Ask the Artist: Usarechan
Hello! I’d like to thank
oxoniensis for inviting me to this month’s round of Ask the Artist! I’m so excited!! I’m rather new and I’ve not done as much as other artists have so you can’t imagine how thrilled I am. It’s such an honor! Thank you.
Warning: There's a lot of rambling and big pictures under the cut, as well as NSFW art.
About me
First off, I apologize for my bad English. My name is Alejandra or usarechan and I’m from El Salvador, this tiny country in the middle of Central America. If there is one thing I remember from my childhood is stealing my mom’s college notebooks to draw all over them, until she realized she needed to get me my own, I’d go nuts without paper or pencil. She’d always tell me I’d be taken to art classes after school but it never happened, so when time for college came I signed up for Art School against my whole family telling me: how are you gonna live from that? So I took three years of plastic arts (drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery, etc) and I majored in graphic design; I’m graduating next week. yay me!
Tools of the trade
I use Photoshop CS3, my computer can’t take more than that. And for some reason, a friend of mine talked me into buying a BAMBOO tablet a little bit more than a year ago, I’m not lying when I say I gave her the money and I had no idea what I was buying. That’s when I started experimenting with digital media, I would only do traditional stuff before that. I think she really loves me.
As for brushes, I use the standard round hard brush, I just can’t use brushes with texture. This must be weird coming from a graphic designer, I bet. It’s probably because of how I paint, very old school; I do it the same way I’d do it with oils on canvas, or watercolors on paper: mixing colors, playing with opacity. I also abuse the smudge tool, especially when working on hair and clothes.
Inspiration
When it comes to fandom, all my inspiration comes from fics I’ve read, or bigbangs or challenges I’m working on. Strangenessandcharm’s ficlet “It’s Wonderful” it’s the reason I stared doing fanart in the first place. Otherwise I’m just doing portraits from scenes I loved, when our boys looked especially beautiful. Visually, if I just don’t know how to do something, I seek refuge on Petite-Madame’s work or Euclase’s, or Artmetica’s, or quickreaver’s, or brilcrist's and so many other fantastic artists in this fandom, I go and stare at their art and wonder HOW? Then I give up and go back to my work. It’s always good to study other people’s work.
Also, thank you ammo, for listening to all my crazyness, you must be tired of me already. ILU <3
How to
I’m gonna explain a little bit of my process using one of my favorite pieces.
I always work big, 300dpi. Just in case I want to print my art someday.
For this prompt: "Demon!Dean and Cas getting it on", I started sketching on paper the different positions that came to my mind and I chose the more dynamic and fluid one. Wings were an obligation in this one. Oops?
Before I draw the final sketch or lineart I go looking for references, mostly for their faces. I can’t draw realism without references; they end up looking anime like. I blame the one teacher who told me: “draw what you see, not what you know”. Forever traumatized.
Then I build my color pallete on a different layer, visualizing first the atmosphere I want to achieve, the emotional state I want and choose my colors based on that but I always try to have the basics, blue, red, green, white and yellow, or I just grab them from the samples. I put the skin tones together, the hair tones somewhere else, and so on. There’s a lot of flesh here and most color is on the background, lighting and the color of the wings. For the wings I used an eagle’s as reference. Eagles have very dark, but yellowish and reddish colors; those influenced me a lot in choosing the overall pallete. Brown, yellow, red, orange are such passionate colors, they fit here.
Time to paint,I choose a middle fleshy tone as base and start adding light or dark colors where lighting or shadows will be, I use a round hard brush(which I change all the time, both size and hardness), opacity set very low, between 5% and 20%. I change those as I’m working though. It depends of what I feel I need. Also, don’t be afraid of changing stuff, I realized when I was almost done that Cas’ back and shoulder were wrong, how do you anatomy?
On this one, I was thinking they could be in a non physical place. Dean could be having a nightmare. They could be in hell or another dimension, for whatever reason. Then figure where light is coming from, and this one is tricky because they are in a dark place but there’s a lot of light coming from their bodies and specially the wings. Things make no sense in dreams. :P
When I’m done painting I add the glow coming from the wings, which falls on their backside. I did that on a different layer with a very big, very soft brush, painted the glow on strategic places and then played with the blending modes to find the one that gives me a good effect. And the light source in the background, on another layer. And, done!
A friend asked me how I draw hair, hair is hard! I’m sure everyone agrees! I choose 3 or 4 colors, depending on who I’m working on. I start with a middle tone again and add big strokes of a dark color that will be locks of hair, then start adding smaller strokes with lighter colors and so on until I’m adding detailed lines. Finally the smudge tool, I set it very high, 90% when I'm blending colors and pilling lines. Now, with detailing hair, when you are doing something brushy and painting like, not entirely realistic, you don’t have to draw each and every hair you can see on your reference, you just suggest it, let people’s mind think that that’s hair, 3 or 4 light lines there and that’s hair, less is always better. And this makes no sense at all, I apologize. I’ll show you, I really like how their hair looks on this one.
I’m done with all this rambling, I’m gonna finish with some WIP’s I put together, originally posted on my tumblr, one from each boy.
Godstiel
Dean
Sam
And some of my favorite pieces, There's many more on my journal and deviantart gallery :)
Here’s a little video of me drawing future!Cas for the superwho bb. 2 hours reduced to 10 mins, it looks nice I promise.
Again, I’m aware this probably makes no sense at so feel free to ask anything you want.
Thank you for reading and inviting me here!