They Are Finally Free

Ineffable mess with pencils.

Art Log - 06/2024

It's been about 3 months of using Procreate for me!

Would have never happened if it wasn't for my good friend who's an incredibly talented graphic designer. She let me test drive Procreate on her iPad. Back in the day we bonded over being weird artsy kids in school and now we're being weird artsy adults together 🤝 Best friendship dynamic.

According to tumblr, I posetd my first digital painting on April 4th (over on my other blog). I think I made a bit of progress since then, even though I didn't make a lot of paintings in the meantime.

For every single painting I'm still making a traditional pencil sketch, upload that to Procreate and then start coloring on top of it. Not sure if I'll ever get fully confident sketching directly in Procreate.

I started liking the process and the result more around the third painting when I started using a combination of soft and hard shading with some hatching for texture. So that's the 'technique' ended up using more deliberatly for this portrait of Aziraphale.

Gotta stop drawing side profiles, that's way too many side profiles 🙈

I'll post a more detailed making-of of that portrait to document my process a bit.

The trajectory of the stats is a little concerning: 1st painting (3hrs 50min, 16 layers), 2nd painting (5hrs, 21 layers), 3rd painting (9hrs, 23 layers), 4th painting (23 hrs, 62 layers). Yeah, probabaly not a sustainable trajectory. I need to learn how to make some quicker illustrations. I tried here, but did not like the result that much.

I will forever love traditional drawing and painting, but. Digital art ... it's nice! There's no extra space needed to store paints, no brushes to clean later, fixing mistakes is easy, trying out several different color variations not a problem.

It's a goal of mine to make more complex paintings some day. It will be hard for me, I just love portrait drawing too much, it's my happy place, you see? Right now I'm working on another portrait. And then I have another planned after that. So. I'm definetly not going anywhere fast with those plans, that's for sure 😅

Azirapahe stealing a drag from Crowley's cigarette.

aziraphale and crowley smoking together. send tweet

Aziraphale portrait study - I finally finished coloring it!

I loved his posture, the colors and the lighting in this scene. There are some in-progress snapshots over here.

They're not wrong...

Part of the fun with the Rivers of London book series is that you can try to imagine what kind of genius loci would inhabit your local body of water.

Like, I'm side-eyeing my local river and think they would be such an absolutely insufferable, obnoxious piece of s****

Things I should have already known about Nightingale, but had deeply repressed until reading Masquerades of Spring:

Jock, but not.

Terrible pain in the ass, and not in the sexy kind of way.

Looks too dam good. All the goddam time. In anything. Any situation. Like, is this an undercover mission or is this a modeling gig, Thomas? You can't just run around looking like that, have mercy, we are all just mere mortals here, oh wait... oh. Nevermind. Carry on then.

World is going crazy, have a ray of sunshine today wherever you are. I'm trying out different brushes for the linework, this one is the dry ink brush from the basic Procreate presets. Here's the reference I used - Edit: added details

Couple of Aziraphale studies ♥

Michael Sheen's face is so much fun to draw. Shout out to the GO reference library on discord that made it easy to find good refs!

Just wanted to draw one more quick one to color digitally and when I looked up it was three hours later?👍

RE: Good Omens and Rivers of London getting along together - Have you read Plausible Deniability by mizstorge at archiveofourown

Summary: In which Inspector Thomas Nightingale pursues stolen books on magic, Aziraphale presides over a book sale, Constable Peter Grant just tries to do his job, and Crowley values his domestic tranquility.

Have I read every Good Omens/Rivers of London crossover fic I could find on ao3? Well, yes, I absolutely have.

My favorite thing about them is how Crowley and Aziraphale are always casually living their happily married cottage life, established relationship tag, like no big deal 👌 They just perfectly fit into the Rivers of London universe as that quirky couple of supernaturals (not otherwise specified). And the descriptions of their vestigia, I absolutely love those 😍

Let me refresh my memory, Plausible Deniability... YES, I loved the ending with the, er, miscommunication! Crowley is living his secret agent AND his bodyguard dreams in this one. Plus, the Nightingale-Peter relationship is giving me delicious book 2 nostalgia.

Just saw there's a podfic, too! 😍