Latest Posts by dandyrebel - Page 3

I’m almost done with this particular page, but I didn’t have the stamina to continue after a while—although I’m working on rough drafts for future pages.

Also, I spent nearly an hour not knowing that this update to Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 and it’s brush tool literally happened five days ago, and I’m just...an extra level of annoyed that I thought that it was Lazy Nezumi, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the smoothing mode for an hour until I figured out that it was Photoshop itself.

On the extra cool side, it’s super cool to see that Photoshop actually has proper screentone stuff now. Really. I’m experimenting with it to see how I can use it better. (Although I’ll probably just get better over time anyway, tbh.)

So, this is the result of my Twitch Stream! I’m pretty stoked that I’m back in the swing of things after Hurricane Irma, and I’m pretty happy that I made A LOT of progress on the page in the past 4.5 hours (although I felt like I wasted a bit of my time with Lazy Nezumi. I want to see if I was doing something wrong, because I only found it useful for two things.)

I also appreciate that the quote “Vaporwave Trash Child’s Baby” is now immortalized in a Facebook status of @arzeron‘s, and I got some good pointers for drawing babus from @galacticglaciers.

I am constantly annoyed with DuoLingo gaffes like this, so I shall start making a chronicle of the various screwups that DuoLingo makes in the DuoLingo Japanese course, as well as silly sentences, because why not?

Also, because I mentioned this guy’s in the Twitch stream earlier today without realizing that I never properly introduced him, this character is not “Vaporwave Trash Child” (as I’m now nicknaming the character on the cover page), I was explaining who on earth the small dude by the door of the first page I’m working on is, and it might not be easy to see a tiny layer label in a Twitch stream, ...I will also show a character design thingy I did a while ago for the small dude by the door on the first page I drew.

I also wrote @plaguenurse‘s comment of “10/10 elf” on there, because I felt like it.

I may also have to fix dem eyebrows, because his eyebrows really shouldn’t be solid if I was planning on him being some shade of blonde.

This was the result of my Twitch stream today! I can’t say that I got as much done as I would have liked, but that’s because my roommate’s corgi, Truffles, started vomiting on both of the couches. She had to be taken care of, and things had to be cleaned. That’s kind of an emergency.

Incidentally, I’m thinking that I want to try the Lazy Nezumi plugin at some point in the near future. I like technical drawing by hand and all, and getting by on on Brush>>Shift>>Click and drawing out a perspective layer isn’t the worst thing I could possibly do...but it seems like Lazy Nezumi’s Illustrator-esque grids might be helpful, and the fisheye thing seems SUPER neato. (Until the inevitable happens and Adobe just adds that as a thing anyway...like how a file recovery plug-in I once had basically became standard anyway.)

>tfw you’re writing a rough draft for something and it actually alludes to the fact that coffee beans might be extinct or absurdly rare by 2080—ergo, coffee would be an extremely expensive black market luxury at the rate we’re going at.

So, I made a bit of progress on the first comic page, and I made a little bit of progress on the logo stuff for the comic.

Also, @plaguenurse had a comment on Twitch that basically made me laugh maniacally for a good minute or so while working on the architecture on the top panel.

Ok, so I managed to finish the illustration components for the cover of the webcomic I wanted to get to, and do some of the logo revision work on the side.

Additionally, I think I have an additional reason to continue streaming on a weekly basis—namely, because I can make 15-minute silly fan art like this with the power of peer suggestion.

(BTW, the Spiders Rohan badge is transparent, for all of your transparency needs.)

Gonna do another Twitch Stream soon! Feel free to stop on by in the near future!

This is basically where I’ve ended my first Saturday Twitch stream at, minus a few minor tweaks.

I’m pretty happy with those hands, personally. :’D I’ve liked drawing hands for years, though, so getting to focus on them once again is really, really fun.

I’m thinking of holding another stream tomorrow because I also want to see THIS cover thing done, as well as the logo for this entire comic/comic series I’m slowly working on in my spare time.

This is only a 4-6 hour rough draft, and I wanna give this guy a lot more polish later... but I decided to start grinding through drawing this character design for a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure fan character that I’ve been playing as in a Jojo tabletop RPG @plaguenurse set up. (Also, @arzeron also has a character.)

I figured that I should get to it because 1) I’m kinda sad about Chester Bennington’s passing, especially when I went out of my way to name this guy’s stand “New Divide”, and 2) on the roll20 site, I’m kinda disappointed with my laziness when I look at a pair of scissors and a picture of Richard Hendricks from Silicon Valley for the stand and the user, respectively. (Btw, I named the user Jonah Joplin, for additional Scott Joplin/Janis Joplin references. Also, he is an ambiguous Jojo. Maybe he’s a Joestar, maybe he’s not. We just don’t know.)

I just realized that I could have easily made an MS Excel spreadsheet for the economic model I usually construct for quoting design, instead of doing everything by hand with a pen and paper.

It would even automatically calculate annual metro-area inflation discrepancies FOR ME if I structured it like that, so that I can just feed it yearly data without worrying about it.

Doing it all on paper is just punching myself in the face.

I’m always baffled when a throw away doodle of mine pops up somewhere else on the internet.

This time, a quick 5-10 minute meme speedpaint challenge I drew came up on Google. I spent the last five minutes laughing. I can’t believe that it spread past the one thread it was meant for.

I’m dead serious about this seamless dolphin vector pattern I made a while ago.

I ended up scrapping this a while ago, simply because pastel dolphins really aren’t something that fits in with the rest of my main portfolio, but...yeah...I did make this a while ago.

Dolphins. Yeah.

I’m almost done with the coloring for the main character of the webcomic I wanna work on (specifically, how he appears on the intro “cover” page)—but then I realized that I was using the exact same colors as the Jazz Dixie Cup for some components of rendering, and then I kinda devolved this into something that would fit in a bad vaporwave YouTube video.

Ｅ　Ｎ　Ｊ　Ｏ　Ｙ　　　Ｔ　Ｈ　Ｅ　　　Ｂ　Ａ　Ｄ　　　Ａ　Ｅ　Ｓ　Ｔ　Ｈ　Ｅ　Ｔ　Ｉ　Ｃ.

Ｍ　Ｙ　　Ｔ　Ｒ　Ａ　Ｓ　Ｈ　　Ｃ　Ｈ　Ｉ　Ｌ　Ｄ　　Ｄ　Ｅ　Ｓ　Ｅ　Ｒ　Ｖ　Ｅ　Ｓ　　Ｉ　Ｔ．

For real though, this made me happy. I enjoy making jokey stuff with my own work sometimes. It relieves stress.

My style of procrastinating—work on other things that aren’t immediately productive, but are productive for things later on down the road that I enjoy.

That said, I’m still a sad sap who’s trying to make black and brown work. (But oh boy, can I tell you how much I like dark reds combined with black?)

I’ve been going about some really rough color testing while I’ve been doing anatomical tweaks and ink refining on the main character of a webcomic I’m working on in my spare time.

It’s really frustrating, because I’m kind of old school with my mentality of “do not mix brown and black together, unless you are an unfashionable pleb”, but it seems like this calls for it. I’m sitting here thinking to myself “Hmn...can leather be dark red? How would I go about breaking that fashion rule? I don’t know how to approach this.” I’ve also noticed that character design for fantasy characters doesn’t typically have that many restraints, so part of me is wondering if I should just resign to mixing black and brown, and being like “Screw it, those are reddish-brown leather boots and gauntlets.”

I wrote the thing. I wrote a slice-of-life Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusader’s fanfic involving stupid parlor tricks. All in three hours.

You’re welcome, but also, why do I feel like this is a mistake? It’s safe for work and relatively innocuous, but still.

Also, the title is a slight modification of the first lyric in Cherry by Chromatics. Go listen to that—it’s a really good song, I promise.

Oh snap. I just realized that the icon client has Pepsi colors because I'm trying to avoid IKEA colors.

Crap.

I’m at the point where I never want to work with this color combo ever again.

I’m at the point where I never want to work with this color combo ever again.

So, I’ve decided to work on the roughs for an old comic project I’ve wanted to do for years, and @plaguenurse did a remix with the baby being punched today.

It’s very dark humor, and it’s like…it makes me feel bad, but it’s also hilarious, and it’s just one of those things where I don’t know how to respond to it.

I’ve been doing super duper rough speedpaints of Jotaro and Joseph in between points where I’ve been frustrated with the approximately 50 icons I have to design for an actual company.

Of course, these two aren’t finished by my actual standards, but I’ve been pushing myself to try to do smaller things on the side so that I don’t get overwhelmed with the sheer number of things I have to design. Also, I’ve been legitimately happy that Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure stood my “two month” test before I get bored with a series and dump it...so it’s in league with Panic! at the Disco and The Legend of Zelda in terms of fandoms for me at this point. (Although Joseph is inexplicably my favorite Jojo, and I’m disappointed that my intro was Jotaro back in the day with the fucking garbage OVAs, because NO WONDER MY INITIAL IMPRESSION WAS BAD AND I INITIALLY DIDN’T LIKE IT, JEEBUS.)

I’m glad I’ve gotten 80% of what I needed to finish while spitting these two things out too. And a few other non-essential things.

I kinda want to legitimately finish these. And make a few other Jojo things, too. I want a damn Kakyoin sketch for myself.

While fretting over what the bloody hell I’m doing for a freelance client I have on hand (because it’s teetering into Clients from Hell territory), I decided to go ahead and make this thing after working on a few tweaks to Truffle’s Instagram photos (because glowy eyes are not cool.)

I’ve been obsessed with Somebody That I Used To Know remixes. Particularly, I’ve been hooked on this 80s remix and the Tiesto remix.

I decided to go ahead and make a retro typgraphic thing for myself as a result.

The Instagram version of this is so much better, btw. Here is this thing in its non-pixelated glory.

I finally made a motion graphics version of my thing. It’s alive! It’s also terribly compressed, but eh. I can still say I did a thing in After Effects!

This was a pain to make, though. Predominantly because of file sizes. However, feel free to use it for whenever you’re in an internet argument (although you are automatically losing by virtue of the fact that you are in an internet argument. Never forget that.)

Forgive me, but I’m slipping into my old habit of listening to a bunch of hard rock, emo music, etc—and just rolling along with it for the sake of design. Any maybe to test some AfterEffects skills, if I can get my main computer to cooperate with me. (And I’m worried I can’t.)

Anyway, I’ll admit that one of the handful of genres I listened to A LOT growing up was hard rock...and there are times where I’ll sporadically recall lyrics from various songs, and go “Huh. Why can I remember THAT off of the top of my head?” Sometimes it’ll be relatable, and sometimes not.

Anyway, have some Three Days Grace related typography. Go listen to the song. Go enjoy yourself. Resist any urges to go scream at exes. Resist any urges to go punch your exes. Forget about the blood on your hands. Rinse your hands and repeat.

So, I have a Tumblr on the side called @dandyreblogs now. I'll probably modify it to look like my current icon, but slightly different. I'm planning on using it as an aesthetic Tumblr exclusively.

I’m more or less satisfied with this, but this ultimately demonstrated a huge problem in graphic design. Specifically, when you find a really good font, but you have to either pay money or contact someone to use it for commercial use.

I say this because the left one is completely freeware fonts (Milkshake + Ostrich Sans), but the right one uses Blacksword, which is only free for personal use. I COULD do my own handlettering, but that’s time consuming on my end, and I want to turn this into a card ASAP...so in terms of my time, that’s not an option.

I’m kinda sad that I can’t commercially use the right one at this time. At least I have a cute corgi in a bowtie staring at me to reassure me that it’s all gonna be ok.

(And for the record, I am aware that you cannot actually give alcohol to doggos. Truffles had no wine, and the wine is only there as a photoshoot prop. My roommate drank the wine later. Truffles got to have a couple of crackers, though.)

I was thinking about how I starting learning Adobe Photoshop stuff way back in 2007 when I was 15…and back when Adobe Photoshop CS2 was cutting edge, you had to pay for it. Which is unlike now, where CS2 is officially free from Adobe (sort of), but Creative Cloud subscriptions are a thing, but that’s even more expensive.

I also thought about the first album design I ever made back then as well, and my dad kindly posted it on Facebook and tagged me in it.

I forgot how bad it was. Dear lord, the back and front have no cohesion, warped text is terrible, there’s way too many fonts, and tilting text is generally a no-no unless you really know what you’re doing… but I actually appreciate looking at it, because I’m looking at it and going “Oh wow, I’ve improved a lot in the past 10 years.”

It’s also really interesting to see what’s stayed the same, because there’s a few things I can clearly pinpoint as consistent things. Firstly, I clearly like either A) bright colors, or B) dark and moody stuff. Secondly, I am clearly a nerd, considering that the first one has a modded amp tube diagram on the back, and the second one has a Sierpenski gasket. Thirdly, I always seem to have ridiculous ideas for song names.

It’s nice to have reminders of how far you’ve come. It really is. I was the kind of kid who got frustrated with a lot of my work and would just wantonly throw things I made out if I deemed it to be terrible for what I could do later. That hasn’t helped me too much nowadays.

(Also, I’m very, very tempted to redesign the old one. I could probably make something a lot better now.)

This should be the absolute last thing I should probably have finished for today...because ain’t poster design fun?

(Also, I used a mock-up from over here, for full disclosure.)