calm
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Illustration #133 and #134 + rewards!
🕑 Added 2025-10-23 19:40:21 +0000 UTCHey! I've got two paintings for you this time. :) Like you may have noticed, I usually finish one illustration at a time before doing the next. But I can often feel some fatigue towards the end of the process of a painting, so this past month I wanted to work on two illustrations in parallel. I want to reacquaint myself with how that feels and what effect that has, and see if it impacts the fatigue one way or another. It's probably too early to have a concrete opinion on it, but it felt pretty good. I enjoyed the process from start to finish on both of these paintings.
Check out the rewards for both paintings in the attachments! You can also always find them in the rewards collection post, alongside all other past rewards you might have missed!
I didn't want to spend too long getting these posted, so I did keep the complexity of these painting down a little bit for the purpose of this experiment. I often feel like I spend way too much time polishing environments that aren't really the focus of my paintings, so keeping the environments a bit painterly and less complex is probably a good thing. Doing cool environments is fun too obviously and I don't intend to avoid them entirely, but I gotta learn to restrain myself more in the instances where they aren't as important to the composition or where my time is better spent painting more paintings instead of a more detailed painting. This probably also had an impact on avoiding fatigue with these two paintings, so I'll have to do some more paintings to get a sense of what has what effect.
Something I really enjoyed in the process of these two paintings is the part just after I finished the sketches and moved on to do the full painting. For that step of the process, as you can see in the videos, I kind of roughed up the whole sketch, making it look almost blurry with painterly strokes. It created a foundation that felt really good to add details onto. The idea there is to sort of go from blurry and then gradually sharpen things and add details where it matters. I did it a bit more deliberately than I usually do, and I think it was pretty successful!
That's all for now! No doodles this time around, but I hope the two paintings and their rewards make up for it. :) Thanks a bunch for your support!
Comments
Calm
Hey thanks! Glad to hear you're enjoying my stuff! A lot of my inspiration for my art style has come from artists working on Warcraft as well as all the other games of that similar visual style. Luke Mancini and Laurel D Austin are two artists whose works have stood out to me over the years and deserve a mention. That colorful style with exaggerated proportions has always appealed a lot to me. But I've also found inspiration in the works of for example Brad Rigney and Chase Stone, as well as other Magic The Gathering artists like them, which lean a bit more towards realism with scenes using dramatic lighting. I don't really make an effort to specifically emulate particular artists, but they all definitely influence me and the direction my style goes. :) As far as tips go, I'm unsure how useful I can be! I gotta admit I've never really had a very solid strategy personally lol. I've just made the best paintings I can and hope it goes well when I share them. And the landscape is pretty different and more crowded now than it was over ten years ago when I started doing nsfw art professionally, so my experiences from back then with how to get that initial audience growth doesn't necessarily apply as well anymore. But I suppose if you wanna start attracting an audience for your gay nsfw art, your first works in that area should set the standard for what people can expect from you in terms of quality, art style and themes. If you can do some storytelling across your works that's great too, since it encourages people to want to follow and see where it goes. Storytelling is an area I could stand to improve at personally lol, but I see other artists finding a lot of success that way, which is awesome. Alexis Flower's works are a great example. One of the more common questions I receive is if I do gay themed paintings, so it appears to me like there's definitely a demand for it! I hope you find your audience. :)
Alan Gomes
Hello Calm! I'm an brazillian artist and i absolutely adore your work! I wanted to lear what are your biggest inspirations? I love your style and want to know what are your references to that aesthetic! I'm thinking about change my RPG portfolio and start producing gay NSFW content, do you have any tips to succeed in that area? Thank you!!
Calm
Thanks, Mogra, I'm glad you like it! :)
Calm
Thank you, Raxa! I didn't manage to entirely capture the dramatic lighting I first had in mind. I think in part because I was trying something I'm not fully used to with the painting technique. The intent there kinda got lost in the sauce lol. But I'm glad you like the result anyway! :)
Mogra
Really beautiful work. I love how you treated the green ladies hair.
Raxastake
hellll yeah, these are to absolute bangers, said it before and I'll say it again: the lighting on tthe demoness is fuckin fantastic
