paintedwingold

[paintedwingold]

james is always one motto away

[paintedwingold]

How do you do your mood lighting? I know what it is and does but I’ve got no idea how to figure out how to do it. Do you have any tips? I’m trying to improve my art and yours is always so pretty. I really love all your Freed stuff!❤️

Hi there!! Thank you for your kind words! 💕 I apologize for a quite late reply, but here we go now! 😅

Also gosh, those days when I was drawing Freed literally all the time 💚. I’m gonna use my mdzs art as examples though, because currently they’re the only wip files that I have on my laptop (and I kinda changed my coloring methods at this point in comparison with my FT art)

So by mood lighting I call the way I add some extra lighting and coloring once I do the main shading of the characters, to kind of make them blend more into the scene and make things more cohesive. 

This is how my layer tree usually looks like and the one I'm gonna describe here is the 3rd/general one - it's above both the character and background groups, so it affects everything.

One thing that I always like to do for mood lighting is to add a soft glow from where the light source is, since it makes things a bit more cinematic - I do it by using the Airbrush tool set to Luminosity/Addition with a bright color (name depends on the software you use, I use Paint Tool SAI) and lower the opacity until I get the result that I like. It's the same thing as I talked about here in this super old manga coloring tip.

You can do it just a little bit when you want the soft/tender mood or really intense for action stuff.

It's also nice to do this thing using the Overlay setting to kind of make the colors a bit more consistent. You airbrush the colors and adjust the layer settings to your liking.

A thing that I definitely recommend is to include bounce light in your art. It's essentially the light that gets reflected by the environment and falls back on the object opposite from the light source. Though in my case I often just turn it into a secondary light. I usually do warm main lighting, so I use cool colors for the shadows/bounce/second light.

And I do this by using a clipped layer to the folder with the characters and an Airbursh/Marker tool set to Luminosity or Overlay (it depends). [so technically this goes into my 2nd lighting category, since it only affects the characters]

I recommend watching some tutorials about how different types of lighting and shadows work, since personally I’m still learning all this and it’s still nice to hear what someone else also has to say. Here is a quite nice and simple one about the principles of shading + an example how to use it!

Alone these are quite subtle, but they quickly add up and if you mix and match these things you can get some nice results!

[paintedwingold]

A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

Now that new semesters have started, I thought people might need these. Enjoy your lessons!

[paintedwingold]

Okay here's the first 'build' of my fan made bonds forged picrew!

I'll be adding more hair and skin tone options in the future, let me know if you have any suggestions!

[paintedwingold]

How to draw: Not white characters

How to draw a Black person

How to colour Black people skin tones

How to draw dreadlocks

How to draw African hair

How to draw curly hair

How to draw braids

How to draw braids part 2

How to draw cornrows

How to draw Bantu knots

How to draw two strand twists

How to draw an Asian person

How to colour darker skin tones with alcohol markers

How to draw hijabs/traditional Muslim hair coverings

How to draw a hijabi girl

All links and art provided by @ itsajart on TikTok

Before you go “mY aRt sTyLe iS dIfFrEnT tHoUgH” you can moderate it and play around with your style to get it to fit.

[paintedwingold]

i really like what gay people have done with batman

[paintedwingold]

[paintedwingold]

*takes a knee* hey gang

so you may or may not know this, but the tumblr metrics system works in a really interesting way where it literally does not count likes. only reblogs. that means if something gets 100 likes and 5 reblogs, that thing actually registers as having 5 notes.

i don’t know how everyone finds fic on tumblr, but i tend to go through the tags. what ends up happening is a lot of really great fic gets buried because it was posted, like, a day ago, so it doesn’t show up in “recent” and it doesn’t show up in “top” because of lack of interaction.

reblogging is vital to keeping this community alive, otherwise we stagnate

[paintedwingold]

How to draw Afro textured 4c hair - an explanation/Tutorial

For those of you that don’t know what 4c hair is, 4c hair is a hair texture type that contains coils to small and tight that the hair appears to be more puffy rather than curly ( like to photo below ) this is in NO WAY to be confused with curly hair. there is a drastic difference.

As a black artist that primarily draws characters with 4c hair, I’ve been asked many times to do a tutorial on 4c hair so here we go~

before we get into 4c hair, lets take a moment to fully understand it by talking about hair texture in a general sense first

let’s take a look at this example of straight hair vs curly hair ( 1 type straight hair vs 3 type curly hair )

If you take a moment to compare the two you’ll notice straight hair is flat, it has no texture. Straight hair perfectly hangs down similar to liquid-like silk. It’s lack of curl pattern is the reason as to why it hangs perfectly flat.

curly hair on the other hand doesn’t lie down flat and silky like straight hair, It’s more thick. Curly hair in it’s raw and unstyled state has a trapezoid like shape this is because the sides of the hair spread more outward.

So why is this? Why is straight hair flat and curly hair thick?

the answer to that question is a thing called piling up. When it comes to hair texture, the shape of the hair strands aren’t the only thing that matters, its how the strands coexist with each other, Curly hair strands coexist by piling up on top each other.

moisture also effects hair texture too, different hair types absorbs moisture differently, thus the thickness of each hair type is different. 

…..soooo, how does this all relate to how to draw 4c hair?? 

Well let’s take a look at the drawing below. Notice how the arrows go outward more as the hair texture gets curlier. As we’ve already discussed, this is because hair piles up, The curlier the hair texture, the more it piles up on each other, the bigger it gets, the more outward the arrows go.

Out of any hair texture, 4C hair has the most curls. Because of this, the hair piles up on each other so much that it doesn’t lie down flat like straight hair, nor does it make a trapezoid like shape like curly hair, it instead becomes more cloud like.❤️

This is what you need to take into account when it comes to drawing 4C hair.

Think of it as piling up a bunch of cotton balls on each other. The most cotton on top of top to lead to a bigger patch of  cotton. this is 4c hair.

How to not draw 4c hair:

Garnet fanart. Let’s talk about Garnet Fanart. I notice a trend that when artists draw Garnet from Steven universe, her hair texture is usually changed to 3 type curly like texture. This subtle form of White washing has confused me because this is inaccurate. 

Garnet’s hair is in the shape of a cube. Though 3 type hair piles up on each other, it isn’t curly nor thick enough for their hair to stay in the shape of a cube. Curly hair lies down more than 4c hair. So garnet’s hair being in the shape of a cube is a dead giveaway that it is 4C. Why do you think hairstyles like flat tops are usually seen on black men with 4c hair? It’s because, the 4c hair texture is thick and strong enough to stay in whatever shape you put it in.

please, if you’re drawing a character with 4c hair, avoid drawing it like curly 3 type hair, this is very anti-black and texturist.

So, how do you draw 4c hair?

honestly, its the most easy thing in the world

i wanna clarify that blobby looking 4c drawings ( like the one on the top left ) can work depending on how cartoony your art style is.

Another thing that I want to greatly clarify when it comes to drawing 4C hair is, YOU. DONT. NEED. TO. DRAW. EVERY. HAIR. STRAND!…..like, seriously. I’ve gotten many messages about how 4C hair is hard to draw, and it’s always left me confused; but then I find out that the same people that have trouble drawing 4C hair, attempt to draw every single strand of hair. This is unnecessarily time consuming because it’s merely impossible to get every single detail down, especially when you have a simple cartoon style. 4C hair does not require much effort, all you’re doing is drawing lumps. It’s that simple, nothing more nor nothing less.

The reason why I greatly advise all of you to avoid drawing every single hair strand is because in real life, when you look at a 4C textured Afro, your eyes don’t pick up on each individual hair strand like straight or curly hair. 4C hair, appears to be more undefined and cloud like, so attempting to draw each and every individual strand is unnecessary and will most likely end up looking inaccurate.

Anyways! that’s it for now! there will be a part 2 to this tutorial that will come out next week! i hope you guys have learned from this and apply it to your black character in your art!~

[paintedwingold]

ayo i found 2 pages with head angles of humans and animals, could be useful to anyone reading this

hoomans

animals

[paintedwingold]

My collection of clothing references for writing. 

[paintedwingold]

Here’s a collection of tips I’ve learned and use for coloring darker skin tones. I hope this helps people out who want to diversify their art!

Note; I’m not an expert, and I’m mostly drawing from experiences and my cultural background.

[paintedwingold]

The Cute Outfit Meme - Send me an outfit and a character!

[paintedwingold]

I read every tag and I love you all mwah

[paintedwingold]

oh??? it moves???

[paintedwingold]

i learned things today on twitter dot com

[paintedwingold]

a couple of magical girls for funzies uwu