#I've gotten to the point of having layers and a select tool that actually works so I can make sure the ''sphere'' part is shaped right

[amplexadversary]

Fuck spheres

Drawing a goddamn Poke ball should not be this difficult.

[silverskye13]

Hey, do you have any art tips that you use or anything? Any advice?

Uhhh that's kind of a broad question! My art advice is mostly situational.

A few very very broad suggestions for you:

Use references. Your brain can only hold so much, and most images we stick in our head are symbols. Aside from a select few very impressive people, no one can photographically remember, say, a tree. You can remember a symbol of a tree [Brown and red and green, in a specific shape], but you're not going to remember off the top of your head how tall an ash tree is relative to its surroundings, how all the leaves look from a distance, etc. So, use references. This includes references for things like poses, or colors, or art styles. I've gotten in the habit of collecting things I think are aesthetically pleasing for exactly that reason.

Draw from observation or life, as practice. Kind of an extension of above, but even if you don't draw realistically, you can learn a lot about stylizing, say, a bottle, by staring at the bottle and drawing it. Same with landscapes and buildings and animals and people. Different lighting and their affects on color and things. Its a great way to learn what looks realistic, in terms of relativity -- figuring out where shadows fall, how cloth lays, that funny shape your arm makes when its pointing straight on. Another interesting twist on this is making copies of artworks you like. Pick up the prettiest watercolor you've ever seen, sit down and try to make it. You won't come close, but you'll learn a lot about what that artist thought was important. Draw This In Your Own Style memes are also good for this.

Use tracing and replication for what they're made for: building skills. They're very good tools for teaching yourself how to take things apart and put them back together again, which is how we as humans tend to learn best. You learn how to do math by learning 2+2, and then you figure out 22+22 is basically the same thing, but when you were 5 learning to count in preschool, they didn't start you out with the 22 bit, did they? Same goes for art. All those "How To Draw X" books start you out with "First a circle then some lines" for a reason. If you can break up the big bit into tiny bits, you can figure out how to build stuff from scratch. Tracing and copying art styles, coloring styles, and poses can go a long way to teaching you how to break up all those things into digestible shapes.

Draw often. There's some saying somewhere that you need to put a thousand hours into something to advance a level. So, 1000hrs to go from "I know nothing" to "Beginner." 1000hrs from Beginner into Novice. Etc. It's not a literal rule. I'm sure I've put a few thousand hours into art, but I wouldn't call myself an expert yet. But art is a muscle as much as it is a skill. You only learn how to draw a straight line by drawing 50 wiggly lines and then miraculously one of them is straight, and you feel how that line felt in your wrist and you try to make it feel that way again. You make a really nice texture by accident once and you try it again 100 times before you can consistently remember its by crosshatching there and erasing over there. A long time ago I used to swear by comics [the largest leap forward I ever made in art was when I sat down for a year and drew a comic when I was, like, 13. It had a couple hundred pages, and rapidly progressed from "I'm basically tracing deviantart wolves every pose because I can't see them in my head" to "I can pose these little guys on my own and they actually kind of look like who they're supposed to look every time!"

Uhm... smaller advice tidbits.

Play with as many mediums and art supplies you can get your hands on! Thats how you figure out what you like, and also you draw wildly differently with a brush than a pen. Its really fun to see those differences and integrate them into other things.

If you're working digitally, experiment with merging layers and drawing over them. If you're insecure about it, copy the whole thing into a new document and draw over top of it. It's really fun, lends to experimentation, and there's a lot of effects you just can't achieve by fiddling with your layers.

If you drop your pencils, you will break the lead on the inside. That's why sometimes you sharpen a pencil and it just keeps breaking until there's no pencil left. This happens especially often with colored pencils, because the lead is super soft. Protect your pencils with your life.

For every "pretty sketchbook" you keep around, keep beside it some shitty copy paper/lined paper book with a ballpoint pen. Its good for warm ups, and for getting over the anxiety of "but I don't wanna ruin my pretty sketchbook" :( anxieties

Keep a bottle of water in your art space. This is good for drinking, for spilling on things, and for reminding you you are human and have needs. I recommend one with a cap if you do watercolors, so its less likely you'll dip your rush in it.

Get in the habit of resting every hour. If you have tendonitis [like me] rest every half hour. Set a timer if you have to. This keeps your wrist from exploding, and it keeps you from randomly picking up objects three days from now and wondering why your hand just decided it didn't want to anymore.

Don't feel pressured to post everything you make online -- in fact, keep from that habit as long as you can. The little seratonin rush is very nice when people comment on your work, but if you rely on it to motivate you, you will stop working on things. I have pieces that live in a vacuum, that no one will probably ever see. Most of them art shit, some of them aren't. The fact that no one can see them and tell me they're pretty is good and healthy, actually.

Don't destroy your work. When you finish a long project, there will be a little demon in the back of your head that whispers "I have never hated anything so much as this. Burn it. Kill it. Punish it for existing. I hate it." Do not listen to that little demon. It has been starved of all your existential angst while you were Stuck In Creation, and it is hangry. Put your art away somewhere, wait a few days, a week, a few months even, if you have to. Eventually the little demon will get involved with something else, and you will look at your art and go "Oh, hey, that's not so bad actually" :)

If you wait a year and you still think its shit, objectively, it might be, but I still maintain its demon is probably just being stubborn.

[tacky-optic]

I saw the Lupin recolors you did (they’re amazing btw) and I’m curious how do you keep lineart so clean on your recolors? I’ve been doing some recolors recently but my technique is usually either trace the lines on top of whatever color I’m changing to which results in slightly-sloppy and inaccurate lines or I spend a million years doing masking. But yours look so clean it’s awesome! How do you do it?

Hello, anon- thank you for the kind words and for sending an ask in!!

The screenshots anon is referring to are in this post!

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you-- I wanted to make some example images to go along with this since this is a question I've gotten quite a few times. I'll try my best to answer as concisely I can!

I personally use Clip Studio Paint (which is what I'll be using to explain this), but I've also done this with Photoshop. I'm hoping this method is simple enough so that its usable for whatever program you (or whoever else sees this guide) uses.

We'll see how it goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some bits to start:

I know this is kind of a no-brainer, but a big thing that always helps is image quality. The better the image quality, the less obvious your changes will be-- so make sure the screenshot you're recoloring has good resolution. This method (in theory) should work for lower res stuff too, but it'll be harder to avoid messy lines no matter how careful you are when selecting. Here's the images I'll be using for this example:

Make sure to have a backup of the original screenshot you're editing!! Even though I didn't include this in these upcoming examples, have the original below the image you're editing so you can check your progress and make sure you didn't miss any changes you wanted to make in your edit.

We'll use this pt. 4 screenshot of Lupin as our first example!

Let's say we want to make his jacket red-- it's as easy as it sounds, but it'll still take a bit of time.

I use selection tools over masking-- primarily the polyline tool. Even after testing with masking and layer overlays, this is the best way I've found to keep line integrity and cleanliness.

When you select with the tool, you'll want to go along the edge of the actual color you want to change, not the linework.

It's going to be time-consuming (which is why I only outlined his sleeve lol) but from all the testing I've done, it's what gives the nicest results. Plus we don't even have to use any layers or masks-- we can just change the color of the screenshot directly!

To do that, we'll want to find the option to change hue, saturation, and luminosity.

From here we can tweak the colors in whatever way we want without any of that ugly crunchy outline stuff or having to fiddle with a dozen different layer settings.

This way of doing it is really good for changing the hue, saturation, and darkness to whatever we want it to be without sacrificing line quality.

Here's the final:

Even though I eyeballed the color for example's sake, the final change doesn't look half bad!

The only catch I've come across is when you need to make something a lighter color. You can bring the luminosity of an image down, but once you bring it up you start having some unavoidable issues.

We'll use one of my favorite Zenigata screenshots for our second example.

Let's say we wanna change his red pt. 4 trench coat to his green one from pt. 3 (again, only changing the sleeve for time's sake).

This is a tough change since there are a lot of lines and extra details on his coat that get caught and lightened in the change.

At this point we're going to have to do some line tracing.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this part either, but unfortunately it's another time-consuming necessity if we want an edit to look as unedited as possible. Every other method I've tried to keep the lines dark ends up really corrupting the linework already in the image.

I'm sure you've noticed the edge of the selection we made in this; even though I skipped this part for time's sake you're going to want to go over those outer lines, too.

I recommend using a simple default brush set to a size that is as close to the actual linework as you can get. If the brush you're using doesn't have tapering or line size pressure just make sure it's slightly smaller than the actual lines. Stabilization isn't exactly a requirement; I'd only suggest turning on line stabilization if you aren't very confident with your linework (practice makes perfect and all that).

When we're done, it'll be pretty obvious that we went over the lines-- there's another really simple fix I found that helps to make this a little less obvious.

Messing with the layer opacity and the blur filter helps to bring out the linework beneath what you've gone over and makes the lines look less obviously drawn in.

I'm sure you could also tweak the layer's settings until you find something that looks right, too-- it'll be the same sorta "experimenting until it looks right" deal as with changing the colors earlier.

I generally stick within the 2.5/3.5 range when blurring for decent res screenshots. In hindsight I probably went a little too low with the blur for this one, but you get the idea.

I think that it mimics the semi-blurry quality that lines tend to have in screenshots and helps to make it look less like it was drawn over.

Here's the final:

I'm sure if I bothered to do the entire trench coat it wouldn't look half bad, lol.

ANYWAYS that's a crash course on how I make lines not look like doodoo in my edits :3

Hopefully this is helpful!!

Thanks again for the ask, and if you have any more q's don't be afraid to send another ask in!🫡