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JezMM Art

@jezmmart / jezmmart.tumblr.com

JEZMMART.COM Pin-Up & Comics Artist They/Them (NB) Mostly SFW, occasionally suggestive. Archive View Personal tumblr MY COMICS Chamomile Phantasm Dyad (On-hold indefinitely) deviantART Bluesky Twitter Instagram pixiv (I recently simplified this profile box - view the previous version here).
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limeth asked:
  • Ask me for advice

What's your method for highlighting on shiny clothes?

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jezmm answered:

Long overdue reply, been a busy week! For high-detail pieces of mine like this or this I've used this tutorial and photo reference and copied what I see as best I can, with minor adjustments for where I can see the particular light sources of the room reflected in the photo reference, and use my imagination to adjust to my own original ones mentally.

For cheap n' cheerful inaccurate but good enough shiny, my default method is like so:

Basically a couple extra lines "next to" the shadowy parts, heavy use of rim highlights, and for both the rim and regular highlights I'm not afraid to have them enter the shadowy areas as if to imply a complex reflection of the surrounding environment.

Granted I don't do it this way AS MUCH as I used to, lately I've been experimenting with a cheap method where I try to make something a little more like the final result of the tutorial above using bigger patches of light and dark. Still inaccurate but more considerate of the "shiny clothes are reflecting their environment" basic idea. The above video was my old standby but it's a little more iconographic - just reproducing a tried and true basic representation of a shiny reflection the same way every time, like pasting in a texture from my mental clip art folder. While I draw freehand a lot of my art works on that basis and I try to inch away from it and into understanding fundamentals whenever I can (but it's hard when art isn't your job and just wanna draw for fun lol).

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jezmmart

Response to an ask box meme over on my personal but relevant to here!

#jezmm#art insight#response#limeth
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Chamomile Comic Trivia #31

#159 - Notice

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It's Sam! I wish I had written down more about my decision to add her, although at this point I'm fairly sure I wasn't certain she was going to become a main character - in fact it was RIGHT around the week this posted that I began work on the first proper cover art for the series which of course did not include her.

Her design was based off this old one-off pin-up girl art from 2017, technically making her the first ever major Chamomile Comic character to exist, sort of.

She was named after Sam Lloyd, likely known for his portrayal of Ted the Lawyer from Scrubs. The news of his death had recently broken and I had just recently begun listening to Fake Doctors, Real Friends, the Scrubs rewatch podcast, as my go-to background entertainment when colouring the comic specifically each week. It still is now, albeit intermittently since they don't always produce an episode each week and I no longer have a backlog to catch up on. Now granted, I don't love the podcast as much as I used to - can be a bit cringey at times as these two hollywood actors chat about utterly unrelatable anecdotes from their lives - but it's overall been enjoyable and it'll be weird to find something new to accompany my colouring if it does come to an end or stops being enjoyable once they permanently pivot into... whatever they plan to do after they run out of Scrubs episodes. It's been part of my colouring process for the comic for longer than it hasn't been now, haha. So... yeah it felt right to honour that connection to my comic with Sam's name, on top of the fact that Scrubs is just straight-up one of my favourite TV shows and Ted was always a character that gave me big laughs.

Of course... I realised after that I'd introduced yet another character to the comic ending in "-a"! ...But whatever, it's a common thing. Not so long ago I had 5 co-workers simultaneously whose names also ended in -a, lol.

The decision to have had her always be around simply came from not having any strong ideas to introduce her and preferring the idea that at least some of the cast already knew her. The gag's been done before, but I thought it'd be extra funny to introduce her with a scene in which she is specifically announcing her departure from being a regular face in Cammie's life, which typically would mean the same for the audience in most works with actually established characters.

Final little bonus note - in panel 1, Cammie once again is entering with a handful of steaming coffee.

#160 - Official

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I didn't really mean for it to be so small it's barely legible at web size, but the little sign on the panic alarm button behind the till says "Real emergencies only Cammie!", in reference to #50.

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#161 - Before

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All that Scrubs talk regarding Sam is kinda fitting, because they did the "this character was always here!" gag there too. For their one, they edited her in on various memorable shots and pretended the main character didn't notice her being present, here I obviously extended the frame on the end of several punchline panels from previous comics.

Here's a gif that shows the original panels compared to the new ones, showing both the new and old art isolated as well so you can see exactly what I drew to extend the older panels which naturally weren't drawn originally knowing that I would one day be extending them!

The second of the three Sam flashbacks is just a nice little bridging one, but it did take me a while to decide for sure which way around I wanted the first and third flashback panel. For the first: while there's been a little bit of mild bad language in the comic once the seal was broken here, Sam's "bitch" is the first time such language has appeared so it amused me to place it in a scene that has already happened long ago just barely outside of the audience's perspective. For the third: the joke is of course that the reveal of Sam's additional dialogue is particularly adding nothing to the scene whatsoever - like, as if Cammie making a fool of herself would even be remark-worthy at this point. I felt both these two goofs had a good punch to them in their own way so yeah, I remember being conflicted over whether I had chosen the funniest possible flow of these three gags.

Of course, the final joke of this one, in case it wasn't obvious (I could see it being subtle for some), is that Mimi's whole running gag is she's a side character who also has existed in the comic for long before her first on-screen appearance, yet Cammie never remembers her.

#162 - New

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The art and dialogue structure of the first two panels here is identical to #160. I think it being a time-saver on my workload for the week was definitely a factor - for whatever reason I needed it at the time - but I also remember going for something with that choice beyond just that... But I can't for the life of me remember what. I don't think the parallel between the two comics adds anything reading them back now.

Anyway here's Newt! I really thought at the time that he was going to be as significant an addition as Sam, and I did come up with the idea of introducing a regular male character at the time I chose to bring Sam in, with Sam's introduction - and exit - being an amusing way to introduce a surprise new character.

...Then I proceeded to never really get any super strong story ideas for him lol. More detail on that in a second. I haven't forgotten him though, frustrates me that he keeps getting sidelined!

#163 - Training

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Standard behind-the-scenes retail frustration humour here. I can neither confirm nor deny how much is based on my current employment. A little detail of authenticity/flavour is that they're watching a DVD intended for widescreen on an old non-widescreen TV that's clearly been in their staff room for at least a decade. Such was the case for my painful training videos too! (It's all online now as of a few years into when I started, so some progress has been made I guess).

#164 - Huh

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It's not made clear yet, but the new status quo that Sam is a receptionist at a primary school is established here - the coloured hanging letter signage on the wall that is too perspective'd to read says "WELCOME TO OUR SCHOOL".

I chose this as a job for her based simply on the fact that my Mum has often worked in school offices for most of my life. She wasn't a receptionist but it was the sort of job where I have some... vague enough memories of the "behind-the-scenes" enough to draw something along those lines when I needed to show Sam at work.

Getting back to Newt, obviously the goof here is that Cammie is just being a sore loser about her friend leaving and Newt is about the most cool-sounding interesting person you could imagine meeting. Unfortunately that involved specifically coming up with fun sounding stuff that are not super common to do or know people that do, so despite the super interesting combo of cave-diving, stand-up and polyamory these are all things I feel like I'd have to do thorough research on to represent in the actual comic accurately... which is something I'd like to do but, time is finite and I have so much pre-existing experience with being a silly nonsense person. Would you believe it, there's another character in the comic for whom that experience lends itself very well!!

Speaking of whom, the first appearance of the bell on the door in Repeat 1 Records was only a month after Cammie got the job. She works fast!

[Trivia Archive | Browse from most recent]

Source: jezmmart.com
#jezmm#chamomile comic trivia#art insight
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