![[Image: 9510064621_f2fe9cced1.jpg]](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3820/9510064621_f2fe9cced1.jpg)
Apologies for it taking so long. It might not be the best, which disheartens me, but it's better than what I had last night.
Murlona brings up a point that I'd like to touch on, and that would be that "experiments" is actually more apt of a word than practice. Some of you might disagree and claim that you can notice subtle improvements in the images, but practice usually implies "getting better", which I can't do thanks to the lines.
Yes, it would be nice to be able to draw semi-realistically and independently (or, more so, on a CG graphics scale,) but I don't foresee myself getting to that point at any time in the near future. Worse yet, changing around my line style to something more suited to sketching would probably invalidate my style (it wouldn't look the same with bolder lines.)
The reason I scrapped Poe's previous image was that pastels wound up looking too generic and flat. I wanted that to be a sort of "premium" option and I knew it would take many, many hours, partially because of having to use a separate brush for blending (Lay down a hue, blend back and forth, lay down another hue, blend back and forth...). The colors were still there, to a degree. But it wound up looking very "generic", flat, and gradient based. I've seen a lot of tutorials for Painter CG coloring use pastels, simply because they mimic Photoshop brushes for people that don't have or don't want to use Photoshop itself.
And it's possible to do some great things with that sort of method, but it's not something I'm interested in doing. While I want to be able to do art very "well" or be able to draw the fantastical in a realistic manner, it probably won't come that way, because I'd like my works to at least retain an artisanal, non-digital feel. To some degree, my skill with colors comes at a detriment to the lines. Some might call them too wild. I might discover a new brush or I might be able to vary the width, opacity and frequency of my lines for cleaner appearances, but I don't see them at all looking "better." There's just not a lot of potential for improvement without changing everything about the way I do things.
A lot of animes, even, only use two or three shades per color and lots of flats--whereas I'm comfortable with about four to six, plus three other colors. When something is orange, I throw in three shades of orange... and some yellow, and green, and red-violet. I go absolutely crazy with it, which is kind of the point.
And I think that's part of what makes my work so "distinct" as Poe said: the scratchy lines, the blotted paint, the white space, the heavy grain. It doesn't win awards or featured status on sites, but I don't think people forget it, even if they dislike it. I've partially realized that I'm a "niche" artist, if I could be called an artist, and I'm one step closer to accepting that.
