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| sWest
sWest
[1855664]
[2005-08-28 01:28:25 +0000 UTC]
(Unknown)
# Statistics
Favourites: 0; Deviations: 5; Watchers: 137
Watching: 8; Pageviews: 14449; Comments Made: 105; Friends: 8
# Comments
Comments: 41
I thought I was already watching you.
Well now I am.
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thanks for stopping by and adding us to your favorite...stay in touch!
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I have a contest running right now that I believe you might be interested in.
A goddess of nighttime whose skin looks as if it is made from darkness. A god of killing with the head of a squirrel who carries a human skull with him. A god of light with burning eyes of amber.
You can create Gods and Goddesses just like this and many more by checking out this contest:
[link]
[link]
Hope you can join in the fun!
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I'm assuming you go to my school considering your account was on the board.
Nice gallery.
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WOOT Simon is back on DA 
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Hey Simon, long time no see, glad to see you put up some of your awesome work!
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Hello random Deviant! xD; I am shamelessly plugging my art for commission purposes. I'm trying to get more customers, see.
But also, I'm trying to comment on others' artworks.
Your work in particular is beautiful. o.o Specifically the featured, "Lachalia". It's stunning.
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I can't even begin to communicate how much I enjoyed my jaunt through your gallery and I would probably sound incoherent if I tried! I love your lineart and character designs. Absolutely brilliant. You understand, I must devwatch you.
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Fantastic gallery. Having noticed and faved 2 of your pieces, i shall go the whole way and give you a watch.
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Please, continue with your imaginative creations, and especially do more monsters. Thank you for sharing your art with others.
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thanks for the nice remarks all of you
I'm not an animator professionally, i've mostly been a storyboard artist and more recently a teacher. That being said i DO actually animate, I'm making a animated 3D short film.
I'm currently going crazy trying to get some better works of art into my portfolio and trying to improve... really really fast if i can
-swest
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You've got a great gallery and your work is really professional. Hope to see more, keep up the great work
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Awsome work man! So are you an animator or something?
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beautiful gallery! I really like your style, your works are very professional ^_^ I must give you a watch!!
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Well you haven't been here too long, but your art looks like it is making waves ^^ Congratulations on such a lovely and professional gallery, it's full of inspiration and imagination. Keep up the wonderful work, and hope to see more art from you
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thank you all for your supportive comments
-swest
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Welcome to DA~! I really adore your gallery, you've got some mad skills!
Imma gonna hafta watch you now.
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hmmm hitting "Reply" in this doesn't seem to nest the response beneath the original comment. Oh well. I hope it's not too confusing and people can find the comments my responses belong with.
-swest
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ha its okay, actually there's a setting in everyone's profile that makes it how they want to see other people's comments on their work and deviant pages....I think
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thanks
-swest
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You know i think it be nice to see some real old roughs in the scarp book that what it for in here
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yes I've considered putting a bunch of sketchy stuff in the scrapbook, but it means a lot of work sorting through all my roughs and scanning them, etc.
I'm going to move the drawings out of my gallery into scraps as I get finished colour versions of them done.
-swest
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Hey! Thanks for the 
Welcome to DA btw!
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hey dude, you have great art skill and talent, im really influenced by your style of painting and shading, i was wondering if you could give me some pointers and ways to do my art like yours, i have alot of rough sketches and wish to turn them to good copy, what program do you use and what tools, if you could help me it would be great, thank you. EXCELLENT WORK!
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thanks for your supportive comments
what I do is a little different from piece to piece, it depends on what I'm going for; but I always start with a rough sketch or drawing. I draw a lot in my sketchbook at first. I try to stay really loose and draw really light at first, and work up the underlying structure in the drawing. This is the most important part! Work out all the problems, anatomy, structure, design, perspective in your light, loose rough drawing. I draw with (mostly) blue Sanford Col-Erase pencils; the kind animators use.
I gradually tighten up my rough, darkening the lines I want to keep. How clean it gets depends on the final piece. Sometimes, I just buff down my rough drawing with a white plastic eraser, so I can still see it but lots of the rough sketchy stuff drops away. Then I go over it with a much sharper blue pencil, putting in darker clean lines.
If I want a super clean tight drawing I will put the rough under a piece of bristol board and redo it on a lightbox. Sometimes I scan the rough and resize it to what I want first. I lightly redraw it on the lightbox and then clean it up with a black pencil (the Staedtler mechanical 2mm clutch-pencil kind) or even ink it sometimes. It's important to try to *redraw* it and not just trace your lines.
Once it's done (either as a tighter rough or finished pencil) I scan it at 300dpi and take it into Photoshop - that's what I use for my colouring. What I do in Photoshop depends again on what style I'm going for - stuff with nice clean tight lines I might do in a flat colour anime style; looser sketchy-er stuff I tend to make into digital paintings, that's what I'm working on these days.
I use a Wacom graphics tablet in Photoshop; tablets are *awesome*. Usually I put the black & white line art scan on a layer, and multiply it over the colour layer. If i did the rough in colour (like blue pencil) then i usually desaturate it first and try to get it darker without killing the art quality. If it's an anime-style thing, the colours are all solid and flat and totally opaque.
If I'm doing more of a "painting" like my recent pieces, I only use the round, hard-edged brush to paint, but I set the opacity between 30-60% and also set the pen pressure to control opacity. I blend colours by layering low-opacity colour together. All of this colour is in one layer in photoshop and I don'd try to stay inside the lines. I try to be loose and kinda messy and free. After it's mostly done I take the eraser tool and carefully erase the colour up to the lines.
I haven't been working digitally in this method for very long but I'm really enjoying it. I don't use any fancy effects anymore, but I will put bright highlights on a separate layer above the lineart. In the end I flatten the image (so it's all one layer) and maybe add some little final touches (like using the Dodge tool for shiny highlights; but don't go crazy with this).
I make sure I save my progress all along, and before I put it up on here I resize the image by changing the 300dpi to 72dpi and save for web as a jpeg.
I hope that helps. I can explain more sometime if you like... but remember: it's all in the drawing! the stuff you do on the paper is the most important. Photoshop will not make bad art into good art! So always always always, work on your drawing skills!
If you want to see the idea in practice, I have two pieces on here that are the same drawing: Ysanne Contemplates is a pretty clean rough drawing (I used several Col-Erase colours) from my sketchbook, then I digitally painted the scan of that to get Ysanne With Orb.
-swest
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thank you so much for the help, ive been trying to get new style of concept, ive been using a Wacom tablet aswell, i find it hard and tricky, good effect though, i prefer traditional work, i dont like to use wacom tablets, the style that you do rocks, i love the drawings of Ysanne, excellent character! how many charecters do you have? im just wondering if you have msn? and if so do you mind if i have, i could learn so much from you, im practising the painting in photoshop, thank you once again for your advice!
Dzenan
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just wanted to say thanks to you all for the nice welcomes
i don't know what finally made me put my art up here. I'm trying to check out everyone else's stuff but there's just so much cool art!
it's awesome that artists of all sorts have communities like these nowadays... everyone keep up the good work
- swest
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hey i'm from halifax ^_^ used to live in shearwater and go to cole harbour high lol
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