Artwork Bear Ribs' Random Drawings

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
The Odd Quad, crossposted from my current story thread.

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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
This week's Fanart Friday goes to Chris Nuttal's story Pandora's Box. I tried a different dithering system to shade this one and give it a rougher look for his clothes but I'm not really satisfied with it, I think I won't stick with this method and will go back to digital tones.

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Crom's Black Blade

Well-known member
Sketch of a Trek style ship, though I was trying to conspicuously avoid making it anything like any canon design.

Trek ships are fun, they have so many angles and interesting shapes. So many ships people make these days appear to be either a box or a cylinder covered in kibble, it's quite boring sometimes. I detest "Box with thrusters on one end" designs, so generic, nobody finds these boxes iconic.

Very neat. Not sure if it was your intention but between the pylons/nacelles underneath and the raised almost circle rising up from either side above them it almost gives the ship an avian profile. Makes me imagine it's some elseworld 70's take on a Romulan starship design.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
So, it's been suggested to me that I should start adding a signature to my stuff so it's easier to identify. I thought I'd throw a few options together and see what people thought. Here's attempt 1 at a signature.

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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Alright, it's Fanart Friday. Actually doubling up today as I had an extra day off last week and got more done. I was never particularly happy with only having time to do a brief pencil sketch for MCA Hogarth's work so I went back and took time to ink and spot-color it, plus played with a few book titles.
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Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Felt like sketching a goblin today. Flat color this time. I wanted to play with how I shade hair so this is more anime-esque without my usual long stripey tapered lines.

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Any particular character, or just someone you made up on the spot for its own sake?
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
This one's made up on the spot, an effort to stretch myself a bit and draw different body shapes.

Understandable.

By the way, been meaning to ask you what software you use, or if you have any tips for an aspiring digital artist like myself? I'm a decent (if rusty) hand at illustrating the "old-fashioned" way, but have next to no experience with digital art — save for some really crude, sporadic pieces I've done in Autodesk Sketchbook over the years. (The fact my stylus doesn't "glide" along my iPad very cleanly or precisely doesn't help, either, so there's that.)
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Understandable.

By the way, been meaning to ask you what software you use, or if you have any tips for an aspiring digital artist like myself? I'm a decent (if rusty) hand at illustrating the "old-fashioned" way, but have next to no experience with digital art — save for some really crude, sporadic pieces I've done in Autodesk Sketchbook over the years. (The fact my stylus doesn't "glide" along my iPad very cleanly or precisely doesn't help, either, so there's that.)
Well, I do a lot of base work on paper with a pencil and inking pen (I always think I'd like to try using a brush but never get around to it). Once I've scanned it in my go-to program for post linework and color is Xara. I like that its color palettes can be set to, f'rex, only produce Websafe colors for pics that should go on the internet or you can use a CMYK palette if you plan on printing, which I frequently do.

For my digital tones I like Manga Studio. I'm still using version 4 because I'm cheap about upgrading my software when I don't have to (My Xara's also several generations behind).

My best advice for digital art is not to underestimate the value of Vectors vs. Bitmaps. Most people start out wanting to draw in bitmap where you have control of every pixel instead of vector where you control a few key points and it draws the line based on that. But you don't need to micromanage your individual pixels, that results in jaggy lines. There's a bit of a learning curve to Xara but once the splines start flowing from your mouse it's ever so much easier to make the smoothly curved line you want and if it's a touch off, instead of redrawing it you only need to move a control point to change its shape a little.
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Well, I do a lot of base work on paper with a pencil and inking pen (I always think I'd like to try using a brush but never get around to it). Once I've scanned it in my go-to program for post linework and color is Xara. I like that its color palettes can be set to, f'rex, only produce Websafe colors for pics that should go on the internet or you can use a CMYK palette if you plan on printing, which I frequently do.

For my digital tones I like Manga Studio. I'm still using version 4 because I'm cheap about upgrading my software when I don't have to (My Xara's also several generations behind).

My best advice for digital art is not to underestimate the value of Vectors vs. Bitmaps. Most people start out wanting to draw in bitmap where you have control of every pixel instead of vector where you control a few key points and it draws the line based on that. But you don't need to micromanage your individual pixels, that results in jaggy lines. There's a bit of a learning curve to Xara but once the splines start flowing from your mouse it's ever so much easier to make the smoothly curved line you want and if it's a touch off, instead of redrawing it you only need to move a control point to change its shape a little.

Okay, thanks.

Dunno what most of those terms mean straight away, but will look them up when I have time.

Still hoping to get a better device for doing some base line-work on, though I should probably brush up on my pencil-and-paper drawing skills in the meantime. Can’t do much drawing at all if I don’t review the basics first, unfortunately. :confused:
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Okay, thanks.

Dunno what most of those terms mean straight away, but will look them up when I have time.

Still hoping to get a better device for doing some base line-work on, though I should probably brush up on my pencil-and-paper drawing skills in the meantime. Can’t do much drawing at all if I don’t review the basics first, unfortunately. :confused:
Hmm, well:

Websafe: Certain colors are standardized and will appear in every web browser the same way. Other colors may vary or dither depending on the browser. This is significantly less important than it was years ago as browsers have gotten more advanced, but some web developers still prefer to use only websafe colors that will look the same to everybody rather than risk different users seeing different things.

CMYK: Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK. These are the colors of ink in your printer. A computer monitor uses red green and blue but you can't print in those colors, stuff like royal purple or vivid blue* won't print due to how the inks mix. If you want to print something from a standard printer you need to use CMYK colors.
Bitmap (Also called Raster): A way of drawing that uses individual pixels. F'rex a circle isn't, to the computer, a circle, it's a series of individual dots that happen to form a round shape when a human views them all at the same time.

Vector: A way of drawing that uses shapes. F'rex a circle is a center point and a radius, and the computer draws the circle for you based on those two numbers. Add two radii and get an oval, and so forth. This gives you less direct control over each individual pixel but makes smoother shapes than can be easily resized, and also take up vastly less space in your hard drive because the drawing is a series of mathematical formula rather than the individual positions and values of several million dots.

Modern printers generally print in Bitmap while there are old-school printers called plotters that actually swing a pen across the paper and used vector graphics. In the modern day, ink plotters are pretty rare but plotters with a blade on them that cut out shapes for manufacturing are still in common use and they only work with Vector instructions since they need a mathematically defined path for the blade to follow, not a grid of individual dots.


*There are specialized inks called Pantones that actually produce such colors, however they're fairly expensive and most works will only use them as spots, hence why frequently my pics are black and white except for small spot colors, those are designed to facilitate Pantone prints. A lot of oddities in how I draw are actually old-school methods for accommodating different printer types.
 

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