#and changing my brush in csp 30 times

[toxictoxicities]

i wish i could draw anything humanoid so i could draw your iterator designs

A /// I recently gave a handful of drawing tips in my stream! Though it's mostly animation I talked about a few things!

So for some general tips

Don't worry about what everyone is doing

Compare yourself to others (positively). What I mean is don't say "I can't do what they do" but "How do they do this" and try to learn from them, learn what you like from them, the more artist you reference from and compare to the more you'll be able to draw in and create a unique style!

Remember everyone improves at their own rate, we start at different time, have less or more time to practice, different resources- the main thing is that you improve yourself over time- linear improvement or not! You never stop improving, there is no end goal, so enjoy the journey!

Brushes do and don't matter. Try to collect as many, explore them, I've grabbed brushes from some really cool artist and tossed them because I don't understand how they work. The main thing is understanding what brush gives what effect and what brushes fell good to use. Your taste in brushes will always change (mine do always when I find something!) These are my brushes as of now!

Don't worry about what everyone is doing

Program means nothing- the only reason why I have CSP is for animation and nothing more (bc adobe animate sucks and I came from Fire Alpaca so I was lazy to learn Krita) Legit only get CSP if you want to animate

Finally, don't waste time with anatomy. You learn it as you go and with reference you get better, like yes study it if you want to for fun but you don't need to study it to be able to produce art work, just your ability to observe and be critical of you work is a skill required to improve! Also 100% don't if your character has baggy ass clothes, you'll spend 30 minutes drawing out those boxes and making sure it's perfect only to erase a god 80% of it, just get the rough shape out! If they're nude then different story or skin tight clothes but majority of clothes are slightly loose. Practice it yes but, you will improve in all skill sets together as you continue your journey.

Don't worry about what everyone is doing I hope any of these somewhat help, good luck on your artist journey man~! <3

[nocek]

omg what brushes and program do you use?

Oh I'm not sure this answer will be very usefull from amount of brushes listed. I have very few faves actually and mostly like them because they help me circumvent my perfectionism.

So right now I'm using Clip Studio Paint but I've been using Photoshop for a looooong time. Till they pissed me off too much with adobe adobeness. That's why part of my brushes are originally photoshop ones I've ported to CSP.

I mostly do linearts, like overly detailed ones, like this closeup:

Which I used DAUB FunnyGranny2 and back in PS times (and also now sometimes) I've used Kyle's Drawing Box - Animator Pencil 2016 from Kyle Webster (now available for free with PS as far as I know? still I had bought them ages ago and just ported it to CSP, works ok)

I like those two brushes because they are slightly grainy and aren't 100% smooth which helps me not to be as precious about smoothness. Otherwise I'd be smoothing it over and over again. Also they loose a bit of opacity with lighter touch which I like :)

I also like the Belgian Comics Smoother from Kyle's Inbox. It's very smooth but has a nice shape so I use it for touchups on color flats and lettering.

As for my more recent spiderverse comics of following close up:

I need to make them quick so everything is on 2000x2000 canvas and is linearted with DAUB - Fluid Ink Chisel 2 set permanently on size 30 so I won't be tempted :D It may not be grainy but I like how it changes it size and opacity with pressure and how it changes it's shape with direction of line.

Besides that I mostly use flat colors (I love the Lasso Fill tool in CSP) and regular soft airbrush too add some gradients.

I don;t use them that often but I also like Mirre's markers + blender if I do some actual shading but I also use Kyle's gouaches then.

And that's about it :)

[graha-stan-account]

MiqoMarch Day 20: Free Day

[saint-nevermore]

i did a summary of art thing! i did a LOT of experimenting this year, moving away from everything needing to stay realistic and "finished" (march is a good example), fucking around with a geometric hard-line style again after changing to sketchier softer lines in 2020 (april, may), and finally retiring my 10 year old cracked copy of Paint Tool SAI for Clip Paint Studio (legally this time LOL) in mid-July. over the year too i feel like ive gotten a much better grasp on creature/character design, and ive been trying more and more out-there designs. this was crucial in finally doing more development on Deities and monsters in NVMR from 2020 since i was really struggling to find a good way to design them.

i think my favourite change was the complete overhaul in how i drew after moving to CSP. this was something i Hated at first, but i braved it since i knew it could let me do way more than SAI, and i think its really paid off. simple things like how the brushes function and using hue jitter when colouring beefed the hell out of my work. things like this lead to me being able to more comfortably do lineless stuff or speedpaints - the longest painting of the year was A Patron's Dream and even that was only a 10 hour venture, most stayed under 6 hours. for comparison, i had a painting of similar detail of Nevermore in progress in 2019 that easily had 30+ hours sunk into it and i still never finished it. really excited to see how my work continues to improve in 2021 :)

summary of art template can be found here, characters from July's piece belong to @foulserpent and the character from September belongs to @dimetrodone.

[pixelphite]

A Decision Was Made

I finally bought one of those fancy gaming keypads.

So, a little backstory on this: I broke my left wrist when I was, geez, 6 I think? The way it healed and the way my body has changed since then has given me some mobility issues and pain in that wrist and hand. This wouldn’t be such a huge deal if I didn’t use that hand for shortcuts and hotkey functions. However, spending the amount of time I spend sitting down drawing, the constant motion starts to strain my wrist and my fingers on that side, so I started looking at solutions.

I saw the Clip Studio Tabmate ($54.00 or $57.68, 4.4/5 rating), but that only works with CSP and doesn’t have as many buttons as I want.

Next up, the Wacom Express Key Remote ($99.00, 3.7/5 rating). It has a couple of extra buttons that the Tabmate doesn’t have, but it doesn’t seem like a good ergonomic solution.

So I started looking at other options, and I ended up at Razer (I figured my mouse and keyboard are Razer products, so I might as well go with another).

Enter the Razer Tartarus V2. This bad boy has 32 programmable keys, including a thumb d-pad, and a nice ergonomic palm rest. Oh, and did I mention it’s cheaper than the Wacom remote? Sure it’s going to be plugged into my computer, so it’s not as portable, but do I really need it to move? Absolutely not.

I spent a good couple of hours programming shortcuts, hotkeys, and every pop-up palette and menu I use. These are my current settings on this profile (by the way, you can set multiple profiles with different settings)

I figured, at the very least, this would help with the strain on my wrist and allow me to work in a more comfortable way. It definitely does that for me, but it also does a couple of other things that I didn’t realize were INCREDIBLY useful.

Remember how I said I programmed my pop-up palettes and menus to it? I went into Clip Studio and added those shortcuts to the 5-8 keys (as well as ctrl+5-8). Do I need the navigator window? Press back on the D-pad. Need the brush size window? Press left on the D-pad. Do I want to access my custom color sets for my characters so I don’t have to guess at the right colors? Ctrl+up on the D-pad, baby.

“Jeff, that’s cool and all, but where are you going with this?” You ask, curiously.

By programming those shortcuts, I’ve completely uncluttered my CSP workspace. The consequence of that is that now I can focus a bit better because my eyes aren’t being constantly barraged by unnecessary information. I only get the information I need, when I need it, with the simple push of a button.

I went from this:

To this:

With only one device that’s takes up very little desk space.

Now here’s the thing I’ve been trying to avoid talking about: money. This bad boy cost me ~$76 after tax. I figured I deserved a Christmas present, so I decided to treat myself. I know $76 is nothing to some people, and nearly impossible for others. I understand that. So here’s some good news, you can do this with pretty much any keypad that has enough functions for YOUR specific preferences. Some people may only need a couple, others, like me, will utilize all 30+ functions and then some with key combinations. So the silver lining to that is that there are other options if you can’t afford this one, or if you just hate Razer products (hey, I’m not judging). I’ll list some below, and I’ll continue adding to the list whenever I find others that I think may be worth it. If you have any suggestions, let me know! With that in mind, I also made sure to link to the Tabmate and the Wacom remote. Even though the functionality was lacking for me, it may be perfect for someone else!

I’m listing these by current price, low to high (at the time of writing this, Dec. 19, 2019)

RedThunder One-Handed Gaming Keyboard - $39.99 $16.99 - Current rating 4.6/5

RGB One Handed Mechanical Gaming Keyboard - $23.90 - Current rating 4.5/5

SADES Portable Mini Gaming Keypad - $23.90 - Current rating 4.3/5

Redragon K585 DITI One-Handed RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard - $36.97 - Current rating 4.2/5

Razer Tartarus V2 Gaming Keypad - $79.99 $69.99 - Current rating 3.8/5

[coe-lilium]

Hey Lilium! I love your Servant redesigns! I'm starting to learn to draw digitally so that I can design Servants myself, like Kriemhild. Would you have any advice you could give me on this?

Hi! Thank you so much for your words!

I’m a bit unsure if you’re asking for tips on digital art itself or on chara design?  

In doubt, I’m going to go with “digital art” in this post, if you meant chara des hit me up with an ask and I’ll happily provide for that :) 

*necessary intro*: please consider that my art education ended 10 years ago and never prepared me for more stylized/cartoon styles, so I’m self taught for almost all intents (100% regarding digital art).

Long wall of text under the cut:

First suggestion is to get a good, reliable art program. 

Plenty of artists use Paint Tool SAI and Clip Studio Paint (currently using CSP myself and don’t plan to ever abandon it). Neither of them is free but both are less pricey than Adobe bundles and both were created more for illustrating than “photoshopping” purposes. There’s plenty more but those are two I used and can recommend. Many art programs usually offer a 30 days trial so my suggestion would be to try them out and see which is more to your liking and offers the best quality/price wise.  

By personal experience, it’s much better to pay and have support than to find a free unofficial version and then get fucked and lose all your works when you update your operating system and discover the bootleg program doesn’t work anymore. Learn from me, don’t risk it.     

Next suggestion, get a drawing tablet or a tablet. Nothing too pricey as a beginner, when paired with a good program any decent tablet will do its job. What you really need is pen pressure, everything else is optional. People draw on their iPads with great results but never having tried I can’t give suggestions here, if not to look for artist who do and see how they work (YT surely has tutorials ‘bout it).   

With hardware and software out of the way, let’s get down to proper drawing business:  

First of all, forget that “but you’re not a real artist if you use references/copy poses” noise: use references, use all the references you want. 

If you want to paint a starry sky and don’t know how to rend the effect, maybe the glowing of a nebula? Look up Youtube and Deviantart tutorials, tumblr tutorials, look up on how all the artist you like paint and their tips, all the IRL photos in google. 

Something I personally find very helpful are tutorials comparing realistic and stylized styles and showing how to go from one to another, how to simplify shapes etc.    

Renaissance artist invented the darkroom/camera oscura to help them drawing perspective and then traced over that shit. If Caravaggio traced to save time, then so can we. 

And there’s so many different ways to reach a similar result that maybe your first attempts will look like copycats of that tutorial you saw or that really inspiring artist. It’s fine. But the more attempts and the more you play with your program of choice, brushes you like/find more comfortable, the more you look up different sources and integrate bits of them all in a singular piece, the more your work will be distinct.

Now, onto one of the big elephants in the room: do you know how to correctly sketch a human body from scratch? If yes, amazing! (all my respect). 

If not, there’s plenty of solutions without having to learn how to (which is the way I currently work bc drawing is a 100% hobby and I’d rather spend my time elsewhere than in re-learning human anatomy) and working digitally makes these solutions way easier. 

After you find a “how to draw anatomy” book or blog or tutorials and safely store it somewhere safe to go back and reference, then you can 

1. find stock photos, either from google (be careful not to use copyrighted stuff) or in bundles specifically created for artists to use as bases or references. On Deviantart for example there’s SenshiStock, incredible project with hundreds of photos free to use. The anatomy book/blog here will be useful if you want a certain body shape and your reference doesn’t match with your idea. 

2. chose a program like CSP or similar that comes with 3D stock poses which you can then alter as much as you like in size, weight, rotation, light direction, position of every body part down to each finger (in CSP’s case, you can also download plenty more free to use poses, brushes, 3d objects, patterns etc created by the userbase and shared in the library bundled with the program).  

3. if your main art program doesn’t come with human poses? no problem at all, get one just for this specific purpose, like Design Doll (both free/pay ver, imo free ver is more than enough), Posemaniacs (free, online, uses flash), MagicPoser (free with option of in-app purchases, it’s an app, good reviews, just tried it a little and seems quite good). 

4. less conventional but imo still useful, especially if you want to draw in “anime” style and proportions for Servants designs: go to My figure collections and use figmas. 

They’re highly posable plastic figures from the most different jp (and not) characters, each one with a photo gallery and as long as you modify the final piece and -important!- don’t sell it if you base it on a specific user photo? I’d say go for it. Or mix body parts of different figmas, or use the “archetype” products, naked bodies made precisely for drawing bases, there’s options with both more “anime” and more realistic proportion. 

I collect them for both owning Fate/other characters without spending a fortune and for drawing references and I find them quite well suited for this purpose. Why on earth despair if I’d ever want to draw Arturia in armor when I can just grab my figma of her, pose it, take a photo and then draw on it? :P

Now, hardware and software check, way to find poses check, what else? 

Layers are your best friends. For example, Bradamante? A good 50+ layers, some of them stored in folders so I could just select and deselect them to remove or put on mantle, lance, shield, sword etc. Just... remember to name them to save yourself a lot of time.  

And changing a layer’s opacity too, especially to draw the definitive lineart over the first rough sketch or for shading or highlights.    

The more I write the more I find things to write about so I’ll call it for now, this post is already a WoT as it is. Hopefully I was of use, but if you need more, ask right away and I’ll do my best! :)