at your own pace and shouldn't feel bad about it. In fact, it's taken me over 10 years to get to where I am now from the time I started drawing more often cause I'm slow as hell and get too bogged down too often by self-esteem stuff, hahaha.

Anyway, I joined a roleplay group on Deviantart that's run by one of my local dA friends, and to upgrade my character it's important to be active in it, so yeah, more incentive to draw humanoids.

My character application:

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And an illustration with her from a prompt I made:

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Also, I recently redesigned an old OC. Happy to see some improvement from last year.

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And, lastly, I've been trying to learn some star photography. My camera lens is so bad for this OTL.
The first picture is Pleiades and Taurus rising, the second is a fragment of Cygnus between trees - should have gone with a narrower aperture to have less jarring contrast between the edges of the trees and the sharpness of the stars...

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/flops around

[Zeteri]

Wow you are amazing! Is that watercolor, or hand drawings?! When you take commissions please save a spot for me to order some art!!! Because you are absolutely amazing!

[Niverdia]

I don't know exactly what you mean by "hand drawings"? ^^;
But yeah, I mostly colour art with watercolour. And some colour or water soluble pencils for smaller details - recently, though, I've been thinking about how to learn to detail more with watercolour only.

Thank you, it's always flattering to hear someone likes my art. I must disappoint you, though, I will most likely never take art commissions or requests on Magistream again. This is mostly because I'm lately a lot more invested in my own projects and would prefer to not do underpaid work - therefore, I wouldn't take less than minimum hourly wage, or site currency equivalent for my work right now. Also, at the time I just have no interest in taking any commissions to begin with ^^;

Also, quick doodle from this week, another dragon from Light flight's "Draw the Dragon Above You" thread on FR.

[Bananaz10]

Your art is beautiful!

[Niverdia]

I just... keep on forgetting to post things here?
These are by no means all art pieces I've done since my last update, but those I'm kinda happy with.

Past few months have been quite productive with RP art.

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Aaand this was a collab with an IRL friend, I did the lines and they coloured:

I also did some animal art.

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And a commission for Arionn.

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//disappears into the shadows again

[Emerarudo]

I love your art! How are you able to scan so clear photos of your traditional art!? And how do you get them PNG!? :0

[Niverdia]

I love your art! How are you able to scan so clear photos of your traditional art!? And how do you get them PNG!? :0

Thank you!

The answer to both questions is... I post-process. I clean up my digital images of art a lot - delete irregularities, adjust colours (levels/curves, colour balance, sometimes selective adjustment for specific colour channels), sharpen the smaller/publishable image etc. I don't know if I can give any advice on that, as I'm pretty much self-taught in this.
In fact, until this year, I didn't even have regular access to a scanner, so I used to take photos with a dSLR (it's a matter of lighting and practice to get decent photos of art).
I use GIMP for post-processing, and .png is one of the (many) supported file formats you can make with it.

[Chess]

Hi Niv! I was wondering if I could use the red panda on the blue background on my sig or profile. You can never have too many of them.

By the way, your art is beautiful! Even if you don't take any more commissions, I'm glad you are still making art pieces and posting them here so we can see.

I'm no artist, but your pieces are wonderfully detailed. How small of a paintbrush do you need? Also, did you first learn to draw in school, or did you take drawing lessons outside of school when you were younger, or have you just self-taught?

[Niverdia]

Thank you for the kind words, Chess!
Yeah, you may use the panda pic, but please link back to my dA or art tumblr for credit.

I very rarely work on anything larger than A4 paper size, so I usually use a size 5 and 6 round brush for backgrounds/larger areas, and a size 1 and size 2 round brushes and a size 2 flat-ended brush for characters/small details. Dunno if there are different classifications for brush sizes where you live, I'm talking about brushes I've bought where I live and where I've traveled.

Also, I prefer to paint with plastic fiber watercolour brushes over natural hair (sable etc.) brushes. I find plastic brushes easier to control (despite how it sounds, they actually feel quite silky and soft to the touch), whereas natural hair brushes seem to bend all over the place, haha. This is probably because I prefer to make pieces with defined detail over softer-edged works, which have their merits, too.