#I made the lineart and was like ''If I try to colour this I /will/ mess it up'' so I let my art program take the brunt of that one hehe

[sillyfairygarden]

made a companion to my hades!pearl design... i think bigb would give the best boons ^_^

[astranauticus]

Director of the False Last Act

[sysig]

Can’t, too busy flirting ♥ (Patreon)

[jae-birde]

(Click image for better quality)

This shot from the latest update of @somerandomdudelmao's series was absolutely incredible, and I desperately needed to colour it after I saw it. I had a lot of fun with the colouring and details, and I also really wanted to get this before the next update.

[vampstel]

hi ⭐ anon again I FORGOT TO SAY IT IN THE LAST ASK BUT YOUR ARTSTYLE IMPROVEMENT IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE!!!!! + i really really love how you render and work with colours !! idk i love your art so much it's so warm

Eee thank you again ૮꒰ ྀི >⸝⸝⸝< ྀི꒱ა

I don’t even know how to respond anymore so I’ll just ramble lolol but like… Not to sound arrogant or anything but I also get really baffled by my own art style improvement. I sometimes come across art from last year and I’m like “woah… I can point out all the mistakes I did and fix them.” and that’s such a cool thing to experience??

I won’t lie, I cringe when I see my old art but it feels like a good reaction to me. Knowing I’m not actually stagnant with my work is neat and I’m really happy when people agree that I’ve improved,, After all, my biggest fear is art style regression so I appreciate messages like this so much 😭

[7squidgy7]

✧.*100 follower celebration type thing*.✧

So, to celebrate 100 followers on tumblr, I decided to draw some fanart for people. This community is so sweet. Every one of these artists has inspired me in some way.

I'm really sorry for those I haven't made art for. I may make a part 2 one day for those I missed. Who knows.

This was a really nice way to try out different art styles while mixing them with my own.

Apologies for all the link later on. Want to explain the creative process a bit for those interested cause I put way too much effort into it to not mention.

Close ups below cut:

@donutfloats

Your arts so cute and soft, I love it. You have a great way of just expressing love through your art.

I was inspired by 2 of your pieces for this, the main one being the 3rd image for this post. The lambs dress is so pretty, I just knew I wanted to draw it flowy and dancing, and the second image I used is this post for the rendering style.

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@aniimoni

I really like your artstyle. The monochrome colours are delightful, as with the way you do lineart. while making this, I was thinking this is the perfect style to meld with mine.

I was inspired a lot by the axe and hammer drawings in this post. As a hammer lover, I decided to combine the 2 together.

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@teruuu

Something about your style is mischevios. Your rendering and lineart are just wonderful as well. You have a very distinctive style that matches mine quite well, i think.

I feel compulsion of the flesh Lamb and Narinder would give each other kisses on the hand but take a bite at the same time. They freaky like that. Based my rendering around this post and the previous draw you character here, I did. These are fun designs to draw.

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@poopylumpkins

I really like your vampire au something about it really spoke to me as a afab non-binary.

Lamb deserves to wear their own clothes and something about narinder helping with their makeup convinces me he'll help out.

if you're curious, i colour picked the background and shading from this post

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@olrinarts

This was a really fun style to draw. Something about how you draw these 2 is delightful. Love yuri narinder's eyes in particular.

Rock god yuri. What more can I say these are really good designs. Showed them to my friend, and they loved them.

Decided to have them dueting, while Narinder can't sing lamb can always pick up that role.

Used this post for the background and shading colours, and this is a kinda basis for the pose.

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@redcrowncafe

Really love you fic and art. I like to see the fic brought to reality through all the comics and art, which has a very pleasing look to the eye.

I have never struggled so much with an art style, fun challenge, but very different to my own.

Wanted to draw their Halloween costumes from this post. Lambert would definitely get too into the vampire costume and bite Nari at some point probably.

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@joffyworld

Just wanna say thank you so much for the reblogs and kind words. It gives me a lot of confidence in my work and is a genuine brightness in my day.

I wasn't sure what to draw you, so I thought I'd just show you a pic of my new one who waits figurine, that arrived recently. Its a little weird, I think an earlier design but cool none the less.

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[loustica-lucia]

Heroes of the Dragon Age

An animation I've made for Dragon Age Day 2023, featuring my main Warden (Alyssa Cousland-Theirin), Hawke (Eleena Amell Hawke) and Inquisitor (Sulevin Lavellan)!

It's to this day one of my best artwork and I thought I should share it here too! 90+ hours between the original sketch, outfit design, the rough animation, rotoscope, inking, flat-colours, background shading and even the audio :')

Interested in the process? I detailed it below since it was my first time doing something like that:

I would like to start by saying I'm not a professional animator!Everything you've seen here is the result of experimentation and a lot of practice to learn and understand how 2D animation works.

My first idea started in May 2023. I just finished rewatching DA Absolution for the X time, and wanted to analyse why I loved the intro so much. (Even after countless rewatch, I never skipped it once.) I was inspired to study it with my main three protagonists!

Then came the first test with Alyssa Cousland-Theirin, my Hero of Ferelden! I tried to understand which part to separate for the animation. Mainly the hair and cape because it flows a lot more than the rest! If I recall, my first idea here was to make her counter flame attacks (?). Then, as the camera turns around her, I tried to add a grid to know how the camera would work around it.

I ended up making the clip longer, so she could position herself to the further left and leave space to the two other protagonists.

Now it was time to try to animate Sulevin Lavellan, my Inquisitor. I really kept that quick doodling style just to capture the vibe without putting too much time/effort into it! The background would be static to contrast with Alyssa's. I also loved the idea of a rogue sneaking!

Instead of working on Eleena Amell Hawke, my Champion of Kirkwall, I went back to Alyssa and started working with Clip Studio Paint 3D models (this entire animation has been done on the EX version of the software!) It helped for rotoscope animation and maintaining likeness! That's when I got the idea to make the background swirl around the character to let the eyes be guided by the rest of the screen!

After a couple more hours, I planned the entire animatic with 3D models and quick doodles! I finally found a cool pose for Eleena Hawke, which was honestly the hardest of the three to imagine for some reason? I tried many other poses but ended up picking an animation from the game!

This whole time, I was studying a bunch of background ideas and how studio Red Dog Culture House (who made Absolution) work! Thankfully, they have a YouTube Channel where they shared some BTS content so I could analyse it!

Then, I simplified my character and their original designs in the style of the studio! These outfits are how I imagine them after Trespasser. Alyssa as the Queen of Ferelden, looking for a cure to the Calling, Hawke following Fenris to Tevinter & Sully as a Red Jenny Inquisitor!

The idea for Sulevin's animation actually came from a piece I doodled on a live stream, when I was drawing pose studies and turning them into finished artworks haha As for Alyssa, I wanted to draw the fight that got her facial scars!

Once their designs were ready and the background ideas too, I made the rough version of the animation! Basically a sketch done on top of the 3D models to add the details, staying pretty rough just to capture the idea and movements.

Then it was time to start the lines! I decided make a folder per frame, so I could separate all he main elements and draw them one by one. It helps keeping the likeness of a character in the different frames without having big "jumps" between frames! In fact, every parts were coloured differently to recognize them, and then I used vector erasers and masks (Ah yes, the entire lineart is done in vectors of course! It's easier to adjust and save time when working on similar frames!)

At first of course, everything overlaps! But I find it easier to draw too much and erase after, just to make sure everything is coherent in each frames! The cool thing about CSP is how you can change the colour of the layers in one click! So all the coloured lines turned into black in one second, and I could reverse it just as quickly to double check!

Then I started working on Sulevin! I made a blue line to mark where her feet were, as the sketch in the background wasn't perfectly straight! (Like Sulevin's sexuality 🤭😂) The silhouettes were very quick to do, but I had fun adding more & more details as she came closer to the foreground!

I really wanted to add that little dagger trick, but I remember it required me to change the pacing of Eleena's apparition, as it was recovering her arm too quickly! I had to change the pace of multiple frames quite a lot during the project, to make sure the flow was right! For Eleena, most of her animation remained around her arms and the staff itself, as magic would be the most difficult part! That way each character has their own focus: Alyssa has a very animated background, Sulevin got the grappling hook and Eleena the ice!

Then it was time to start adding colours! Just like for the lineart, I separated every colour on it's own layer, so I could easily adjust the colours later if needed. I added one colour at the time, going through all the frames, and then another colour!

I made full palette tests with the colours I would use for their background at this point, checking if the details remained readable! Alyssa was the most challenging in terms of clothes, because I made her a very detailled armour! I had to simplify the Theirin heraldry, vectorize/redraw the Cousland, and make a brush for her cape's pattern!

Once I was done adding the flatcolours, I started the background, and oh boy it was a wild ride. For the cave, I painted multiple tests. I imagine was to use CSP panorama tools, which transform a texture into a 3D sphere, so each corners must match to look good. Sadly, it made the background very blurry, so after hours of testing, I changed ideas. Instead of the random fire balls (?) I originally imagined for Alyssa, I made three simple frames of a Rage Demon to attack her.

I ended up using the cave as a repeated pattern to make it turn 360° around the character. For Eleena, I mixed inspiration from the comics, Dreadwolf & Absolution, using warm colours matching Hawke's signature red. Just like I made the cave very grey/blue to match Grey Wardens. For Val Royeaux, it was more complex because I wanted to make it green, matching the Inquisitor's signature green. But bright green couldn't work, and the original colour during day time was blue/white/gold. So I added more leaves, played around the design a bit! After adding the rage demon, I made the shading! It was surprisingly easy and quick to do now!

I clipped a white layer on the flatcolours to not be distracted by the colours, and made thin lines to separate the light/shadows, then simply filled everything with the bucket tool! Then you set the layer to multiply and remove the white layer, and you have celshading shadows! Now the character looks out of the picture, so I added layers of blue in color burn, saturation and substract blending modes to make her look like she's in the right setting! Of course, I did the same with the other two, giving Hawke a red overlay and Sulevin green shadows!

Then I added the details, it went from white irises, to sword/staff smears to earrings and smaller finition that goes on top of these layers. To add the lights, I simply selected the shadows and reversed the selection! Using warm and cold tones to create contrast with the purple/bluish shadows! I also added more ambient light layers for Alyssa to reflect the Rage Demon fire. Now it was time to add ice magic! My first attempt had too many frames, making it look weird! Sometimes it's better to lower the frame rate to make things less bumpy!

Then I downloaded some cool ice brushes on CSP assets that made it look less like blue magical flames! But when I covered the screen in ice, I realized "Oh wait, I could make a cool transition from the ice, to blue lyrium turning red?"Red Lyrium truly links these three games and The Veilguard somehow! I spent the next hour painting over the idol and putting it in a black background, with lyrium and then the golden Dragon Age title text.

For the SFX, I used free youtube libraries sounds & "Darkspawn!" comes from the violent human female voice set (iconic for ""Can I get you a ladder? So you can get off my back!"😂🤭) After editing all that, the animation was finally done!

Here's the final math:

About 15 hours for the sketching/rough/animatic phase, 30h for the lineart, 25h for colours, 10h for backgrounds, 5h for details & 5h for music & SFX, for a total of 90 hours. Aka the same amount of time it took me to finish Baldur's Gate 3 the first time lol

If you have any question regarding the animation or the softwares etc. do not hesitate to ask, I'll do my best to answer!

[datcravat]

HI HELLO I love your art So much,,, do you have any tutorials on how you render your stuff? For example, the colors you use & how you pick them, how you get that pink tone around the Lineart (I think) (it's just rly cool). I would love to see stuff like that, cuz your art is Such visual candy (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)

Hey! Thank you so much, I'm glad you like my art, I worked hard to make it what it is!! Means a lot you appreciate it!!!!!!

I've had no professional art training, I seriously don't know what I'm doing and struggle making tutorials. But will try here!!

For me the colour work is really situational on the drawing! I find myself experimentally attempting to weaponize colour theory and there's a lot of instinct involved that I can't figure out how to verbalise yet. Here's an example of some thought process I have:

My main advice is to play with sliders a lot and really experiment (that's what I do for every drawing)!

To get the pink glow around your lineart, copy your lineart layer, fill the copy in with a pink of your choice (sometimes I do a gradient), blur the layer (experiment with how much blur you'd like), put it directly below the lineart layer, and set the layer to multiply (or any mode you think looks pretty)!

You may want to adjust your piece's brightness/colours after applying it and sharpen the image after exporting.

A lot of colour gradients are involved and on their own they can eventually compromise the gritty/punchy style, especially the ones that are between extreme and subtle. A good way to combat this is with screentones/haftones!! You can use them to diversify colours and imply shading/texture.

I recommend going nuts and having a lot of fun with it to find what works for you!

I often add a lot of small lens flares as they satisfyingly cut through the piece, imply flash photography (which goes well with the strong black shading), add visual noise to areas you don't want to be your main point of focus, are a great way to show speculars, and idk man sparkles are just pretty haha.

Go nuts with them and have fun!! When you get them to look good, think to yourself why that is.

I made a tutorial ~1 year ago on how I shade with black. This simple trick will really help it look good, 3D and rendered - it just requires a lot of knowledge about shadows to start with. I have a lot of experience rendering "normally" which helped me learn how to use black in an experimental way.

Minor correction that the shadows labelled "ambient occlusion" in the tutorial are actually just normal shadows, ambient occlusion is total lack of light.

I hope this is useful to you!! You have a knack for art, your work is very inspired. Please keep drawing!! I am still learning too, let's keep going baby.

-Cravat x

[phoebepheebsphibs]

Rise August: Couch Potato

Alt version with my own style-ish design changes for the characters

I've seen a few artists do their own iterations of TMNT so I guess this would be mine? My iteration based off the Rise designs? I suppose?? Idk I do too much stuff anyway so let's move on — but I did draw this version first and then got too in my head about whether or not people would like it so I uh redrew it because I'm a coward so here's the secret version:

I made Splinter have a more similar colour scheme to the 2012 Splinter, a brown rat with some pale marks and stubble on his face and tail.

The boys have slightly altered green tones — slightly darker shades than usual. They all also have facial marks, and I gave Raph his own birthmarks!! Their shell designs and stuff have simplified, no outlines, just solid colour (same with Leo's banana marks).

Raph is probably the biggest change — he has birthmarks, extra spiky scales, and tons of red in his skin!

I put in my own art style bits for this as well: I try to draw Rise as close to the actual style as I can, but for this I wanted to go for more of my style traits. The knees have swirls and the limbs are a bit more loose. There's some more detail and strands in the hair for Splinter. Raph's toes are claw-like. The boys' hands are rounded out, a lil' pudgy. I prefer drawing rounder edges, so I included a lot of those. I also (on occasion) do this style thing with my lineart where I add some shades and tones to it so it has multicolour... things? I dunno what to call it, but it looks dope as heck. Only issue with the art choice is it takes a while to draw so I don't do it a lot, only for special art pieces (like this one)!

@sariphantom

[polarolds]

From @thedreadslayer's fic Unbroken, Chapter 37.

Sometimes I like to make comics, as a treat. See below the cut for a snippet of my progress. :)

Clothing refs for Ch 37, Ellie's hand-cropped shorts and red flannel were given, but Abby's clothes were not as clear so I took some artistic liberties. :')

+ lighting test - was aiming for early morning/dawn colours. Purple hues are some of my favourites to work with.

The section of the fic I was adapting, written by the brilliant @thedreadslayer:

“What … the hell am I doing?” Her legs go numb and unsteady. She plants herself down on a boulder. “Oh, god. I could’ve … oh, my god.” “But you didn’t,” says Abby, kneeling beside her. She gently rotates Ellie’s arm and indicates her masked bite. “Because of this. Because you believe in what we’re doing here.” Abby takes Ellie’s hand, clamps it around her Firefly dog tag, and just … holds it there. It’s terribly intimate. And terrible. “You did a good thing.” Ellie glares at Abby and imagines ripping her pretty face right off.  Because the Fireflies, the cure, humanity - her supposed “greater purpose” - had little to do with her decision to stay. 

I've made comics from prose a few times before in the past, but I can't say that I've developed any specific process for it lmao 🥲 i just try to make thumbnails and see what vibes well

from sketch (damn they messy)-> lineart -> to final

it isn't shown here, but I've learned to start blocking out the colours before I line and found it's been a great help figuring out the tone and layout :')

and that's p much it!

[mr-tsuyo]

i love the style of that 3d render of your character! may i ask how you animated the outline and made the whole thing pixel-y? :0

Very glad you asked!

There isn't many tutorials on how to make this kind of stuff so I am totally glad to be the first one.

BLENDER 2.5D TUTORIAL

First of all

Get your model ready and steady, that part is what I ain't explaing, however if you want it to have these colors, you will have to put this nodes in your texture shader

`[ This is for her red jacket, the lower nodes is for her primary colour and the upper nodes are for her shadows, which also has some extra nodes to give it a comic texture. ]

Quick reminder to give the model some lineart yourself to the parts that don't form its sihlouette, for example her shoes.

Now for the lineart, first of all make sure you have created a black Emissive material and that it has Backface Culling activated

After that go to the Modifier Properties and add a Solidify modifier

Make sure to Flip the Normals, set the Material Offset to where the Lineart material is, and adjust a little bit the Thickness of the mesh, then you will get some natural good-looking lineart like hers.

Now, you could easily be satisfied like this, but now we are going to make it feel like each frame is a new drawing by making her model lineart jiggly

First of all create a Displacement Modifier and give it a cloud texture

Make sure to lower the strenght and midlevel, otherwise it will look like this

Now, create an Empty Plain Axes and go to the Displace modifier, change the coordinates from Local to Object and focus the object on the Empty

And thanks to this adjustments, if you move the empty around, it will create a slight jiggle

Now what we want is for this empty to automatically move around without you having to do anything

Create a new screen and go to the Graph Editor section

In here we will be making the empty move with a modifier

Select the empty and press "I" of Italy and select Location, this will create a keyframe for the empty that we will be able to manipulate

Go to the Editor and ONLY SELECT THE Z POSITION, and then go to the Modifiers tab and add a Noise modifier

Make sure to adjust the Scale and the Strength so that it looks more proper for the jiggle effect, make it look like a rollercoaster!

And now, if you did everything right, your empty will be moving up and down and all around by its own

WHICH also means, the model displacement will follow the path of the empty to create that jiggly effect we crave so so much

However...

The model is indeed jiggling, but it's doing it the wrong way, we are trying to make it look like a cartoon not a gosh darnit gelatin

So to make it jiggle the right way we are going to make its noise feel more STEPPED

Go back to the modifiers of the Graph Editor and add a Stepped Interpolation, and make sure it has a Step Size of 5

And now we finally get the choppy jiggle effect!!

Now you can play around the Displace and the Noise to make it more or less jiggly

But nonetheless, if you followed the tutorial right, you will be gifted with the perfect looking 2.5D effect!!!

Now you can go ahead and try to fool everyone into thinking a 3D animation is 2D

And before we wrap up, one more extra for the one who asked how this is made,

We are going to make the render feel pixel-y!

Go to Render Properties, make sure you are using Eevee, and in Sampling put the Render on 1 and the Viewport on 0

Then go to Output Properties and you can do two things:

1) Change the X n Y to a size lower than 1000 px

2) Change the Resolution % to these numbers (8, 16, 32, 64) This way if you wanna do pixel art you are more accurate

For this render I used the 1st option

And last but not least, in the Output Properties make sure you save your files in the right way with these settings

THen render animation, make an image sequence with all the pngs, and TA-DAH

You get a pixel-y 2.5D animation!!!

Thank you so much for checking, I hope this is useful for anyone who wants to do this stuff, if anyone has any questions don't be afraid to ask, I may have explained some stuff badly.

Anyways have a very jolly day

Tsuyo OUT

[sanctus-ingenium]

Just wanted to ask, please forgive me if you've already answred this, what program do you use? Your art fucks HARD and like. I was looking at your art of the two moths over the city they die in and I was hit with the wave of "oh that looks really fucking fun actually." Like i know my art program can't do some of those effects and like, I'd love to try fucking about with them.

hi there, thank you! all my art is done in procreate and paint tool sai

because you mentioned that drawing in particular i thought it would be fun to break it down and show ppl what exactly went into each part of it so check this out

sketch & lineart - the brushes come from georgbrush.club and the urban sketcher is my most commonly used lineart brush, it has a nice irregular shape. the square brush is nice for big blocky sketches.

the cityscape was REALLY hard but basically I got a photo of the skyline of florence, traced some basic building shapes, then bullshitted the rest using the vertical symmetry/mirror tool to cut down on the amount of work (so i only had to sketch one half of the city). then for lineart I turned off vertical symmetry, turned on the two-point perspective tool, and got this:

the rose windows were made using the radial symmetry tool.

I didn't like it being so flat, so I used the liquify tool to make a kind of fish-eye effect (limited success tbh). I liked how it looked but the buildings in front needed something to cover them up to make the liquification less obvious...

first pass colours. I felt they were very washed out, aside from the sun which i loved. I use the spectra brush (default procreate) for skyscapes a lot, I love the texture. Although the clouds were filled in using the lasso selection tool, I softened the edges using the square pencil again and added texture using true grit sampler grainy brushes. The translucency effect comes from my setting the brush as an eraser. The sun rays come from the radial symmetry tool.

Blocking in the moths' colours was done with the urban sketcher again.

Something people may not have noticed is the labyrinth hidden in the sky! yeah I had a bunch of versions where it was more obvious but I found that it clashed a bit and was too busy, so I made it subtle. But yes. I searched for "royalty free labyrinth" and picked one.

The toner grit brush is one you've seen before if you've looked at any art on tumblr lately (this is such a popular brush) and it's from the true grit fast grit set. The pointillism brush is from the true grit free sampler pack, like my grain brushes.

I added shadows to the moths, increased saturation overall, and changed the clouds to a translucent blue (you can even see in the sun where I forgot to block in the sun itself because the clouds over it used to be opaque lol). Moon rays were drawn using the radial symmetry tool but this time with rotational symmetry off. I also moved the moon down closer to the moths because I felt that it was a bit far away, and this served to visually divide the drawing into three equal parts, so I chose to lean into that and divide the sky colours too, to show passing time, or an endless moment - morning, evening, night, etc.

And then the oroborous, I tried a few different effects on it because I wanted it to be very clearly separate from the main scene - I settled on a dot matrix newsprint texture, using procreate's onboard tool, and some heavy chromatic aberration. This is because the oroborous isn't real, it's purely symbolic and the moths' demise started when they became photographers so I liked the print media aspect there as well. The story itself is about grief without closure, cyclical violence, and sunk cost fallacy, while everyone explores an endless labyrinth, so an oroborous fits I think

what makes art fun to me is thinking up ways I can tell a story using just a single image. and sure a lot of it will be lost to an audience who isn't familiar with the characters or backstory but i want to leave enough in there that even complete strangers to my work will be able to construct a narrative about what's happening here, rather than it just being a cool image. that's my goal.

Finally I exported it to sai on my pc to give it a once-over. this is really important because the retina display on an ipad is oversaturated on purpose, to make everything look amazing and vibrant. but what this means is that on other screens, your work might look washed out. it's especially bad at displaying yellows! so i look at it in sai on my pc and i make minor adjustments, in this case I actually added another multiply layer on the moths and an overlay on their non-shadowed parts to increase the contrast there.

finally if you've read this far, I played a little trick with the caption of the drawing. yeah, THEY die... but only one of those moths is a theythem pronoun haver... the other has to survive. he isn't given a choice in the matter.

[astranauticus]

oh lol i forgot to post this robit sketches! because i have one (1) bit and im sure as hell gonna commit to it apparently

[seiishindraws]

Hey seiishin, I'm a beginner artist and i was hoping you could give a full tutorial on how you color?

hello! this is a bit of a hard question to answer since i dont think giving a tutorial of how i colour without learning any foundational colour concepts first would be very beneficial, so i'll try to give you some basic tips on picking colours instead since this is a very VERY expansive topic and im simply not the kind of person that can pass on that knowledge very well especially since im not the best at it lol

when im picking colours for my drawings, i try my best to "unify" the colour pallet so that it seems more cohesive, this tip from ggdg sums it up pretty well i think

other than that, i usually try to pick colours that generally look good together based on different colour harmony concepts, like these!

i'll try and show you an example with something i'm working on right now. you'll notice i didn't colour pick tinkaton's colours from its art and went for a warmer pink and saturated the blues of the hammer a little.

you'll also notice the canvases i draw on are NEVER pure white. this isnt to say pure white is something that can never be used but white is a colour that usually influenced by surrounding colours, so pure white in most pallets just wont look right. so its not usually a colour i would use as a backdrop if youre trying to pick good colours for your art. but again, there's always exceptions and this isnt a hard rule. here's pure white compared to the colour my canvases usually start with

another thing i should touch on briefly is colour relativity and the importance of value and saturation.

value is SUPER SUPER important for making sure all the colours in your art stand out from each other and read clearly. as you can see here, most of the values here stand apart from each other, and i can see that i probably need to adjust the darkness of the light blue in comparison to the pink hair tips, though the lineart separates them well enough already i think. this is also a good way tocheck you havent made any dark skinned characters too light. values are important guys!

hot tip: put a layer of pure black on top of your art and set that layer to "colour" and BOOM! you can see the values of your art in grayscale.

and i'll also briefly touch on colour relativity. because we percieve colours relative to each other, we usually read a colour as something its not when its surrounded by certain other colours. let's take a look at my background drawings in the cover i did for the shuichi saihara zine:

though i only used a bunch of different purples, when all of them are perceived in relation to each other, a warmer purple can look like blonde hair amongst all the other purples!

as for the brushes i use while colouring, i like textured brushes! i bought these so i cant share them for free but im sure there are many free alternatives out there

anyway, sorry if this isnt exactly what you wanted, but there are TONS of people out there that have worded this better than i ever could, i would suggest looking up some youtube vids on colour theory, but i hope these little tips are useful enough!

[chriskotiesen]

How do you think of your wonderful beasts?

Usually I start with really vague ideas for shapes or colour schemes and just make the creatures up as I go along. Most of the time I'm aiming to make something that has personality but isn't too easy to compare to any existing animal. If it's too boring then I'll weird it up a bit by rearranging parts or throwing on extra shapes. If it's too abstract then I'll swap in some more realistic animal features.

I saved some in-progress pics of yesterday's creature to step through the process:

I started by giving myself the very open-ended task of drawing a creature with a mouth in an unusual place. When sketching digitally I often like to forgo lineart and just play with blocks of colour.

Why is it crescent shaped? Why is it orange? I dunno. But I think that I can turn this into a body with the mouth at the centre of the mass. There are certainly weirder and more interesting places to put a mouth then in the belly, but I don't really know how this sketch is going to go from here. Maybe I'll put more mouths on the feet or something. Finding out is part of the fun.

Let's start simple. I figure that it should have arms to pick up food, as well as eyes and a nose to clearly define a 'head' somewhere away from the mouth. Okay now it looks like a creature, but not one that I particularly like. Also there's nothing between the nose and the mouth so it looks less like it has a mouth in its stomach and more like it just has a really big, weirdly-shaped head. I can fix that if I move the arms above the mouth. And I'll give it a tail and another bend in the torso to balance it out and make it less front-heavy.

Now we're getting somewhere. I'm starting to like this for reasons entirely unrelated to the mouth, so I'll just remove it completely. It's getting in the way of the rest of the anatomy. There's no client or art director dictating what I need to make here. The initial premise is just a jumping-off point and I can ditch it entirely if the design works better without it. I like this bug-eyed, cobra-hooded aardvark-centaur-dragon-thing. That seems like enough of a creature without throwing on extra features.

I try to keep my palette organized and only add more colours when they feel necessary. The countershading here helps to define the creature's shape a bit better and break up all of that orange, as well as just making it a little more realistic. I made the tail bigger just because I like what that does for the 2d composition of the picture.

Cleaning up the shadows also helps to make the volume read a bit better. The stripes help too, but I mostly added them to break up the orange some more and make the creature more interesting. I also started laying in some blobs of colour for a background. Now that all of the basics are in place it's just a matter of adjusting colours and polishing out details until I'm either happy with it or just sick of looking at it!

Done!

[kozachenko]

(Click the image for better quality)

Yipeeee that Keiki and Mayumi fanart I posted the WIP of is finally done woooo- This piece was a very experimental one that I'm kind of OK on. Maybe because I've just gone insane looking at it for so long and I'm my own worst critic lol.

Artist's Notes;

So I've once again been playing around with my rendering style, mainly because I have been wanting to improve my lighting for a while now and as I was just scrolling through Tumblr, I saw some of the official art for that one webcomic-turned-animated-TV-Show Lackadaisy and was immediately inspired. I also have seen a technique a few times in the past where the lineart and shading are merged together, so I've been meaning to try that for a little while.

I did some experimentation on this one sketch of Keiki I posted in my sketch dump and I really liked the results of it, so I carried those over to this piece.

I ended up scaling up Keiki and Mayumi from the original WIP because I felt like they were both getting lost in the composition, and I'm glad for that because I think it works a lot better. I'm not a fan of how Mayumi's sword turned out at all, but it's not really meant to be the focus of the piece so eh. Overall, I think I could do better with my colours, probably because with Keiki and Mayumi's colours, I did them flat in greyscale and then used a brush on the overlay blend mode to colour all of them over, after which I changed the base layer for their colours from white to yellow and then lowered the opacity so it all went together better. I also decided to use gradient maps for a lot of the background elements, mainly to experiment with getting in my values first to make them pop out more. I ended up finding a really nice sky gradient on Clip Studio Paint that I really liked, and that kinda helped to establish the colour scheme of the background a lot. I think the whole "start in greyscale then colour" thing really works better with painterly styles rather than more illustrative ones, and while it is good at making sure your values are more readable, I honestly don't think I have the skill level to pull that off yet. Honestly, I think I've been looking at this drawing too long or maybe I added too much to it, but I wish I could've made the colours less monochromatic, but I'll just save that for the next piece I do.

I do love how the flame (...well it's more of a weird space rift than anything in this piece) and the lighting turned out, those were fun to do. I was initially struggling with the flame and how Mayumi is positioned in front of it before realizing "Oh wait! This is a weird abstraction of a weird creature! I don't have to follow the laws of anatomy!" and just dislocated it's flamey bottom jaw from the main body. I also changed the colours of it since I was really not liking how incredibly bright it was when it had lighter colours. Again, the gradient maps served the more painterly style of the flames well.

I also love how Mayumi turned out. I could do her sleeves better but that's more of just me needing to study how those types of sleeves fold in that position more. I'm also very happy with the posing, the technique I used for that was taking photos of myself in the positions I wanted, blocking in the silhouette and then modifying that by adjusting it to my lines of action that I drew on top of the original photos, and then sketching over the silhouettes and drawing in the shapes of the hands overtop of the photo if I needed to get the fine details right. As for what I do to take the pictures myself, I use a tall chair I have, prop up my phone with a phone stand, put on a ten second timer and scramble to get in position. Yes, I did have to use a bunch of thin markers I had to try and get the hand positioning on Keiki's pose right, yes I do have a fake sword that I used to get the positioning of Mayumi's arms and hand right, the sword was for an old Halloween costume from several years ago. I really like how both Keiki and Mayumi turned out in this drawing, I'll have to play around with these designs for them more in future drawings.

Also, if you wanna know why I draw buildings like that, when I watched Fantasia 2000 as a kid (One of the Disney movies where they make really beautiful animations to classical music) the way they drew the buildings in the first few sections Rhapsody in Blue segment (the jazz one with the cities) changed my brain chemistry and now whenever I need to draw buildings really quickly, I refer back to that. Since the buildings aren't really the main subject, I didn't put much thought into them.

As you can tell I am very tired of this piece, mainly because I made things harder for myself by overcomplicating the process compared to what I usually do, mainly with the whole "starting in grayscale then adding colour." I'd honestly just prefer having a black layer set to colour that I can just toggle on and off when I need to see the values, but it was good to experiment. And that was mainly the point of this whole drawing, to experiment. I'm definitely going to have to play around with this new style I'm going for, mainly because I liked how it turned out a lot in the augmented Keiki sketch, and also because I want to find ways of making it suit my style more. I also really want to keep experimenting with my lighting like this, it's very fun. Last but not least I am never starting in greyscale again because dear god I do not like the workflow it forced me into. I don't have a problem with the method itself it's mainly just a skill issue lol.

If you wanna read my headcanons for these two, I put them in my WIP post, so you can read them there if you want to. The more I look at this the more I prefer the simplicity of my WIP. I might go back to this and just take away the fancy colours and effects to see what it looks like without all of that stuff and reblog this post with that drawing, but for now, I don't think I can look at this drawing again for a while.