SnowSultan's avatar

SnowSultan

Creator of 'Fae and Flaeme"'
3.5K
Watchers
307 Deviations
324.1K
Pageviews

Lesson learned

2 min read
Rita2

⚔️ -------------------------------------------- ⚔️



After almost three years of working on giantess pics because I mistakenly thought it would be a fairly simple project where I could learn about making an image series and improving my skills, I'M. FINALLY. DONE. While the person I was making them for was very patient, I REALLY bit off more than I could chew, and will not be doing any sort of gift images or commissions for the foreseeable future. Time to get back to making my own art. :)


You can view the giantess images on @Flashman-87's page (click on his name to go there) as he posts them (should be nine in total). Note that they are NSFW (topless nudity and violence), and I made them based on Flashman's instructions. I may post them to my gallery here at a later date.


I'm planning on just continuing to use 3D, but with little bits of AI used in postwork to improve hair, clothing, eyes, and such. @Telperion-Studio has been doing that recently and it can really make things look better when used modestly. I still want to make Fae and Flaeme art in pure 2D, but I'll experiment with that and using AI results as reference when I can.


Thank you as always for visiting and I hope to make new art that you will enjoy!



⚔️ -------------------------------------------- ⚔️

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Thanks for the votes on my last poll. Results were pretty close between 1v1 female fighting and giantess/gorgon slayer pics, and those who wanted giantess pics will definitely get what they want fairly soon...almost down to one picture left for Flashman...


Do you ever have an idea for an image but manage to talk yourself out of making it because it's too different from what you're known for making? Maybe it doesn't fit at all into the world you've made for your other characters? They're silly reasons, but those sorts of thoughts have been nagging me a lot lately. I guess it has to do with my wanting to make stuff that's sexy, violent, cute, lighthearted, fun, and satirical - ideas that don't always go well together or appeal to similar audiences, and I feel like I have to try and justify everything I make with some reason other than "I just felt like it".


As a ridiculous example, I don't want to have any nudity in my Sahmika images or have her appear too brutal or merciless now, so I make the Slayer of Beautiful Evil pics for that - but then I can't use Sahmika, so I use the Vincent character (the knight with curly hair), but giants don't fit into my Fae and Flaeme story, so now I'm thinking of just using Laventus for those fights and have them be more made-up stories of his exploits to impress his female admirers...ok, that could work, oh and I also want to make some one-on-one female fights like the poll said, but what should the story be behind those? Is it a modern-day Sahmika fighting bad girls, but if I keep doing that, people might think I always want to show a black woman beating up other races, so maybe I should have a male hero, but a man defeating a single woman isn't a good look, so maybe I'll have a guy fighting a group of bad bunny girls armed with knives in a nightclub or something but oh no I don't have any good 3D modern male clothing...ah nice, someone liked my Flounder drawing, but oh god did they also happen to see Bullseye or Back on Top, which by the way was not supposed to be as lewd as it turned out and of course THAT picture got shared on Instagram and now 100,000 people probably think that I'm a Black supremacist pervert ARHGHFH forget it, I'll just make a cute picture of Sahmika standing under a tree that no one will pay any attention to...


Being a weird artist is hard. ;)

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Just wanted to mention a few things I'm working on and possibly thinking about doing in the near future. As always, it could all change tomorrow, but that's the life of an artist. :)


* I'm pretty sure that I want to focus on making all of my future Fae and Flaeme art in 2D. 3D is just too limiting; I'm stuck using what is available or what I can afford (which isn't that much these days), and I think the characters (especially the demonesses) would look a lot better and have more unique designs if I could draw them. I'll still use 3D and AI to try and simplify the process a bit, but I know I would enjoy seeing my characters come to life in the way I imagine them even if it requires more learning and more work.


* As for 3D, I'm leaning towards using more assets "as is" and not worrying about having to retexture everything or get stuff in and out of Zbrush and Substance Painter. That was always the problem I had with making Fae and Flaeme stuff. I spent more time trying to tweak products to better fit my characters than I ever did actually making art, and they still never really looked how I wanted them to. A few weeks ago, I tried copying a fight picture from KickassClub (a subscription site and great resource for femfighting images) and it came out unexpectedly well. It's been pretty fun trying different camera angles of the same scene and dropping in different environments. Might think about making stuff like that or pinups when I get tired of researching how medieval corsets tie up so I can properly draw Sahmika's casual outfit. ;)


Thanks as always for stopping by!

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Best wishes for a happy holiday and a safe and prosperous New Year to you all! I just thought I'd share a few of my artistic plans for the future...and yes, they've changed yet again.


* I should have the next Flashman giantess pics finished in late January. So far, I think they're quite a bit better than the old ones, and I learned a few things doing them - most importantly, if it can't be done in a day, DO NOT DO IT FOR FREE.


* As far as my own art goes, I plan on going through with drawing again instead of 3D, but using AI generations as reference material. I want to use AI as a artistic tool and not just as a quick way to make pretty pictures, and I'm testing a workflow that will use Stable Diffusion more as a 'toon renderer' to run my own 3D art and sketches through before doing the final work manually. Early test results seem promising at least.


* I haven't bought anything 3D in a month or two...think I might have had enough of 3D rendering at least until we see some sort of major development. I'll still keep up with it and use Studio in any AI/drawing workflows if I can though.


Thanks as always for visiting!

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Just thought I would mention a few artistic things I've been trying lately - I do work on stuff every day, but most of it is frustrating and none of it is anything that you all would be interested in seeing. Maybe some of this information might be of some use though.


- I'm not currently messing with any AI. I might experiment again with trying to improve the hair or clothing on renders or maybe backgrounds in the future, but...eh, most of it is starting to look the same to me these days (3D renders too, which is why postwork and experimenting is important :) )


- I subscribed to the Adobe Substance 3D plan again, mainly to try sending DAZ content OBJs from Studio to Adobe Stager. Stager is a nice little renderer with an easy one-way bridge from Substance Painter (more on that below), and a great PSD export that includes automatic surface and object ID maps, but it has very few features compared to something like Blender or even DAZ Studio itself. I found it very odd that while Substance Painter can send a project directly to Stager and set up all the materials in one click, there is no easy to way to update that object or those materials once it's sent to Stager. Settings materials up manually is time consuming, and I found that any rendering benefits that Stager offered just wasn't worth the effort.


- After canceling that plan, I tried Adobe Fresco, a free natural painting app that's primarily for iPad but also works on Windows 10. If you have Clip Studio Paint or Photoshop, you likely don't need Fresco on PC, but it does have one particularly interesting feature; you can animate objects on paths like in After Effects or the much more mediocre Cartoon Animator. Path animation can also be combined with traditional frame-by-frame animation (which even Clip Studio Paint can't do). It also has vector brushes, but they can't be edited afterwards like in CSP (they're just for scaling your images up for better printing).


- At the moment, I'm experimenting with using Blender to render DAZ Studio scenes that I'd export as OBJs. Seems like a 4090 is finally enough to get Blender to stop crashing after loading a couple of textures, and as it's easy to make ID passes there, it would make doing postwork in Photoshop easier too. I'm not going to bother trying to get DAZ content working properly in Blender though, it's way more trouble than it's worth. OBJs still come over fine, it's getting the materials right that will be the unavoidable challenge.


- The first thing I need to do though is to find an outfit for the giantess for the new Flashman pics I need to make...nothing is looking good so far and it's holding up everything. Anyway, I'm always trying to improve and learn new things, and hopefully I'll be able to make more art that you'll like in the near future. Thanks for your patience!

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Featured

Lesson learned by SnowSultan, journal

March plans and artistic stress by SnowSultan, journal

Future plans (for the moment) 2/1 by SnowSultan, journal

New Year, new workflow by SnowSultan, journal

Not giving up art, new methods by SnowSultan, journal