Ex-Twink Ollie

Decided to try something very new this time.

You remember my several attempts to make fully digital realistically rendered artworks without pencil shading, all these involved my OCs so they were deliberately simplified and stylized. But what about even more realistic things which I usually draw in pencil?

In one of these posts with fully digital OC drawings I said I'm not sure if I'll ever use this style for anything outside more simplified OC artwork. Well, things and opinions tend to change and as the time passed I started considering it a much more possible option.

Why so? Because, to be honest, I started getting tired of traditional pencil drawing and feeling more confident about digital drawing for several serious reasons:

1. Pencil drawing is ridiculously time consuming compared to digital art. I really felt it recently when drawing second part of the Father's Day sequence. As you remember, a majority of the canvas was taken by Volk's body there which is simply a big spherical shape, nothing special. If it was drawn digitally it would require just few moves with a very large smooth brush to make a gradient. But pencil is a completely different thing, there's no other way to render things but with thin lines which means rendering something as simple as such gradients needs THOUSANDS of pencil strokes and a lot of time and patience. It was okay for me to do things that way for 5 years but recently my mind is getting more and more gnawed by the thought how much less time I'd spend if I used something else instead of a pencil which would mean making more artworks and wasting less energy. Thinking about it during this second part of the Father's Day art made me feel SO damn frustrated I started really hating what I'm doing and what I waste my time on.

And it's not "quantity over quality" situation where artist gets lazier and downgrades their style in order to mass produce less unique effortful material just for the sake of engagement and profit, there's no real reasons to say that pencil is ultimately better than digital brush when it comes to NSFW art, for me it was just a matter of habit and that's where we get to point 2.

2. I started disliking the way it looks. Sure, I often get compliments for my style with people saying pencil shading looks unique and authentic but the price I pay for this "unique feel" which is still very much an acquired taste thing is too big and there's some major things I dislike about pencil shading.
- Rough texture. Sexual art is very much about the texture of flesh and things being smooth, a chaotic mess of rough lines doesn't nail this idea perfectly, it requires very careful shading with very thin lines to make pencil work look smooth but when you want to do several big artworks each month with numerous alts and so on there's no way to get that much patience and time to draw everything so carefully. Even smearing strokes with fingers doesn't always help fully.
- Dark colors. No matter how much I try to soften the look of my works they still look a bit too dark, graphite drawing is still a graphite drawing. It's hard to think in colors when you're drawing a black-and-white image with graphite pencil so as a result I end up having shadows way too dark than they could be, this problem was especially prominent in first years since 2020, then I became more moderate about my shading but the problem still haven't gone completely. One of my commissioners said his friend doesn't really like my art and "wondered if you were a horror artist or something". That's very insightful of them, I didn't even feel offended because it's just the truth, I indeed were a horror artist in past before switching to furry art and it's true that I still have a huge weakness for horror aesthetic in sexual art but it's not like I always want this vibe to be present in every artwork of mine. However, with all the rough shading and dark shadows all my art is forced to have this brutal feeling at least a bit.
In order to deal with that dilemma I tried to do two things, I started setting pencil work scan layer transparency to 70-80% in every artwork in recent years and some of my artworks used very little pencil shading overall compared to my usual drawing style, like latest Easter works with Jack Rabbit, if you look at the pictures of the original drawing you'll see it's very light.
You can already see the direction it goes. I started reducing the role of the pencil stage in a drawing process and relying on a digital shading part more and more. I was very insecure about my skills in digital shading and thought that pencil is the best tool for me to do things best because, you know, I don't have a drawing tablet and afraid that I'll never get used to it even if I get one, after drawing on paper for years and years it sounds so odd to move your hand on a drawing surface but watch the screen instead of your hand. However, those fully digitally shaded art experiments with my OCs and also the recent change in balance between pencil and digital shading process in my regular art proved that I'm actually not that bad with just the PC mouse even though it's a very backward way to do digital art compared to how others do it. Yeah, it's pretty inconvenient, even worse than what I imagine drawing with a tablet must be like, but yet I got used to it over the years and managed to do some neat things which filled me with more confidence and helped to make this decision.

I need to mention a couple more problems of pencil art.
- Precision with small details. All my works look pretty detailed for sure if you don't look them up close. It's because I'm using A3 paper sheets and very thin mechanical pencil, I did my best to enhance the look of my work as much as possible. And still there's no other way but to say it still could be better. If you look at some of my scans really closely and pay attention to such small details as eyes or dick veins you'll see how rough and smeared it is. It could be MUCH better at such resolution but it's impossible with pencil, I can't work with a needle under a microscope, that's how pencil works, technically it CRUMBLES under the pressure and leaves a mark on paper, by simply making another stroke you smear your previous stroke with a pencil lead so it's impossible to make things so sharp with microscopic precision compared to digital art while such precision is very important for me, you know, I love to draw BIG bodies and it requires very small heads for a contrast with tiny facial features which I want to still look distinguishable.
- Inability to backtrack and other minor inconveniences. Everybody knows that pencil and eraser are two inseparable buddies like bread and butter but did you ever think how often actual traditional graphic artists use the eraser? The answer is NEVER. That's right, well, at least that's a half of the truth. It's normal to use eraser at early stages when you just sketch everything but when it comes to actual shading it's better to avoid using eraser completely, that's what we were always taught in art college and that's how I was doing things nowadays. The reason is pretty obvious from a practical point of view. When you already have a lot of pencil shading on your artwork, using an eraser means a huge risk to make a big mess and pretty much ruin everything. Eraser starts smearing the graphite layer instead of actually cleanly removing part of it, leaving bad looking spots which simply stick to the paper structure and it can be pretty hard to remove them completely. So you better be perfect all the way and don't do mistakes, there's no ctrl+z for you in real life. Which is obviously not a problem in digital art.
"Other minor inconveniences" involve slightly smearing EVERYTHING when your hand is resting on a drawing while you shade something and some uncomfortable hand positions when you have to apply shading at certain angles.

So, as you can already tell, there's a plenty of reasons why I got exhausted of the way I was doing things. I can even assume it's one of those numerous reasons why my productivity declined recently. I started feeling intimidated by all these problems, every time I have to draw I think "Man, I need to go through all this shit again" and this lowers my will to draw no matter how much excited I am about the idea itself in my mind.

This Ollie Gaytor pin-up is my first attempt to do things the new way and I feel very satisfied by how it looks, it met all my expectations, was much easier to do and took me much less time, the only pencil work I did is a simple line sketch, I love the level of detail and how the colors pop in a new way even though I still can't get rid of my habit of making shadows too dark and do the artwork really soft and bright but I think I'll figure it out.
The sketch I did for this artwork.

Also this artwork is a bit random and out of my main art plans, it'd be better to finish those Father's Day and Pride Month sequences but I needed something different and simple after this long tiresome hiatus, something to press this restart button and just do something I have on my mind right now and I was actually horny to do some hot regular pin-up with Ollie Gaytor sporting all the hot bits I like about men for quite a while. And yeah, time to indulge on my phimosis obsession again. Also, no matter how random it is, it actually still fits the summer season vibe so I'm glad I decided to switch to this idea!

However, transition to this new style is gonna be gradual. I still have some unfinished art sequences which were started in pencil and it would be weird to continue them in a completely different style so they just have to be finished the same way. Also I think commissioners might feel too afraid to be guinea pigs for a new style they don't know if I'm gonna be good at or not without examples so I'll need to practice it more to have more to show and let people get used to it. But as for all the other upcoming new personal artworks, I'm gonna leave the pencil behind and do everything in this new way from now on. Let's see how it will change my life as an artist, it was nice to be a one of a kind sort of artist who handles traditional materials so well as very little nsfw artists do nowadays but I guess it's time to give up that pretty much useless title and just do what feels better for me. If I decide to do something outstanding, extremely effortful and traditional I'll rather just try to do another physical wall piece with plastic and acrylics like the ones I did with my OCs.

And of course I need to tell about the alts, although it's all pretty classic and doesn't need much descriptions. There's various hairy alts and yeah, I understand body hair looks odd on reptiles but who cares, reptiles don't have belly buttons and nipples either and yet we have King K. Rool with an outie and cartoon animals with human body hair on top of a seemingly furry body which is no less absurd, it's just ambiguous cartoon anatomy. I did a mushroom head alt as well for those who might like it more than this weird tight foreskin, some crazy cock head swelling alts for those who CAN'T GET ENOUGH of foreskin tightness like me and some dirty hyper fart and smegma stuff that you can see in a dirty versions archive below. Hope you enjoy all the new stuff as well as this new style!