#Mostly because it's not really my usual style (for example this one has no lineart) but also because it's about 70% background

[demaparbat-hp]

The Painted Lady stared at Zuko, eyes wild in deep focus, and sank into her knees next to him. Her pale, scarred hand reached out to meet him, but stopped short before making contact. Her voice was soothing and gentle as she asked, “Is that what you truly believe?”

Sometimes, it feels as if Izumi knows Zuko better than anyone else.

For our confidants and spirits (and those who are one and the same) is For the Spirits Chapter VI: Dream of You.

[your-unfriendlyghost]

How I draw: Proportions/sketching

The first response to a few art questions from @johnny-and-clyde :))

sketching:

So I honestly used to be a lot more…intentional about my sketching?? Up until a few months ago I would draw out actual sketches that I’d then cleanly ink on top of in a separate layer, like this:

I’d try to keep things loose and easy, but I’m not fantastic at that lol

I have a tendency to over complicate sketches- It’s not super obvious here, but I did semi-map out the anatomy under the clothes and fabric folds. That’s probably a good thing to do, generally, especially since I was and am still learning anatomy.

I don’t do it much anymore tho, because I often got caught up in little details that just wound up covered by clothes 😭 So I generally focus on mapping out the clothing shapes over the proportions/ anatomy. Definitely study anatomy anyway tho- this only works for me nowadays because I did and still do study anatomy a lot lol

These days though, I don’t r e a l l y sketch that much. I mean, I do- but instead of making another layer and inking it, I kinda just clean up the sketch the way I would if I were using pencil and paper. I don’t have a lotta example images of this, because it goes from the sketch to the final lineart in one layer?

tried to reverse-engineer it here on this Angela drawing. idk how helpful that is tho lol.

Idk, most important thing for me while sketching is remembering that everything has a 3D form, and also to FLIP MY CANVAS FREQUENTLY so that it stays balanced lol. -also- I almost always take note of the ribcage, the clavicle angle, and the hip angle when planning poses

-And I consciously try to keep things from getting stiff, and think of the pose as an intentional composition. I actually struggle most with plain standing/walking poses, because I very often can’t think of ways to make them look…idk, interesting? That’s why it’s taken me so long to finish pt.2 of my Outsiders character designs- I can’t find good dynamic-but-also-stagnant poses for them

proportion:

Honestly man idk I just sorta say “fuck it we ball” and hope for the best. I used to think a lot more about this one but as it’s become more and more natural to me I become less and less able to define/describe it?? I dunno lol.

My art style is semi-cartoony, and honestly kinda inconsistent in terms of proportions. I generally aim for the hands to be similar in size to the face, and for the shoulders/chest area to have enough space to fit the clavicle…but none of this is really a conscious decision? It just sorta happens. The heads/eyes of my characters are usually stylized, and so the hands end up a bit bigger to match the faces, and I tend to exaggerate muscle mass but not really muscle definition…And I also stylize things for characters to better contrast each other. For example, I’ve noticed I draw Steve Randle stockier/bulkier than he is to better highlight Soda’s slenderness.

(see how they’re not as drastically different in build as I draw them? Steve seems bulkier mostly cos he’s shorter but has a similar amount of mass I think) (don’t quote me on that tho idk how to put this shit into words lol)

I have a pretty decent idea of how proportions are supposed to work from years of studying them, and I have no idea how to explain any of it. Just…do a lot of figure and gesture drawing, use a lotta refs, and it’ll make sense eventually 😭

[technically-human]

Hi Aixa! I'm not sure if you've answer this, but what drawing program/s do you use, and what pens? I love how textured the lining pens you use are!

Hi there! Thank you! I will do my best to reply to this, but the answer might be a little disappointing

First of all, I use SAI. It is pretty basic and it lacks some functions that would be very useful to have... but it was the first drawing program I came across when I started making digital art, and I hate change, so I'm very attached to it.

As for the brushes, they came with the program! I mainly use two, A basic paper texture one, and a spray one. I often mess with the density and edge hardness depending on how I want a specific line to look, but not by a lot. That being said, I mostly pick at random because, although you wouldn't usually be able to tell from my comics, my style has a very messy lineart! For example:

Here I used a regular pen with no texture at all. But it still looks kinda textured because I like to go over the lines multiple times and do it messily. The reason I do it this way is... simply because it's fun. It's the way I found to have fun and still end up with a result I don't hate. Here are some examples with the regular paper texture brush

I personally don't think the result is that different! Sometimes I skip the lineart part and just color over the sketch, like in that second example.

Whatever program you're using, you probably have similar brushes, so it's just a matter of finding ones that allow you to play with the lineart. If you want it to look very textured, I would advice thick lines, and to really have fun with it! I used to try to make the lines very neat and perfect, and I admire anyone who can. I was miserable the whole time, lol.

I'm sorry this answer is a mess (like my lines) and I hope any of this is useful or at least interesting!

[pigswithwings]

since art has been brought up what is your process and brushes you use?

the gist of it is: i use my phone, my index finger, and the app IbisPaintX to draw! also my brushes are the Digital Pen and the Fade Watercolor (Opaque). my general process is making sketches and focusing on the energy of a piece, then sticking to that

long stuff and more detailed stuff under the cut... i put a bunch of images in there for reference

overall its not very fancy!! mostly i make art when i feel very inspired by something (which is to say, not super often). i usually start with a very rough sketch which helps me figure out how i want the art to feel. so for example this piece

was originally this sketch

basically the purpose of the super messy sketch is to outline ideas and stuff. i say "i think this would be cool, it looks cool in my head. this is what the finished product should emulate" and then i roll with that. also usually i have multiple sketches based on the same idea, but more often than not there will only be one sketch that i want to work with.

i tend to pick colours based on the feeling of the piece! so for me, the idea of plants gets the colour green, the "i have no mouth and i must scream" art gets a lot of red and orange. it's basically colour associations.

although very simple, my backgrounds tend to be developed around either the concept or the sketch. for the plant one above, i tried to use more flowing shapes in the background to emulate leaves, hills, and vines. for my first few "factory pomo" style pieces i wanted to get a sense of contrast, so i designed the background to be almost split into two colours/two parts, etc.

other examples

you're probably noticing how similar my sketches are to my final pieces. it's basically because i treat sketches like lineart. i pick a sketch and enlarge it so that it takes up most of the frame. then, i set it to a low opacity and draw on the layers underneath it. oftentimes i turn the layers on and off to get a sense of how the whole thing looks, and the finished product will not include the original sketch layer. but a work in progress for me usually looks something like this

it's a whole lot of going back and forth! zooming and out, erasing and redrawing and turning off layers and zooming out again. it can be messy sometimes but i stick to it and enjoy it a lot. i am not always faithful to the sketch, either; i usually add whatever i think looks cool. for the piece above i did Not originally intend to have glitching effects on my sona's body. but then i thought it would be cool to add some!! so i did :]

as for Brushes i work in IbisPaintX and i use this bad boy the Digital Pen (set to various thickness depending on whether i want very small and fine lines or just want to cover a Big Area). its basically just pixels so thats how i usually get very crisp lines!! also you can turn it all the way down to just 1 pixel if you want to be really precise. eraser tool and ruler tool are my best friends. also the Fade Watercolor (Opaque) that is right underneath the Digital Pen is what i use to sketch sometimes.

um hope this helps or satisfies your curiousity!! yeah. not a formal tutorial to my art or anything, this is just how i do it. which is in a silly way

[would-holden-caulfield-like-nge]

The Bully Artstyle

Am I the only one who really appreciates the official Bully artstyle?

Though, calling it one style is technically wrong, since the images are made out of one front image and the comic background, both of which are made by different artists.

If you are wondering, the guy who did the main illustrations is Anthony Macbain.

If you look around his website, you will not only see his Bully art, but also that he also did some work for the GTA series.

The person who did the background illustrations is Stephen Bliss, who... also did art for GTA, believe it or not. I guess Rockstar only has that many artists that focus on semi-realism.

Obviously, since GTA is like, the most famous thing ever, his website does not focus on Bully that much. But if you scroll all the way in the Rockstar Games portion of his website, you will find the art that was used for the backgrounds! And it seems like he designed the logo too!

Now that we know who did it, I'll try to to a bit of art analysis.

Similar to the GTA style, the style of Bully is somewhat realistic. Kind of stiff looking, to be honest. But the background illustrations kind of make up for that.

The lines are mostly the same unchanging width (except for some smaller lines for details). They do not taper much. The lines are also colored - their color is more dulled out than the colors they are containing.

The colors are also kind of dull in general (though this may only be because of my monitor.) Probably because the art is going for that realistic look. Of course, we could also look at it a bit more artistically and say that the colors are dull to fit the miserable atmosphere of Bullworth. You might also notice that there are no real whites - the shirts are either tinted yellow, or whatever color is around it. I think this is pretty neat. White fabric often tends to reflect the colors around it in real life.

The lineart is just a bit too chunky to convey true realism, so it is stylized in a cool kinda blocky way. The shadows are also quite blocky in general. They often tend to be interesting shapes by themselves. Look at those eyebags and the shadow under the mouth!

Besides the hard shadows, the art also uses some airbrush-like effects. Look at how it conveys the shininess of Pinky's belt and the softer shadow on her thigh. It is also used in Gary's hair to show the soft color transition.

The opposite of shadows, the hair highlights, are these cool zigzag shapes. I like it when artists make the hair highlight a bold shape like that. Speaking of the hair highlights, notice how they often have a similar color to the background. Like, look at this - these ones are actually a pretty bold purple, probably to mimic the way real hair can, just like fabric, reflect the color of its environment.

Now, let's look at the blush. A lot of the characters in these illustrations have this strong blush on their cheeks and nose. This is probably used to make them look a bit more alive. I wanted to say every character, but then I looked at the art again and found out that was just not true.

Look at these two, for example. Edna sort of has the blush, but it is single colored and blocky, making her look kinda sick, rather than more alive. The boy next to her also doesn't have the blush, probably because the brighter pink wouldn't work as well on darker skin.

Mr Burton here also does not have the blush, because... I don't know, to be honest. Random stylistic choice, I guess.

Overall, I cannot quite name why I like the style of the main illustrations so much. It's just not the kind of thing that would usually appeal to me. I guess it's something about the realism combined with the cartoon stylisation and the slight blockiness of it all.

I have much less to say about the background illustrations. Don't get me wrong, I love them. It's just that they are only black and white, so we really cannot dissect the stylistic choices here. But also...

God, I just love the style of these. Just look at them. The caricature-ish style done with some bold inks is so cool. These have so much character, shame we never got a real comic in this style. And since they are black and white, they are as contrasting as a picture can be. Which means they are perfect for the backgrounds. And since the style is so exaggerated, it looks good even when the pictures are pretty small.

I wonder, were these done digitally, or with real ink? Both are possible, I think.

And that's about it for this post. If you have any other observations about these styles, I would love to read it. I just really like these illustrations!

[mono-rogue]

Throwup Thoughts: "More Than Anything" Poster

(If you want to see the time lapse, click here for the original post!)

So you know how my usual art has a sketchy (and sometimes fuzzy) feel to them?

I decided to return to full on line art for the More Than Anything poster, partially because of Sam Haft's tweet, and partially because of Sam Haft's tweet (looking for poster-style fanart of Hazbin songs)

I probably wouldn't be as miffed if I didn't slave away a straight 9 hours (For comparison, that Rosie/Charlie only took at most 3 hours!), and the fact that I did not like to do line art at all... But you know what? Creating and posting art that didn't rely too much on cleanliness and instead focusing just on rough sketches and colors unironically helped me here, and it's really hard to explain how. For example, I was originally going for this shot as is:

Then midway through the sketch phase, my intrusive thoughts intruded: Why not shift the perspective? It would both serve as camera practice and to not just be a screenshot redraw (though you could consider it to still be one, depending on what you think it means)

I did also consider fully drawing both Lucifer and Charlie so I could have their own standalone renders, but I really only ended up doing that for Charlie since Lucifer's missing his right arm (his right leg... it's a perspective thing), and even then the way I did the composition wouldn't have worked for Charlie...

Adding in all the effects was fun though, figuring out what color treatment worked best (mostly linear dodge)! It just ends up becoming one big piece of eye candy. A very orange piece of eye candy. If you get orange diabetes from this, I apologize.

Angular Sharpness

I think one of the main issues I had with line art before was figuring out how to make angles appear as sharp as they appear, especially when considering the style of Helluva/Hazbin. I looked up how to make sharp lineart, and ended up on this short guide!

(Original DeviantArt post here)

I'm mildly conflicted now because now I feel like combining sketching and composition was already fun enough, yet now line art is actually fun. We'll see where this goes I guess?

Colors Are Weird

I noticed also Krita was exporting pics out as dull as Alastor's time, so I looked into a solution and the solution arrived:

So now colors should work the way I want them to be. Nice!

Off Topic Topics

I've been going back and forth on my post schedules a fair bit, figuring out what works and what doesn't. A couple early morning posts feels the most fitting for my style, so I might roll with that going forward, at least for a while

Hopefully I'm going to start to embrace the multifandom part of this blog and start making more of whatever. UT/DR? Lackadaisy? Who knows

The state of the Vox Alastor comic... it's in hiatus as of now. It's honestly that since the show was releasing at such a quick schedule that my initial ideas for how the comic would play out kind of got jumbled around? I don't know honestly, so for now it's on hold for now.

However, I got struck with an idea for another one...

[dusksmote]

How do you ink and color? Any tips? I love your art! 💜🖤

oh shit i got this ask months ago and forgot to answer

inking: god i hate lineart so much. the trick is to not do it 😂 unfortunately, i still find myself spending hours on lineart all the time @_@ 

the biggest thing i’ve found is making your lines varied in thickness. it adds to the interest. i also try to make my outside line thicker than my inside ones to break up the figure from the background. don’t be afraid to skips some lines and imply them with shading instead. i will color over my lines at the end to make them not as strong, but i’ve learned to still keep some lines black for extra emphasis. 

^ here’s one of my older pieces that i’ve been considering redoing. it has very little line variation, ALL the lines are colored so there’s no solid black, and there’s very little hard contrast in shading values. overall, it looks flat and uninteresting and if i had the time i’d redraw this one.

this is a more recent example of lineart that i think works a lot better. the characters are really well defined with a strong outline, but the inside lines aren’t harsh and distracting. you can see i recolored the lineart in kyle’s hair to be a dark red, and in some places it blends with the shadows to imply areas with more highlights. stan’s pants don’t have and lines in them, just the outside shape and pockets. 

you can see in this wip what the lineart looks like before i do all the shading and fancy stuff. stan’s pants look totally flat and straight until i start shading.

a lot of the time though i won’t even do lineart, especially if it’s a big scenic piece. the more zoomed out less detail you can convey, and lineart takes up a lot of space. 

^ this piece is an example where i do both, lineart and no lineart. the mirror image of kyle isn’t the focus, and i honestly didn’t feel like going in and drawing exact lines because they’d probably look fucked up anyway. i typically don’t put hard lines in backgrounds because it would take FOREVER and just be distracting.

the one thing you do have to be careful of with lineless art is contrast. hard lines are good contrast that show you what you’re looking at, and without them your image can blend together. 

here’s part of a painting i did last august, when i was first experimenting with lineless styles (full image on my NSFW twitter). can you tell what’s going on here? i sure as fuck can’t. there’s no contrast, and it makes all the skin tones blend together in an unintelligible mush.

contrast has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as an artist, so i’ve been trying to improve over time. here’s a more recent lineless drawing:

this one works because it had high contrast. the highlights are really bright and the shadows are really deep. you can still make out the facial features too, but there’s no ‘lineart’ layer’. everything was painted on in the same layer.

-

-

coloring: oh my god i love coloring. it’s my favorite part of drawing and the reason why shit takes forever. a lot of the same stuff from before comes into play, like contrast. you can also portray some really interesting moods based on colors if you’re being stylistic, but also pay in mind to your environment.

i always color my background first. in fact, a lot of the time i’ll do the entire background before coloring a piece. the environment establishes your light levels and light source, and it’s typically easier for me to tweak colors on a figure than the ones in the background. in the above example with kenny, the background is a mostly solid black with a beam of light from the left. i picked kenny’s colors to fit in this environment. 

it’s also important to use references.  

you can see in this wip i’ve got a reference image for how light from a TV looks against figures and the way their shadows are cast across the wall. it also helped me figure out what colors to use in this situation.

a lot of coloring is just trial and error to see what works. i usually start with a flat base color and add value to it. if you put all your colors on different layers it’s really easy to change them quickly. 

here’s an example:

i got my base colors down and here i can see the skin tone is blending with the background, so i lightened it up for better contrast

i typically shade the skin first, then clothes. you can see here i did a dull skin tone with a bright colored shadow. this adds more contrast and interest. i always try to avoid doing dull shadows where you shift toward black. black shadows are really uninteresting and they can make your piece look muddy. i’ll typically shade with an orange, red, blue, or purple.

the final piece has a really bright highlight on it coming from behind. this just adds more visual interest and contrast. you can also see i’ve gone back into the pink shadows and added an even lighter, brighter peach value in places to show reflected light. this also gives the darker pink shadow an added outline effect, because it touches the base skin tone but looks lighter within. 

^ this one’s a good example of light and shadow (full image on my NSFW twitter lmao). there’s not a lot of color because it’s dark out, so everything had to be conveyed in values. there’s hard light across the stomach and then a shadow over the chest, but there’s still light being reflected up into stan’s face that lets us make him out. the rest is deep shadow and unimportant, so it’s all black.

that’s the other part, color and value determine where your eye is gonna look, so consider that when drawing. 

^ consider this piece i drew like a year ago. it has a lot of blues and reds, and originally i was going to make stan’s guitar blue. i don’t have the wips anymore, but it didn’t stand out and it didn’t look right with the image. after a lot of playing around i went with yellow because it’s bright, it breaks up the image, and it adds another color to the piece to balance it out.

the same thing happened when i was working on the cover image for What They Say About Us. 

you can see in this really early wip that i’d blocked in the colors and butters is totally naked. for one, i was like “damn that kid is WAY too naked in this image” and he also blended in with stan and cartman. additionally, there was a lot of warm colors on the left, a lack of color on the right, and an overall lack of blue.

first change i made was throwing a shirt on him and it made a huge improvement. the image looks much more balanced now and he’s not super distracting with his naked-ness.

other than that, coloring is just picking your base colors, blocking in shadows, adding highlight, and cleaning it up. if you wanna improve, look at photo references. look at other people’s art and examine how they use color and value. practice practice practice. have fun with it. the most fun i have coloring comes from figuring out interesting textures like the pharaoh headdress or kenny’s leather jacket. 

i find stock photos like this and study them to see how the light works

other than that, the rest is just playing around, seeing what works, and making things up as i go!

[onebizarrekai]

so I was just wondering how you do cell shading? I’m not very good at it myself but you’re good at explaining things so I figured I’d ask you how you do it :)

depends! I mean, it follows foundations of shading, of course, where you pick a light source and make sure all the shadows are in the right place… but besides that, I usually pick one dark-ish desaturated-ish color for the shadow, clip a layer on top of all my other bundled coloring layers (since I color with a base outline layer and all of the flat colors come in clipping mask layers above that), and then just start shading. once I’ve done that, I set the layer to multiply and change the opacity to whatever fits.

however, I mostly do this with lined art, or art that’s supposed to look like a scene (and thus has a single shadow color and single light color). lately when I work with lineless character art, I just eyeball the shadows and I’ve found it kind of gives it more of a stylized ping, especially since the style isn’t considered fully shaded. whenever I work with really bright colors and no lines, I find just using a mid-level shadow with a multiply layer makes it less interesting to look at. plus, if you’re using a one-color shadow, you kind of have to commit to implementing other effects like additional soft lighting layers to make it look more balanced.

anyway, yeah, cel shade with some dark color you grabbed and then mess around with some effects and the opacity. oh, and don’t forget to draw in the shadows with a hard-edged tool and not like, a tiny airbrush or something that disperses colors unevenly.

art examples? maybe? I threw this together very fast so ignore the incongruity of the shading. for cel-shading itself specifically, it should be, at its core, something like the thing below. it’s flat, so you can’t really see that it’s set to be a multiply layer, but it is. keep in mind where you think the light is coming from, and stick to it.

DON’T do this it means you’re 10 and you’re touching digital art in 2010 for the first time and you want to post it on your brand new deviantart account that your parents don’t know you made:

you’re really gonna want your lineart and your shadows to have the same feel to them, you know what I mean? I draw them with the same tool. when I draw the shading, I often draw the outline with the lineart tool and fill it in so it has the same feel. I use the bucket tool like… a lot. if it’s a small space, I just color it in manually with the lineart tool.

anyway, you probably made it this far, so soft shading? now that you have a hard shadow, you can freely add soft shading to give it that finished look.

so yeah, I made two new layers, took the shadow color, filled in the whole layer with it, and then airbrush erased it–this creates a denser soft shadow than airbrushing the color in rather than out. (don’t forget that I’m working with clipping masks on a base layer, so it aligned with the lineart automatically) meanwhile, I took the lighting color from the opposite end of the color wheel, made sure it was lighter and more saturated than the shadow, and then just threw it in with a regular airbrush, setting the layer to (add) glow and turning the opacity WAY down since it creates a very bright effect. doing all this makes it kinda look like he’s in an actual place with an actual light source. my partner literally just taught me how to do this at least somewhat properly just this year, so don’t look at me like I’m some ancient art guru.

anyway, shuichi, but with actual colors and that shiny hair thing I always do in my style now. what a beautiful boy. also, please note that I literally never do the flat colors after the shading. I just did that this time because I threw the flat colors in at the end to show the effect the lighting has–but not worrying about the flat colors can also be good for practice when it comes to shading itself.

I’m pretty sure this tutorial was completely incoherent but maybe some part of it was informative enough for you to make sense of it. if you were just asking how to know where to put the shadows, you really just have to think about what ‘objects’ in the drawing are casting what shadows and how, and where the light is coming from. besides that, there’s not really any other way I can help besides saying practice a lot.

[monsterfloofs]

Writing Commissions

Hullo my name is Floofs! I write silly fluffy things between monsters and hooman beans! For a sample of my writing style, please check out my Masterlist!

I can pair a reader with a creature that I already have written for, ones that I create especially for a story, or an oc of yours! And it would be helpful to have a short explaination of the personalities and quirks of the characters in question! If I am making a creature, please tell me the idea for the type of monster you have in mind! I would also appreciate what kind of baseline personality you would want! Flirtaceous, shy, grumpy— ect! And then from there I can work off of those descriptions! For ocs, I would really appreciate a short bio and description so I can write them properly! A written description is okay, and pictures, if you have any, would also be appreciated! =‘Dc Please DM me the details!

Also! Feel free to give me ideas for a setting, or a bare bones idea in general! =‘) This is your story and I want to know what you would like to see in it! I will be more than happy to brain storm ideas with you too!

I am going to keep things short and simple! It can be a little difficult for me to write longer stories, so I am going to keep my maximum limit to 1500 words for now! If I write anything extra past these minimum word sets you will not have to pay anything extra!

500 words - $5

1000 words - $10

1500 words $15

Disclaimer: You have to be 18+ to have anything written by me-- especially if that writing has nsfw implecations!! I try to comb through all my new watchers and make sure they meet the age requirements on this blog, but please, please, please, respect this boundary! I will refuse to write for anyone who is not 18 or older! And if you are following this blog while you are underage- please come back when you are 18+!!

Things I can do!

Monsters and spooky critters, light angst, light nsfw, light kinks, comforting senarios, fluff! I will do all the cute fluff for you! ;u; ) I can also write for sadder situations but I think my best writing is usually goofy and silly stories with quirky characters!

That being said some of these things would be something that would need to be discussed via dm! Because everyone has different levels of what they see as what would be considered to be light?

There was a long time I was using writing for self therapy. One of the reasons why I keep my stories relatively happy and on the more silly/comfort side. So there are some things, (mainly types of conflict and confrontations) that I am highly sensative to and would not be able to write!

Things I would be uncomfortable with!

Fan fiction (mostly because I am not in the loop with many popular stories, dkddkdjd x-x ), hardcore violence, vore, hardcore anger (yelling/screaming), Misuse and abuse of another person, offensive dialog (transphobic, rascist, slandering, shaming) drug use, incest, no underage anything!

Extras:

As some of you already know, I also draw and do my own illustrations! I can add one of my drawings to your commission as well for the title image. This would be added onto the base price of the story and these will be bust drawings!

Sketch: +$5

This can be drawn digitally or traditionally your choice

Sketch and color: +$10

Lines can either be traditional or digitally produced, but coloring will be done digitally!

Clean lineart and color: +$15

Completely digital

Painting: +$30

Completely digital

Examples of my character busts are on my Ko-fi account here!

And if you were further interested in my art, I would be happy to speak with you in DMs about the other art commissions I can offer! =‘) There are also more art commissions listed on my Ko-fi page!

[celiabowens]

how do you make your anime edits?

Mm, going to try to reply as clearly as possible lol!! edit: this turned out to be a long reply i’m sorry lol i tried to cover my process in general and this is what you got

I use Photoshop (CC17) and Illustrator (which is a more recent development, I’m still trying to figure out a lot about it). I use AI mainly for 3D shapes and typography, because the end up a lot less blurry than in photoshop (basically I just do the shapes and typography and then place the file in my canvas as an embedded file, which gives me a lot of freedom when it comes to resizing bits and pieces as I go).

Usually the first thing I do is pick a subject (character or infographic mainly, I’ve never edited a specific arc of a manga or an anime yet) and then find stuff. Mainly, this is what I use:

concept art. Concept art is your friend lol. It’s easy to find, it can be storyboards (especially for ghibli, they are a lot of fun to work with) or character sheets. Most of the character sheets can be found on anime wiki or with a quick search, since several studios release them. I used concept art for this totoro edit for example.

promotional art. Movie posters or official art released ahead of the season, stuff like that. A little harder to find in good quality and a bitch to clean, but it can be quite useful. For example I used promo posters on most of my KNY edits like this one. I usually cut the background out, polish it a bit and then apply filters or turn it into lineart.

anime stills. These are literally the worst to clean up and they require a lot of filters and coloring for my style of edit but I have used them before. I used stills in both edits linked above, and in this FMA one. Again, it really depends on what you want to do, but I cut out the background, try to clean up the lines as well as I can without crying and then apply filters, colorings etc. I don’t use any pre-made psd though.

manga panels. I use a lot of manga panels. Usually once I’ve picked a subject I reread/look for some chapters I remember well and choose the scans I might need. I don’t clean all of them (lol), but I save many with different angles and then see what fits my concept. Also just in case, but by cleaning I mean that I erase/remove all the speech bubbles and panel lines, other characters etc. I usually avoid panels where I’d have to redraw like the plague for my own sanity. (idk if anyone needs this but random tip: if a character’s skin in the scan is very gray I’d try to create a layer mask, fill it with 50% gray and set the blending mode to divide)

so now for the actual how (consider that it takes me forever to edit lol): I look for a lot of graphic design posters and you know, actually professional work for inspiration. I like typography (which no one on tumblr seems to like smh) and 3d design and once I’ve found a concept I’m curious to try I just try to translate it to my own aesthetic and style. This is all up to you tbh, I like to mix up smaller and bigger fonts, I use a lot of pastel colors and lineart and, recently, I’ve been into trying to mix more organic elements and 3d shapes (for example a Shinobu edit I haven’t posted yet has a lot of butterfly/3d shape elements). 

In general I suggest having a clear(-ish) idea of which aesthetic may fit the character you want to edit and then find a palette (I mostly use shades of the same color tbh, but if you want to find colorful palettes there’s plenty of online resources) and some basic concepts/quotes you want to include. And I’d always remember there’s a lot on PS besides basic functions: blending modes, filters, liquify, pixelate are all useful. 

I’m not really sure how useful this is to be honest, but if there’s a particular edit or panel you want to know more about I still have all the files, so I should be able to walk you through the process. 

[fate221]

Hey! Do you have any advice for people new to digital art!! I started recently but I'm having a really hard time especially with lineart and colors ;-;

Well digital art is such a huge and scary beast and it’s more than normal that you have difficulties with it. Tbh I still struggle with it a lot because I’m always afraid that i could do it better or that I should have been to choose absolutely another style for myself. Now my main struggle is a choice between more simple coloring with more sharp shadows and some kind of volume and more realistic lighting. I doubt very much now about all of this and wonder if my arts would be better and audience loved them more if I’d draw with sharp lineart and simple coloring. 

Idk if I’m the only one who thinks that lol. I think that’s mostly because you have a really large amount of possibilities in digital art. Thousands of brushes, effects, instruments - all of this use to scare and make you confused. You don’t know where to start from or what you want from your style and how it should look like. And it’s normal, especially if you only started getting used to it. And you should be ready for that it’s gonna take a while before you finally feel comfortable with your style and digital art at all. However it all depends from the person.

So I would like to write some basic tips based on my own experience and thoughts and maybe it could help someone.

Find yourself a nice software you’d feel comfortable with. I wanted to make another post about my software but it’s for another time. I would recommend SAI or Sketchbook Pro for those who start. I still love them more than Krita and photoshop tbh because of simple interface and configurations.

Find tutorials for anatomy, expressions, all that stuff. Learn color theory, because that shit is really important in good illustration. Same goes to the laws of composition, lighting etc. Youtube has a lot of this things, also you can search on Pinterest.

Probably the most important tip: Don’t try to start from some difficult kind of drawing. And go to some kind of realism. Instead try to make a lot of pics with simple lineart and coloring, it will help you to get used to the pen and brushes and feel more confident. Many artists who only start try immediately to draw some very cool difficult idea with cool lighting and volume and details (trust me I was lterally that person) but I think it’s better to make just a lot of simple colored pics probably even with lineart + solid colors + blush for example instead of one big and “detailed’. I failed with that so much.

Make studies. Make a lot of studies. Of everything - poses, faces, environment. Just try to copy screencaps from shows or cool pics on Pinterest with trying to analyze how lighting and stuff works or which instruments are better for you. Plus studies often help to understand how color theory and composition work especially when you make them from someone’s  already made pieces such as photos and movies. that’s just like in real life when you sketch smth or smb from real life, or make gestures drawings. It’s easier in digital because you can train yourself in coloring too without a need of thousands of coloring art stuff.

Make a lot of observation. Open an acc of your favourite artist. What features of their style do you like the most? Maybe they have a certain way of drawing eyes or noses, or maybe they usually add to line bright colors or make those good looking outlines with lighten color? Try to note these features and use in your drawings so you’d feel more satisfied with final result. Go watch their speedpaints so it would be easier to understand how stuff works. Don’t try to copy, just note some things you love the most about them.

Use references. It really can help with understanding what atmosphere you want from your piece, lighting, environment => it would be easier to imagine it in your head and I think that it’s already a half-finished work if you have a really clear imagine of the final piece in your head with poses, lighting and stuff. I always spend a while for imagining what I want from drawing, often while being on my way to university in a subway, listening to some themed music. Also I used references for my latest Halloween and autumn pieces. It’s not that you copy stuff - more like try to analyze how to make your drawing more realistic and detailed. 

Use different modes of the layers. That’s honestly the best what the God of Digital Art could gift us. My leaders are definitely Glowing and Overlay. Also I would recommend to use rather Multiply mode for shadows than trying to draw them with just same color but darker. You can draw shadows with just purple or brown and than just use Multiply so the they would look more natural. The same goes to everything else - from backgrounds to lighting. These modes can become your true saviour in tough times.

Flip your canvas horizontally all the time to see the mistakes in anatomy, faces and stuff. 

Don’t use too much texture brushes. Seriously they are good but sometimes you only need the most simple ones to create a decent piece.

And of course the very-very main advice. Without it everything I told above loses its sense completely. PRACTICE! Just practice-practice-practice, draw thousands of pics, sketches, try different styles, experiment. It’s the best way to get used to digital art and understand what is comfortable for you and what is not. Experience is really important in this field. Don’t expect that it would turn out immediately perfect and remember that with every piece you become better and more confident. Every finished drawing makes you closer to success and satisfaction from what you do. The most important thing is to not give up. Look for inspiration in songs, people, everything around you, try to make drawings of it, sketches, whatever. Just make a lot of that. Really a lot. Of course with analyze and permanent observation. That’s the only valid way to success. 

These are very rough and maybe I forgot some important parts but tbh I wish someone told me these while I just started to draw digitally. Honestly a really good observation and practice make perfect and I understood it pretty good for these months.

[cyancees]

do you have any digital art tips at all? especially on line art ;_;

i tried to draw something new for this. i really did. but art block heh. sorry ;;;

i feel like the least qualified person to answer this question, but if you’re asking me of all people then i guess you wanna hear it from me!! so here i go

STUFF UNDER CUT CUS ITS A LONG POST!!

so first off, you should line with you sketch layer as low opacity as you can while still being able to see it. i usually have mine on 9%

also, stabilizer really helps w lining!! i’m using paint tool sai, where it looks like this:

i usually put mine up to 15 when i line, whereas it’s usually on 3. 

here’s a cap from my recent souda speedpaint because it’s the most effort i’ve put into lining in a while. the lines are a bit thicker than you’ll probably really want, and i’ve been told that mine are too thick... but some people like that style so. it’s preference!

i personally use a hard-edged brush. you should draw with long, quick strokes, instead of slow careful ones. hit ctrl z until you get it perfect! also, drawing with black lines on a white canvas is probably best at this point.

as you can see in the cap, the lines around the jaw are thicker than those of, say, the teeth. more defined things like face shapes and eyelashes and clothes should have thicker lines, whilst the thinner lines go to more finite details - hair details like loose strands and texture, teeth, definition like wrinkles in clothing or skin - stuff like that. basically, more prominent shapes should have thicker lines! 

you can also use the lineart tool sai has if you want (if you’re using sai) cus it’s pretty handy. 

here’s a line i drew with my mouse:

the little dots are the points you can manipulate the line. you can also add new ones by holding ctrl and clicking the line, or erase them by simply erasing part of the line

by moving the dots around, i’ve gotten the line to look like this:

but it’s still a bit too thick for me. so using the ‘weight’ option, i can turn it down to the size i want, then click the line:

then using the pressure tool, i can make the edges thinner by clicking and dragging the dots one by one, and:

bam, totally looks natural now! so, you can definitely make use of the lineart tool if you use sai and find yourself hitting ctrl z or fixing finite details too often.

fast forward to when all the lines are done

might not be able to tell here cus the cap is terrible, but here i changed the lines from black to a dark red. i don’t like to use true black in my drawings, i usually have my lines really dark red or another dark warm colour (sometimes a cool colour depending on the pallete)

when it comes to the base colours, i don’t like to do anything at any exact edge of the pallete. what i mean is, for the white part of the eyes, instead of

right in the corner like that, i’ll do 

a very slight change (assuming the lighting is bright)

so basically i never like letting the colour touch the edge of the square. no max brightness colours, no pure whites, no pure blacks, no pure greys, etc.

get a bunch of colours that you think look nice that you can use to shade ya pic

shade ya pic accordingly

now back to the lineart aspect. i like to colour my lines so they’re not all totally solid 

i preserve opacity to do this, but theoretically you could also do it on a separate layer directly above the lineart layer and select ‘clipping group’ for that

adding warm dark reds and oranges with skin, some dark yellows and greens for his clothes, and dark reds and pinks for his hair (you can go wilder with hair because it’s more reflective than other stuff. don’t be scared to colour with unnatural colours because Light Be Like That). i also personally like to lighten the colour of the eyelashes with that technique too

as you can see here, my lines are now all different colours - the base colour in darker spots, and other colours more matching the colouring of the drawing everywhere else. it makes the colours pop more and feel more natural. but remember to keep lines darker if you want something to stand out more - and you usually don’t want the lines being a lighter colour than the actual colour

be sure when lining to utilize multiple layers, too. for example, in this image souda has glasses, and as you can see that the lines under the lenses are paler - because i put a low opacity white layer there to imitate glass.

i put the glasses on a layer above the rest of the lineart so i could do that - if i just used one layer for the lines, the lens layer would be on top of it and i’d have to very precisely make sure it didn’t overlap the lines for the frames

just some other general stuff - UTILIZE THE FEATURES YOUR ART PROGRAM HAS! take advantage of the fact that it’s digital art to do cool stuff! mess around with brushes, and layers, and colours, and textures, and layer effects a ton! get comfortable with them! experiment and learn to use em! i personally use the Overlay, Multiply, Luminosity, and Shade layer effects a whole lot. and dont be afraid to mess around with brush settings as much as you want until it’s something you like! 

here’s the settings for the brushes i used for the drawing i used as an example (and definitely my most used brushes)

Ink (used for lining)

Hard Acrylic (used for shading and minor blending)

Soft Acrylic (used for mostly blending and perfecting the shading - along with adding colour to the lines)

I HOPE THIS HELPS LOL I FEEL LIKE A TOTAL CASUAL AT ART STILL BUT IF YOU LIKE HOW I DO STUFF THEN HOPEFULLY THAT WAS HELPFUL ILY

lmao all you asked for was tips but i ended up doing a mini tutorial hghgh i hope i didn’t do too much lmaooo

[annieisyourfavourite]

I have a question but it's okay if you don't have an answer; how did you change your art style so quickly? I've been trying to alter mine for a long time but it either doesn't look good or it slips back into what I'm comfortable with, which I am trying not to do.

No, you’re good!

Developing style habits is really hard, and I definitely have tendencies that I slip back into (especially when drawing fan art; it’s hard for me to change my designs to fit whatever stylistic thing I’m doing atm). The way my style evolves is mostly picking 1 thing to add in/change, and making a really conscious effort to include it. For example, I’m currently trying to expand how I play with shadows on the neck/face, cuz I’m really awful at incorporating them. So until I feel comfortable with that, that’s like, The Thing I’m focusing on.

The last few drawings I’ve done have also been way sketchier than I usually like, for a couple reasons. One is that I was on a bus when drawing one of them lol. But also I feel more comfortable in sketches and tend to psyche myself out on lineart, so I’ve been playing with how sketchiness can contribute to the mood of a drawing instead of always getting rid of it altogether. So then when I do go fore hard lines or ink, it’s purposeful to the piece, instead of just what I assume I have to default to. Also I think sketchiness is good for developing skills because you can focus on some things while acknowledging that you’re not adept in every area, and that doesn’t have to hold you back on a drawing!

And I’ve also been really pushing myself to do different poses/angles. I get very comfortable in the ¾ bust trope, so when I do different things, my style naturally has to adjust. This also leads to me using photo references much more frequently. I take photos of myself for drawing references like, constantly now. And that naturally pushes me in a more realistic kind of style.

Hope this helps at all? It’s all really a facet of trying a bunch of new things and hoping some of them stick haha :)

[marvelandponder]

I’M SCREAMING

We’re 3 months away from this glitter-bomb and they gave us some stuff to scream about. I think I’ll do just that. I took my sweet time putting this together, I know, but there’s a fair bit to unpack and a lot to be excited about so, let’s go through it all!

Animation

Okay, so first things first: people are calling this a 2D movie and that’s not really that accurate.

It certainly has some 2D elements, like the backgrounds, but the style of animation only makes the characters look 2D, when in fact they’re 3D models.

You can tell in how they move. If I were to give you a still screen shot, you might guess that it was from a 2D animation, but in motion, you can tell what it actually is: cel-shading.

I had a hunch that’s what it was so I asked a storyboarder who worked on the MLP movie (and the show) if I was right and she said: 

The program they’re using is ToonBoom, which does rigs with 2D toon shaders, among other things!

You know, I don’t often call things, but I fucking called it. Let me have this. Just to give you a quick definition from Wikipedia:

“Cel shading or toon shading is a type of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make 3-D computer graphics appear to be flat by using less shading color instead of a shade gradient or tints and shades.”

3-dimensional figure with cel shading, has the effect of making it  look 2D. Typically seen with thick outlines on the outside and little to no outlines on the inside:

(Team Fortress 2 itself isn’t normally cel shaded, but that’s a great example a fan made of what cel shading usually looked like when I was growing up)

Cel shading without outlines, as seen in Wind Waker. 

Like I said, just seeing this still image, it looks 2D, but watching it move, you can tell there’s a 3rd dimension to the character with the features and lineart mapped out onto the models to make it look 2D

Which by the way, is really unique for a major release! I don’t know about anyone else, but I was excited that MLP: The Movie seemed to be 2-D since there hasn’t been a domestic 2-D animated movie since Winnie the Pooh in 2011. 6 damn years! While I maybe would’ve ideally liked a completely 2-D animated movie, the backgrounds and the cel shading works in really neat ways, and it will definitely make the movie stand out 

The purely 3-D objects seem unfinished at the moment (but that’s not out of the ordinary, CGI seems to be one of the last processes). It needs texture or shading or something, and I can tell because most of the ship looks too soft (too much like a model) to be metal. I really think this will be fixed for the final product, but that’s probably the most jarring part of the style at the moment

Not all of the 3-D looks unfinished, but the best looking parts are still the painterly, 2-D stuff (look at those towers; they’re really stylized, but you can tell they’re 3D in a more 2D environment)

THAT DIGITALLY PAINTED VERSION OF CANTERLOT THOUGH:

The light effects are definitely 3-D in the fireworks and rainboom

Oh, and speaking lighting, so much of it looks so pretty! There are one or two times when the colours are slightly off, but the majority of the time it looks freaking gorgeous

You can kinda see by looking at Rarity that the shading is juuust slightly off here (kinda like they were for the teaser trailer), but then you look in the background and see this BEAUTIFUL background and Twilight all upset and worried about this invasion, and it feels like such a nitpick to worry about what will probably still be cleaned up before it hits theaters

We also get some really great expressions, so they’re not really limited by the 3D models underneath (if I’m right about that)

Also, just as one last little note here, the style is detailed enough to see little things about the characters we didn’t know up until now, like the fact that the spines on the side of Spike’s head are translucent, or that the colours of RD’s mane aren’t 100% perfectly separated

Overall with the animation, I’m so impressed not only by how gorgeous it is,but by how willing they were to take a risk and incorporate a 3D element in the form of  (I think) cel-shading. This only really matches the creative spirit of the MLP team, though. Whether or not you agree on how well they always execute everything, they always try to step up their game with every new season and push themselves to be and do better.

And while I will say that if some of the more 3D parts (yeah, I’m talking about the zeppelin/airships mostly) aren’t fixed for the final release, I would have a bone to pick with them, but I have faith that we’ll be seeing a much smoother integration of that 3D on the big screen.

Story and Character Details

I really appreciate that they didn’t outright spoil anything too big. It’s definitely a well-cut trailer! We basically only know about the same information we did before, with just a hint or two as to things like who the true villain is.

Just based on the focus given to these characters in the trailer (and what I know of the Storm King’s characterization in the first Movie Prequel comic that was just released), seems like he’s not as big of a threat as the commander of his fleet, Tempest. 

It’s a kind of villain we haven’t seen on the show or even in EQG, and not only that, but 

She’s got a fantastic voice actress behind her, so she can pull off the deliciously evil vibe well without, say, reminding us too much of Chrysalis or other powerful animated villains from Disney classics

Plus her design with the broken horn and her magic sparking up out of it is instantly intriguing to me: for such a powerful presence, it’s awesome to see her weakness (and most likely shady past) is always on display---especially for a commander character, that’s just really cool

Grubber seems to be pretty standard so far, nothing he’s done has really impressed me quite yet, but I’m hoping his best stuff is saved for the movie itself

The sky pirates (or skyrates) look like a lot of fun, and in context I can see how well the bipedal birb pirate blends with the universe (the bipedal designs were the ones I had the most trouble with)

On top of that, we have sea ponies at last! And they’re far more adorable than I ever could’ve hoped

The original sea pony designs from G1 looked a lot more like sea horses, with curling tails and fins on either side, but I think the meraid-ish look is both more marketable for Hasbro and more appealing to look at (the original sea ponies always seemed like a joke in the fandom to me, I admittedly never understood why people would actually want it in G4)

And a-ha! Good queens do exist! Poor Celestia and Luna. Always a princess, never a queen.

Oh, and Seaquestria? It’s freakin’ beautiful. I LOVE the rich blues and purples here. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the 360 image of the underwater palace complete with an excellent piece of background music, treat yourself.

The Mane 6′s sea pony designs are pretty dang adorable. I don’t have anything interesting to say, I just like the cute water horses, okay?

Minor Details and Incidentals

I’ll start out by saying Twilight’s narration in the trailer is pretty standard, but still heartwarming (mostly because I already know and love these characters though). It sort of reminds me of the bits of narration from the How to Train Your Dragon movies, although those had a bit more character to them. 

The what could possible go wrong? line, though. It just makes me laugh thinking of all the flashbacks we could have to the series. 

I guess she’s talking about that festival specifically that she’s organizing, and in that way it’s a show of character development (in a similar way to the character development on display in A Flurry of Emotions, where Twilight is told she’s late and doesn't have a panic attack or worry about what could go wrong... too much), but it’s still hilarious to contrast the idea that nothing could go wrong in Equestria to... literally all of the show. 

AJ and RD protecting their friends even before the others have gotten over the shock of whatever they’re seeing tho

Starlight and Trixie get a bit of screen-time together and it’s adorable. Starlight might be stuck in Canterlot for the duration of the adventure, but I’m glad to see her included. Characters like Discord who might be too hard to explain to new audiences are understandable losses, but even if Starlight’s cameo is brief, it’s good to see her role acknowledged

In terms of music, Sia’s looking adorable so far, and Lukas Graham’s as of yet unreleased Off to See the World sounds pretty catchy (it’s the song at the end of the trailer), so they’ve got talent behind the vocals!

Jumping back to little details, it’s neat how sea pony magic has a very distinct look from unicorn/alicorn magic. Also, the bubbles are really cute

And, okay, I just wanted to take a minute to appreciate how serious this ponk is. Can we all just stop and take a look, because in this scene Twilight’s saying how she’s the one Tempest is after, and she should probably face this alone, which seems to be our Princess of Friendship’s big dilemma in this movie, and Pinkie’s clearly trying to tell her she’s crazy

Gotta love that they didn’t just go for hyperactive comic relief Pinkie Pie; they don’t seem to be boiling down these characters to just one trait (which is partially why I loved the moment where RD and AJ defend the girls; RD’s ego will no doubt be on display throughout the movie, but you’ll also see she’s ready to lay down her life for her friends)

And hey, lookie here! Canterlot got a make-over... and a contractor. There’s more pink than there typically is and it doesn’t necessarily match what we’ve seen of it in the show. Especially places like the throne room:

And you know, I’m a little torn on this detail? It’s beautiful, and I’m digging the starry night mosiac they’ve got going on back there, but it would’ve been nice to see the throne room we know and love rendered in this new style, you know? I’m gonna miss the deep magentas and the stain glass windows of the Mane 6′s accomplishments. I know that’s mostly the fangirl in me, but I like seeing continuity nods back to the show (like hey look: Cadence gets a cameo!)

Unless Canterlot gets destroyed and subsequently rebuilt in the season 7 finale, in which case I’ll shut my mouth

Speaking of which, I still have to wonder exactly when this will take place in the series, or if it exists slightly to the left of canon like the Equestria Girls movies (which, I mean, I consider canon, but still). I know there’s ties into the comics, but I wonder if/when the show will acknowledge the events of the movie... I guess only time will tell

And for now, I think that about wraps it up! All in all, I’m beyond excited to see this thing, as anyone could’ve guessed. 

It should also be noted that a lot of kids movie trailers focus on the fun, comedic portions of the movie, so while I do think it’s mostly going to feel like this, I’m also looking forward to the more character-driven feelsy parts. As we well know, you can never get the full scope of a movie from just the trailer, but it’s usually especially true for kids movies.

Even just from what we have seen, it looks like we’re in for a ride. Can’t wait to get on.

Hey, if you’d like more MLP stuff, you can click right here to see my editorials or here for episode reviews. And if those links don’t look pretty enough, have the last three things I’ve done right here:

Parental Glideance Review, Celestia/Daybreaker Editorial, and LGBT+ Editorial

Year of the Pony

[fbmajor]

This is Aeryn. She’s pretty cool. That’s... really all there is to say on the matter. The world that she hails from isn’t really built yet, so it’s actually a bit odd that I drew her, but that’s that.

Of course, it has become a tradition in this blog to rant for an excessively long time on every post, and I don’t plan on breaking that just yet. Buckle up, this is going to be a long one, so long that I’m not going to grammar check it.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff behind the scenes of creating this. For starters, I drew in portrait instead of landscape, which really only makes the actual drawing a little bigger, but it ended up confusing the hell out of me when it came to drawing things at a reasonable scale. I think the end result, as is usually the case with my drawings of people (which is all of them at the moment, barring that one logo I did for Graft Theory a while back), has a somewhat large head and short body. But that’s alright, as anyone that knows me will know that I have a fondness for short people, and I haven’t actually decided Aeryn’s height yet anyway.

She also has huge eyes, which isn’t exactly a new concept but I prefer realistically sized ones. Despite the larger scale I was drawing from by doing portrait, I really can’t draw decently shaped eyes at anything smaller than the size they are in this picture. Or rather, I can’t draw two eyes that look reasonably similar to each other and in proper place.

You’ll also notice that she isn’t shaded at all. I usually don’t scan my drawings until they’re finished completely, as the process of scanning while I’m at college involves walking all the way to the campus library and back. However, as this is essentially concept art, I’m debating coloring it as opposed to just shading it, so I wanted to get at least an outline saved somewhere so that I can look back on it fondly after I inevitably turn it into a disaster by using colored pencils.

If you haven’t used them before, accept from experience that colored pencils are really finicky to use and are difficult to use for satisfactory color fillings, particularly the darker ones and the dreaded black pencil. Unfortunately, they’re the only kind of coloring I have available to me at the moment, at least that will work reasonable well with a penciled outline. They do have their strong points, though. Because they have fine points that don’t really splatter or distort like inkpens and markers, it’s not disastrous if you screw up, and you get quite a bit of precision. The real issue is making it look good, which is just a huge pain.

On that note, pencil shading isn’t exactly easy to get right either. The problem with pencils in general is that they will make it easy to see the grain of the paper and any particles that happen to be on your table under the sheet. This doesn’t really show up in lineart but once you add area to your penciling it gets noticeable real quick. The whole lack of distortion thing I talked about earlier becomes a curse as it becomes impossible to get a fill without missing a ton of really tiny spots. You can keep drawing over it, but doing so will cause you to converge on certain levels of darkness, effectively limiting your color palette to around 8 shades, which can be annoying in complex drawings with a lot of adjacent regions.

Speaking of, this is actually one of the more complex character arts I’ve done, particularly in reference to the clothes. Due to the aforementioned difficulty with adequately shading a large cluster of regions, I generally keep clothing pretty simple. This habit is definitely because of that and not because of how difficult it is to draw clothing. Since there really isn’t anything indicating it, allow me to list the pieces of this outfit: cloak/coat, shirt, vest-like thing, skirt, whatever the female equivalent of compression shorts is, boots, and fingerless gloves. It is at this point that I will give a shoutout to a particular person whom I’ve made fun of for having a character with fingerless gloves. You know who you are. I apologize, you were right, they are pretty cool (but my character is still going to make fun of yours for them).

I’ll get back to the outfit design in a minute, as it does require some world context. Aeryn, who is probably in her late teens in this drawing, hails from the world of Graft Theory that thing I mentioned in what I believe was my first post on this blog. The idea behind the story is essentially a fantasy world where there is at least one branch of magic that works via creating graphs with magic energy, and Aeryn and the supporting cast are attempting to overthrow a magocracy. Lot’s of spywork, secret missions, etc. If I eventually get the time, equipment, and skills to create it (the plan is for it to be a comic), it should be pretty fun.

Anyway, Aeryn is a mage herself, but she is only capable of using this branch of magic that involves graph theory, for reasons that exist but I don’t feel like going into because this is already the length of an essay. Anyway, graph theory branch is kind of the joke of the mage community because it takes too long to set up for actual combat, and as a result Aeryn would have a fairly low place in the society’s magic caste system.

Alright back to her fashion. I have very little regard for fashion, male or female, so if you think her choice of clothing is retarded, you’re probably correct but you can still go fuck yourself anyway. This outfit is meant to be usable in combat, which is why it’s mostly form-fitting. The obvious exception to this rule is the cloak, which probably would be a pain in combat, but she can easily drape it around her shoulders without it falling off to allow more arm-freedom. I have a particular fondness for the coat-over-the-shoulders style, which you can see in some anime, notable examples being the captains in Bleach and the high-ranking marines in One Piece. I will admit that I do this with a jacket sometimes, which is probably the most weab-like thing I do.

The cloak was loosely based off of the Grandmaster from Fire Emblem, and will probably get more design added to it whenever I get the time to finish the drawing. The skirt is based much more strictly on the same source as the cloak. It’s pretty much a direct rip with a few modifications. I don’t know what the ring is supposed to be. I just felt like putting there thinking it might be useful. She is also carrying a dagger which is mostly concealed behind her, but if you were wondering what that little handle thing was, there you go.

I’ve always wondered about the combat feasibility of short skirts. In terms of movement, I assume that a skirt that doesn’t form a complete connected ring anywhere other than the waist would allow full freedom of movement (Though at the risk of panty shots, but in this case the compression shorts eliminate the prospect of gratuitous fanservice). I mean, the only reason we started wearing pants was so that we could ride horses. The Romans used skirts and they turned out alright. I think this outfit is actually more limited by the rope-belts than the skirt, but unfortunately I don’t wear skirts often enough to really be able to say for sure.

I don’t wear fingerless gloves either. Frankly, I don’t think there’s any real benefit to fingerless gloves, but maybe someone more experienced in the matter can let me know. Aeryn’s gloves, however, contain prewritten graphs (specifically paths, if you familiar with the lingo) that she can funnel magic into to quickly cast a spell. I would’ve written runes on them, but the gloves will probably be black and the runes lighter, so I thought it would be best if that was left to the final stages.

Her boots, while not the most difficult to draw, were the biggest pain. Look at all of those god damn holes. I was also very particular about ensuring they were laced properly, though I did screw up a few times on her right foot. This greatly displeased me as it ran counter to the vast experience of shoe-lacing I have accrued simply by playing ice hockey. I was forced to drive to the nearest hockey rink and baptize myself in melted ice to wash away the shame.

Oh man that was a long rant. But this picture took a particularly long time, so I suppose it deserves a long rant. Perhaps this rant is so long a tl;dr is warranted.

tl;dr - Her name’s Aeryn, she’s a magical spy, probably in her late teens in this drawing. Pencils suck for coloring. Her gloves are magical. She’s cool. You’re cool. Have a nice day.

[7clubs]

Your art is super nice! Quick question when you pick colours for your 'stained glass' pieces do you work from a colour pallete or use like multiply layers?

thank ye! It varies from piece to piece- I rarely ever take color palettes from other places unless referencing specific environments.

(on the other hand, for stuff like quick portraits- i color pick 100% because that makes my workflow so much faster lol)

tl;dr I usually like to flat in my own colors with a thing I like to call “floodfill tool at 100% opacity” with minor help from gradient maps and adjustment friends at the end, but not too much, bc I don’t like losing my original colors most of the time

(colors for my tale of two brothers pieces were taken, in places, from these two paintings by manansala/amorsolo and uhhh this bridge) this started off as a gradient, and everything else was just building shapes on essentially one layer, taking some swatches from the ref pics at times.

 so otherwise usually I try create my own color palette for a picture, whether it be just picking colors/shades w/ my own instincts, or letting them develop through, yup, lots of adjustment layers.

the most typical process is that I pick a pretty complete color scheme on my own and then use some adjustment layers/gradient maps at the end, but sometimes only block out certain shapes/areas and try to maintain the original color scheme in a lot of places still. I have an old process video that shows me figurin stuff out a bit!!! 

original flat colors (picked color palette myself) vs. final colors w/ some screen layers probably. I used a LOT of adjustment layers over the cultist zen because I wanted it to fall back into the background some more.

sometimes I just don’t feel like figuring out how to shift all the shades darker on my own, or make stuff greener, so, sure, multiply/overlay layer that stuff yeehaw, for the base/rough colors at least. Once I’m satisfied with the color scheme I typically merge and build the rest of it on my own, and more color adjustments come in at the end.

there’s nothing wrong with using adjustment layers, mind you, i just like the extra control over individual shades when I figure each color on my own and just find myself liking my pictures that don’t use them as much a lot more than those that do xP

this recent commission was a pretty rare one- didn’t use multiply layers, other than the sketch/lineart itself, instead starting with just straight-on flatting in two different color scheme choices with the intention of those being the final colors!

The commissioner requested the first color scheme and the second was mostly scrapped, but since I personally liked a lot about the bluer color scheme I put it on low opacity and erased most of it, leaving just a lil at the side.

I really like these pieces because, naturally, without adjustment layers they kind of show off the purest essence of the ‘coral’ colors I love the most. Another recent example I’ve done, though not stained glass style, that has my raw unfiltered color preferences are my deltarune pieces