Research (IV)

Peggy
October 1, 2021

Illustrator, 7h.

This started with just Kellyn perched atop the shelves (from me recalling how I kid me used to like to climb on top of the dresser in my room, or the shed in the back yard, and read), but ended up also including my SO’s character Alba in the couch. And a few of the cats who live under the house.

Today feels weird and flat and empty; I have nothing much else to say about this drawing. It feels like I may be done with the urge to draw these cozy library scenes for a while.

High res and AI source on Patreon.

Shirts/prints/etc on Redbubble.

Research (III)

Peggy
September 27, 2021

I am still into “my fursonas sitting around lavish libraries”. This one was started back in 2016, and left at a pretty rough stage because I just really did not feel like drawing all those books at that time; now I’ve got a pretty good workflow for this, so when I remembered it existed, I pulled it out and spent about six and a half hours finishing it.

The unicorn on the ceiling is Noelle and the dragon is November-4; the dragons on the bottom are Enmerkar (seated) and Peganthyrus (sleeping). Noelle and Enmerkar are my spouse’s; originally this was just a picture of Peggy visiting Enmerkar at his home in the Library of Babel, but the way I drew the books above the arches made me decide to make it clear that space is a bit broken in there, and put someone on the ceiling.

High res and AI source are on Patreon; prints are on Redbubble.

Research (II)

Peggy
September 24, 2021

It’s just been that kind of a month. I think I am probably still recovering from Hurricane Ida. And maybe from some old Katrina PTSD that Ida dredged up, as well. I feel like I have at least one more “my characters sitting in a big library reading” drawing in me. Possibly also because we got some new bookshelves this week, and I’ve been working on finally getting all my books out of boxes and onto shelves.

This one’s a bit of an experiment; I have a commission at the sketch stage that I think will be well-served by evoking a Japanese woodblock print feeling. Sometimes when I want to explore stuff like that I will make room in the price range for the commission to fuck up and redo from scratch; this time I felt like exploring it in some personal work.

I tried four different ways to get an outline happening:

my initial shitty rough

Astute’s Dynamic Sketch tool

just some simple, monoweight lines

trying to make Illustrator automatically add an extra, thick outline to everything

illustrator’s Blob Brush

The blob brush looked the best, but I kind of hate the blob brush because it feels like working in Flash. And it still felt kind of really sloppy no matter what I did. So I just did a slight variant of my usual methods: I drew some solid-filled shapes, and had an outline on them. I had to be a little more careful about certain aspects of how I overlapped the shapes to make sure the outlines looked good, but it was only slightly slower than my normal methods, and felt a lot less insane than trying to nail the whole thing down as a composition in the line stage, then decide how to best flood-fill everything. Probably by using Live Paint.

Which, yes, is a thing most artists do all the goddamn time, I know. I haven’t been working lines-first since about 2000 and it really just breaks a lot of my workflow to do that.

My original sketch had her kind of flopping coils onto the shelves, but it didn’t feel right. So I looked at some pictures of snakes climbing up sheer walls and ladders and trees, cloned the body layer, and drew something new on the original layer.I liked the results so I deleted the copy.

And then I had to fill some more bookshelves. I drew new book-spine brushes instead of using the ones from the previous picture, and thought a bit about ways to quickly shuffle around the brushes and colors on them. Astute’s Super Marquee is already a tool that’s found a place in my workflow, and its ability to select a randomized subset of the paths in the area it’s selecting was super useful here. I threw together the above image to share it this process on the Astute chat; I could maybe add some more details to how it’s done, but that’s for some other time.

Overall this took about seven hours to do. Which feels like a while for me for a single character drawing, but I spent a couple hours on things like “testing four different approaches to creating a fake ‘ink line’ look”, “making the pattern on her clothes via some tools that let me make symmetry groups that Illustrator’s native pattern tools can’t handle”, and “figuring out why the rug pattern that I generated with the source of a Twitter bot is coming in as black-on-black”.

Anyway. Patreon supporters can get the AI file over here if they want to pick it apart; if you have a blank space on your wall, in your cupboard, or on your body that you think this image would fill nicely, you can get it printed on a bunch of stuff over on Redbubble.

Research

Peggy
September 18, 2021

Earlier this week I woke up and felt like what I needed to be working on was a picture of Stella sitting in a library, reading. This may be a sign that I need to do some research before doing the next few pages of her grimoire; I’m feeling the kind of resistance to working on them that usually means “something needs to be nailed down more before I get into drawing”.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in these bookcases. Firstly, the books are just simple straight lines drawn in various colors with an assortment of art brushes I made:

They’re all drawn flat, then warped into goofy cartoon perspective with a distortion mesh. Which is the weird shape highlighted in red in the above screenshot.

You may also notice that a lot of the sets of books are just a couple of lines in the outline view above; that’s done with a blend between two lines. And a little randomness is added by putting the Transform effect on each of those two lines, with a small vertical transformation, and the Random box checked:

And finally, I use Astute’s Block Shadow effect (in the Stylism plugin) to give some depth to the books by extruding them:

Each shelf has different angles to create a vague sense of perspective. It’s kind of sloppy, but all the lighting effects hide that. If I wanted them to be clearer I’d spend some time thinking about a way to get the edge of a page block in there between the covers. Good enough for now, though. And it took a ton less time to give the books depth with the Block Shadow plugin than it would’ve taken to do it manually.

The whole thing took about five hours, spread out over three days. I shudder to imagine how long it would have taken if I’d had to individually draw every book by hand. I think it was like an hour and a half of work from “I have empty shelves placed where I want them in the composition” to “I have shelves full of books and a few knick-knacks”, thanks to thoughtful use of art brushes and the block shadow effect.

The AI2021 source file is available over on Patreon, if you wanna poke around. It may be weird if you don’t have the Astute plugins. And if you want this on a shirt or a laptop cover or a mug or something, you can get that over on Redbubble.