What it do

[Samurai]

It actually looks less eerie in colour than it did in mono. :) You've already done one of the things I was going to suggest, though, which is add some reflected light.

[Agent]

flowers are gross

[Zengus]

Yeah, I think the key to this piece is going to be adding depth and scale to the image. I was kinda hoping to do this in a simple, blocks of color kinda fashion, but I realize now that that won't work without a lot of effort (and will not, in fact, be simple at all). Current phase of the project is adding dark spaces to many of the seems between petals to show perspective better, it's gonna take me a while I think.

Still thinking of how to color this exactly. There's gonna be a lot of orange and red in the final image (maybe some purple, if I decide to further diverge from how these are in nature). I will probably end up doing thin black outlines between sections of different color, though making that look good will be a headache (but not as much as doing fades/gradients, especially when it comes time to do the actual tattoo). It will probably look a bit like the petals in , when I'm done with that part, but hopefully with the presence of said black outlines it will pop/contrast a bit more. This approach will have the advantage of maintaining the very simple color palette I have going so far, without the need to do any lighter/darker shades of any of the ones I use. I think that solid-block style tends to look a lot better in tattoos, personally.

Blurgh way too tired to work on this more tonight.

[Agent]

i think the iris might be too wide hard to read it as an eyeball

[Esunasoul]

Do it Aku no Hana style.
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off& ... yAH-xIH4CQ

I like the one without the eyeball best.

[Zengus]

I like that style, but I don't know how it would work for this piece. Maybe I'll base something off it for the next one (like I said, flower motif building, no sense in straying from that now)

Agent, I don't mind if it isn't something immediately obvious. I want it to be something that jumps out at you after you've been looking at the image for a few moments already (I also kind of wanted to simulate the appearance of a half closed eye, which wouldn't display a full iris anyway). Or do you mean that it isn't clear enough for people to recognize it at all, the way it is now? Because that would be a problem.

Starting in on the orange colors. It's surprising to me how much less flat the image looks with the addition, even though it's just partial at this point. Not to say I'm unhappy about it.



(also, one for Esuna :p)

[synkr0nized]

Just imagine reaching down to sniff a flower like that and staring into an eye that is staring back.


Also, does that mean if you pluck the flower you're ripping it from its nerve stem?

[Zengus]

[Zengus]

So I guess I don't mention it here so much (mostly I just walk about my drawing/art stuff), but I like to build or craft a lot of different things. I made all the cabinets and tables and whatnot in my apartment (that I'm unfortunately going to have to sell when I move in a couple months), for example. One of the things I've got the most talent with, it seems like, is refurbishing or otherwise restoring knives.

Probably no one remembers this picture:



I think I took it like four years ago? I only have the three knives on the outsides of the triangle now (my professional opinion on ceramic knives is that they suck, by the way), and of those three the only one that I've used much is the one of the left, an 8" Wusthof Classic Ikon santoku. It's been my all-purpose go to for a long, long time, and I've used it for a bunch of things that santokus really aren't intended to do. I've loaned it to other people that didn't take awesome care of it, and even let it get used as a shop knife for a while. It probably has more wear on it than any other knife I've ever seen that still lives in someone's kit (seriously, a big chunk of its handle is even missing on one side). On a slight tangent, I really cannot say nice enough things about the durability and strength of this particular line from Wusthof (I can't speak as highly of some of their other ones, but Classic Ikon is LEGIT), it has never, ever, not even one single time had even the slightest warp in its spine or blade. And it's probably been used more roughly, dropped point first onto tile flooring more often, generally just been fucked up worse than any of the others. I've successfully restored it from states that probably would have made a lot of people just throw it away, more than once.

A couple days ago I decided that it was simply too filed down to properly serve in its original role as a light cleaver/chef's knife, and that the only things I really use it for these days are off board work and butchery (well, I still use it for everything, but those are the only two things it does that none of my other knives do as well or better). So I decided to bite the bullet and turn it into a petty knife (shaped like a chef's knife but smaller, maybe twice as big as a paring knife). I filed it down further and made some adjustments to the shape of the blade. It checks in a little under 7" now. It's handle is too large and the spine of the blade is much too wide to be a proper petty knife (it is more like a boning knife in that regard, but they don't make boning knives as nice as this- they're typically considered throwaway knives, even nice brands make them out of cast steel with plastic handles ffs). It has a good, incredibly solid feel, and combines the best characteristics of a number of kinds of blades. I can tell that I'll still be able to use it well for many years before I respectfully retire it to a glass case somewhere.

Now it looks like this:

[Zengus]

Still do a bit of drawing every now and then. I eventually finished that drawing of the flower with an eye in it, for one thing



I ended up deciding to hand draw it. I could have tooled over this a bit more, but I am pretty happy with it

I did a small series of hearts for Valentine's day as a present for my girlfriend (well, more accurately, I drew a small series of hearts around Valentine's and then realized that they could make a good present- I was practicing with some calligraphy pens and doodling hearts is easy). Three of them were pretty good









Turns out calligraphy pens and brushes and inks in non-pen-form are pretty fun to work with.