#but like I JUST got used to the Wacom and CSP... now I might have to figure out a bunch of new shit... urgh

[allgremlinart]

spilled water on my stylus in the middle of doing commissions what if I killed everyone on earth and then myself ahahahahah

[cynopoe]

heyyy idk if you remember but I once asked u about your inspiration/how you learned anatomy/draw etc. and I wanted to ask if you have answered that already. ofc you don't have to (you don't have to answer this one either, if you don't I'll just assume you didn't) ig you posted stg about not having time etc to reply and again: i love your art

Hey! I distinctly remember something like that although I don’t think I answered. And I can’t find it in my inbox either. Either I responded it and it got lost in the void or I might have deleted the ask when I was cleaning the box from all the porn bots. Either way I’m sorry for losing your ask 🥲

I will answer it now

I started drawing digitally when I was 15 on an old wacom tablet. I didn’t stop doing traditional stuff until I bought an ipad and got lazy with the endless options it offered me. I still use the ipad with procreate and CSP interchangeably. In my experience Procreate has a better coloring tools be it the colors itself or the brushes, the editing tools. Blending modes are, in my opinion, slightly better than CSP. and CSP inspires me to do more sketches and comic style stuff. I recommend them both.

What I will say now will stay between you and me. Alright? I learned doing anatomy from drawing filthy, filthy pornography. I wasn’t any good at it in the beginning, but honestly it is the best way to learn it, in my experience. I developed so fast when I was doing nsfw art. A lot faster than if I had only been drawing normal stuff. Many of those drawings will never see the face of day, but they’re there. And they helped me a lot.

Other than that I also recommend studying real life. Try to understand where body parts start and where they end. Try to study the “line of action”. Try to remind yourself a body is a 3d form. Foreshortening helps, although I’m not the biggest fan of it. Trace photographs- and I’m not saying like go over like by like. Study photographs. There are many reference pictures online. I often find mine on pinterest.

Redrawing one pose over and over again until you can do it with close eyes, helps, and will drive you up a wall. You will want to break your pencil. But it will help. Compare what you draw with the reference picture. Remember to flip the canvas often. Our eyes get used to our art, good parts and the mistakes.

Sleep on a pose if you can’t get it just right. Your eyes will be kinder to you in the next day.

Yeah using references and being very mindful of them will help you a lot. There are some youtube tutorials. This streamer has been my favorite lately.

About finding inspiration… I’m sorry I can’t help you much with this one. You see, I’ve lost mine and I have been looking for it for a year now. Idk. Get unnaturally obsessed with a media? Get into a moderately large fandom? Have some people around you to keep your interest alive? Idk I haven’t been active in any fandom in years. But when I was, I saw that social interaction of it helped me to stay motivated to create.

Keep your mind sharp: read, study, interact with anything out of your comfort zone. In my personal experience, keeping in my walls never really gives me that rush, that eureka of inspiration. I often get this desire to create when my mind is active. I don’t know if it will be the same for you though.

Thank you for this ask! And thank you for being incredibly patient. I’m sorry again for losing your ask before. I hope I could help even a little 🖤 stay creative, friend.

[catboymoments]

What art stuff do you use? Program tablet and the like. Or what do you recommend for a beginner getting into digital art?

I was a clip studio paint girlie for a longggg time until recently when I got my ipad and now I use procreate with an Apple Pencil! I really love it even though it might lack some of the features I liked in csp, but I feel like it’s improved my skills so much with the different formatting.

and tbh it differs for everyone but id recommend starting out with a good paid for program such as paint tool sai or clip studio paint! People talk about the free ones a lot but honestly I don’t think it’s bad to drop ~$30 for a one time purchase on something that’s worth it. If you want to use a tablet you don’t have to spend a bunch of money on one since Wacom isn’t the only tablet company on the market rn- Huion and Gaomon make very good inexpensive tablets that range from $25 and up, and some even have screens you can draw on that are less than $300!!!! But honestly, I really don’t think spending a bunch of money on a tablet is necessary. Small ones can work just as good- it’s the same technology. It’s just about how you like to draw.

[ninjautizm]

what stuff do u use for ur art :0 (like apps and tables)

I use clip studio paint! And I use a Boston drawing tablet! It's pretty big, however I might need a new one as the screen from my computer doesn't pop up on my drawing tablet, therefore I might need a new cable, but it still works! For now it just works as a big ass Wacom 🤔

I also use two brushes in csp called "imi" (for sketching/lineart) and "muffin" (for colouring and rendering!) However I can't get a picture of what the brushes look like rn, I haven't been using these brushes lately though because I've been trying out new ones! I'm trying to dig out different kinds of styles :)

But if you look further down at my art before I got into Ninjago, you can see the brush being used if it has that vintage texture in the lineart! Here's a example of the two brushes being exclusively used in my artworks:

The brushes are in the csp brush store/catalogue, and they're free! I've liked the vintage crayon-textured brushes that you can clearly see in some people's artworks and I've been trying to find some of those brushes! It's been a long search, but "imi" and "muffin" are close to that description! I just gotta learn how to make my own brushes to achieve a brush that I want..

If you don't use csp, I'm sure other brushes in free programs like medibang paint, ibis paint and Krita, have a similar brush set to the ones I use (like a pencil brush!) I have used Krita sometimes with my MLP artworks! Krita is good too, they have great brushes to render and colour with, plus their advanced colour wheel is super helpful! :3

[spearxwind]

Hi!! I'm an aspiring artist and I was hoping your could tell me what kind of tablet your use for your drawing?? Is it the kind you can draw on the actually screen? The one I have now doesn't let me see what im drawing on the actual tablet cover, only on the computer screen so to be there's a massive disconnect. Do you also have this problem? If not what tablet would you suggest to a beginner who wants to try digital art?

Hello! I actually don't have a screen tablet and don't really want one :3

the tablet I'm using now, which is the only one I've ever had, is a wacom bamboo create. It's 9 whole years old now and works like a charm!

in fact, i recently learned one of my favorite artists RJ Palmer (you might have seen his work, he's the one behind the realistic pokemon!) has drawn everything on a screenless tablet that recently turned 13 years old!

you really don't need a tablet with a screen to get good at art or make really complicated pieces, even though at first there's a huge disconnect between your eyes and your hand after you get over it, i think they're the most trusty thing you can own

and yeah, when i got this tablet i also had a huge disconnect and my lines were wonky and shaky, and i wasn't confident in the program i used. i used a really shitty barebones version of photoshop (ps elements. horrid little program) and then moved onto firealpaca for many many years until i felt i couldn't grow more as an artist with that, and then made the decision to buy CSP

not that you have to follow those steps at all, but some of my very talented friends have had similar journeys!

If it'd make you feel more confident, i could pull up some of my super old just-got-a-tablet-help art x)

as for recommending a tablet... i literally only have experience with mine, so i can vouch for it. its medium sized and costs 200$ more or less because its wacom (the expensive brand). but its also a 10 year old model so its only a couple years until the drivers give out on newer computers

i have heard huion and XP-pen make wonderful tablets with much lower prices though! but i think you should be perfectly able to learn and do cool things with the one you have already

[the-odd-job]

I want to get into digital drawing. Do you have a program to recommend? And what ipad or tablet do you use?

This got long so I’ll just put it under a read more.

First, tablet. I have a Wacom Bamboo CTH-470, which is like, super duper basic and cost around 100€.

But it’s always been well enough for me, so if you’re just starting out I’d suggest getting something from a similar price range (it’s also going at its eighth or so year and is yet to fail me despite getting abused quite a bit, so needless to say I’m p happy with it.) I also like smaller tablets like the one I have now, ‘cause they fit into smaller space and I’ve never felt the need for anything bigger. I have tried a bigger tablet (that I didn’t own), but I did not like it.

I can’t really tell you anything about iPads. I have used one a few times (Procreate as the drawing app), but I... Wasn’t a fan of drawing directly on the screen. So personally I’d never get any tablet, iPad or screened drawing tablet or anything of the like, where you need to draw on the screen. But that’s just a personal preference and probably comes from being so used to just regular drawing tablets; I’m sure that if I used one for long enough I’d get used to it. I just have no interest in learning.

Another personal preference: styluses with no batteries in them. I’ve never looked into why some styluses have batteries, but I do not like the thought of needing one for the pen to work.

Then, programs! Me, I’ve been using SAI since I started digital art, first SAI 1 (pirated version), and now SAI 2 (legit version), and I swear by it.

However, SAI is stupidly basic as a drawing program, which is a very big part of why I love it (it lets you focus just on the drawing without any distractions), but is also a huge downside of it. In the exact same price range is also Clip Studio Paint, so honestly, if you were ready to shell out 50~€ for a drawing program, I’d just go for CSP and learn to use it from the beginning, ‘cause CSP is anything but basic and is actually a very powerful piece of software (and 30 day free trial goes without saying. For SAI too I think, if I remember right).

If you don’t wanna pay and don’t wanna pirate, there’s a bunch of free art programs too, most of which I’ve never used to any great extent. Except GIMP, but GIMP isn’t exactly a drawing program, it’s an image manipulation program, so I can’t recommend you’d try to draw with it.

A couple of free drawing drawing programs I have heard good things about are Krita and FireAlpaca, so you could check those out.

And unless you’ve used drawing programs before, word of warning: every last one of them is gonna look complicated and scary at first, some more so than others. Part of what drove me to SAI was exactly because it was so stripped down, which made it easy to learn, but even that was a learning curve. Just take it slow and don’t be discouraged. Once you learn to use the drawing program of your choice it’ll become second nature.

But you gotta weigh the pros and cons of the programs for yourself. In my case, yeah, SAI is basic, but it’s also easy to use and I can achieve the results I want with it, so it’s enough. But what you want and need from a program only you can say, and will only come with a little bit time and a little bit of experience. For me, one feature I can’t live without, is stabilizer. SAI has one for across the board, CSP has one for individual brushes, and idk about other drawing programs. But I need the stabilizer, it gives me so much more control over my brush strokes and brush pressure (for reference, I keep SAI’s stabilizer at 12 excepting the rare instances where I need to turn it off). Some might kinda call that cheating but WHATEVER I like my stabilizer sue me.

Another thing is SAI’s layer and layer folder organization methodology. I have it down for my art flow and use of hundreds of layers for basically everything I make, and is what keeps me from even trying to switch to Photoshop, ‘cause Photoshop doesn’t support the same layer folder clipping thingy. Which is why even if I save as psd from SAI, opening it up in Photoshop will just have it look fucked.

I can’t remember if CSP handled the layers the same as SAI or Photoshop rn, but yeah. Once you get to using something and get used to it, you’ll find features that you just need that will weed out the potential programs for you. Not that you can’t ever learn around them or learn to live without them, but it becomes an issue of do you want to.

Sheesh, that got long. Hope it helps though!

[rainystripe]

HEY MARI!!! i LOVE your artwork and i truly admire them so much, i get so excited when you post new ones. thankyou for being an angel and sharing your artwork with the fandom. it inspires me to take up digital art as well! i just wanted to ask as well, what software and tools you use for your drawings? im sorry if you've gotten this question before, i was just curious! and what kind of advice do you have for artists who wants to take up digital art?

First of all, this is SO NICE OF YOU TO SEND TO ME?! I was NOT expecting to EVER receive a sweet message like this omgggg.THANK YOU NONNIE!!!!!!! YOURE SO SWEET 💕I try to share what I end up liking with you guys!! Being part of this fandom has been such a great experience so far and I wouldn’t change it for the world. You guys have been so welcoming to my little fan artist-self. Love coming up with things and letting the bugfam see!! I haven’t been drawing much up until I watched this dang show and here I am now..all I can draw is them ;)) I’m glad you’re liking the stuff that I post!!Second of all! I’m so HAPPY that I can inspire you and anyone else out there to want to take up my favorite hobby and medium of art: digital. It’s new and different, but it’s honestly SO convenient. Tools: Clip Studio Paint (the site has sales here and there ESPECIALLY during Black Friday and Christmas. I got my program for $18 dollars USD, and it usually runs for about $60 USD)Wacom Bamboo Graphic Tablet (I got it way back in ‘09, it’s old but it still works fine!! I’m looking to upgrade to a screen tablet soon though~)Lastly, I know for a fact that digital isn’t easy to figure out. If you’re someone who’s used to editing on Photoshop and are familiar with the workings of that program, then CSP should be easy to maneuver through as it looks the same-ish. Getting used to figuring out how to draw while looking at a screen is also a trip, but the more that you draw and doodle, the more that you get used to working with a tablet. TRUST ME when I say that it’s FRUSTRATING, but the more that you work with it, the less of a hassle that it becomes. I find that working traditionally is difficult for me now as I’m too used to my tablet and easy access of the tools that come with CSP. That isn’t to say that you’re going to suck at either, but it takes time to get to used to digital. You can’t expect to be awesome in a weeks time, so DRAW DRAW DRAW!!! I LOVE digital, it’s so refreshing to me to work with, I’m still learning as I go, you never stop figuring out how to work programs :)) Another thing is the tablet itself, name brand or not (ex. Wacom vs Huion) both are good! You don’t have to spend hundreds on a tablet just because of its name. You can always start off with something small like the Bamboo series from Wacom like I did. I love mine, but I’m looking to upgrade soon to a screen tablet from Huion! So don’t worry too much about that!! You can also get those touch screen laptops (or you might already have one! Who knows!) but don’t rely on the expensive stuff!! Start off with something under 100 bucks and experiment from there on, especially if you end up doing digital for years (like me) Digital is complex when you first start off, but with programs like Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop (most confusing to me tbh) or Paint Tool SAI (old program that I used to use, GREAT for beginners) they’re all great and have their own learning curves, but it’s fun :D I hope that you get to do digital, I’d LOVE to see what art you come up with💕