#then i freehanded the rendering and the background

[giddlygoat]

can i get a kiss? and can you make it last forever?

i got emotional listening to See You Again by tyler, the creator. i thought of how long mario and peach have been a part of each other’s lives, and so i wanted to paint one of their very first romantic moments. painting in the N64 style was TONS of fun!

[ziegenkind094]

Your art is so incredible. especially your aftg art—they are filled with so much beauty and so much soul. I adore your messy rendering style and your freehand lines. I hope you don't mind but I have the jeanneilkevin trio art as my home screen and I love staring at it for minutes on end. you capture them so perfectly and so beautifully, and your art style is so unique and so ziegenkind094. that beautiful balance between mute tones and vibrant, that little pop of color in the hair and wherever else... the absolute life in your art as you draw people so naturally.

I like to interpret the trio art as Neil being out in the white as he has accepted his fate and moves towards a better future, even with all its shortcomings. Kevin sits by similarly, but a small amount of darkness lingers, because the trauma will be difficult to stop remembering. Jean sits in a darkness that seems to be fading, showing his difficult past and the memories he thinks he can never forget. but he turns towards them, secretly hoping to be like them, free despite trapped. a spark of jealousy that he hates himself for, deems himself undeserving of such a luxurious yet horrible emotion. how his forever partner glances at him, and he sees the what ifs.

I'm not sure if you meant anything by the background choices, but regardless you did something 🌸🌸 forever my favourite ziegenkind094 art, amongst many others.

it's so embarrassing how much I'm gushing over you and your art so I'm going to go as anon. I hope your days are filled with endless joy and peace. I hope you'll forever find happiness in the art you create, and I hope you'll forever give us the honour of seeing it in all its glory.

Thank you so, so much for taking the time out of your day to send this lovely message, dear anon. I kept it in my inbox for a while and read it many times, especially when I needed a pick-me-up. It means the world to me. ❤️ And I'm so happy that someone realized the symbolism in this drawing! I usually don't pay a lot of attention to such things, but this time I did and it's great when people notice. 🙆‍♀️

[habken]

Just- how long does it take you to just draw? Because the sheer amount of details you put and the coloring must take ages

I mean ofc it depends in the piece, but like aprox?? In a fully rendered piece?? Just how

It really does depend haha and I’m super bad at judging time, so I just have guesses and approximations on how long stuff took but I can try and give examples!

It’s long so I’m putting them under the cut

Usually sketches and the busts I do with a bunch of different expressions take the shortest amount of time, something like the nimona sketches I did took maybe an hour or two ? Sometimes takes a bit longer if it’s a character I’m unfamiliar with because I want to make sure I have their design right and also that I’m illustrating their personality in a more or less accurate way.

The drawings with Kaminari, I think those took 5-7 hours?? Again super hard for me to figure out exact times cause I don’t really keep track of it and I like wandering in the middle of drawing so my sense of time is real bad. The expressions probably were an hour or under, and the full bodies took a lot longer, cause there was posing, styling, shoe drawing, colouring etc. involved.

The domestic bkdk comic I did for the top tier zine took way way longer, I want to say anywhere between 40-60 hours lol. I worked on it for months so that’s about as accurate as I can give in terms of time spent. I got hung up on a lot of details with it and the colouring took forever.

The villain attack comic took about 35+ hours ? The backgrounds took forever lol, I was trying to get better with freehand perspective, I struggle the most with environments and I wanted to challenge myself with both that and with drawing a comic with more action.

Finally, the one with little bakugou and deku holding hands I think took somewhere around 8 hours ? I was trying some new stuff with colouring and also background stuff

[tpher]

how do you make your oc screencap edits?? i also have a td oc and i dont really know where to start 😭

ok so!!! i use firealpaca which is just my usual drawing program. so i'll keep using it as a reference for my steps but of course im sure whatever similar program u use should have similar features

i'll be long winded for funsies as usual 💕

FINDING YOUR SCREENSHOTS

the key to decent td edits is to flat out trace screenshots whenever possible. stock pics will do, but of course itll be a lot more fun and less obvious if u use a screenshot from the show and put it into your new context

in terms of making your ocs, you will likely have to do what someone once called "frankensteining" your pics. this is where you use pics of other characters for their specific features and put them together since your oc doesnt have official screenshots to trace. this also absolutely comes in handy w canon characters! maybe you have a pose but u need them to be sitting. so try to stitch together two different pics to get what u need

it will look very scary but just trust the process. here is a random example i made using a dawn screenshot (where i removed the background), gwens eyes and eyebrows, and kittys hair

the sketching part is semi-optional. if you think you can freehand the lineart then go ahead but i assume your oc wont be a complete copy of something found in canon and therefore you will have to draw the newer/different features (such as the hair or the outfit) at least a little bit. and sometimes when i frankenstein the pics, my brain gets all overwhelmed so sketching makes me feel better jfbdjdnd

(in terms of my own oc, i screwed myself over bc his body type is so unique i gotta freehand it like all the time 😭

you can see i traced his head from his render (ALWAYS DO THIS BTW!!! TRACE CONSTANTLY), but then the body was freehanded using a canon pic as reference because tracing the pic wouldve been inaccurate)

THE LINEART

yes the iconic td thick, sharp, flat lineart. i achieve this by using a normal pen tool, turning off the pen pressure, and then turning up my pen stability to 40-60 (very high). you could use a curve tool if that works for you! but i would suggest against that for ALL of it bc the tool just wont respond well to rly drastic curves and such

the pen size varies on the pic. if the characters are close-up, itll likely be a bigger one. and then the characters' little details and facial features are usually a slightly but definitely noticeable smaller size. for the most part, ive had the bigger pen size at 13 while the details are around 9. or big size 10 and smaller size 7.

heres my technique:

as u can see, all of my lines go a bit too far. this is so that when im done drawing them, i can go back in and slowly erase where they meet and get them all sharp and pointy. this is just how i personally do it lmao. when it comes to facial features and other stuff that doesnt connect to anything, just get a close look at your reference to see how thick or how thin the edges get and do ur best to erase the edges to the point where they should be

THE COLORING

not much to it! the bucket tool is the best way to go. again just get a good look at your references just in case any parts have the lineart also colored in

THE BACKGROUND

you can find some generic td background pics on google or u could get them from the show and try to erase any character in the way lmao. if ur recreating something like, say, a dunc/ney scene w a different ship, then its very tedious but youll have to do your best to erase the canon characters and piece the background back together.

i like using the smudge tool a lot for this!!! just kinda pulling whats already there towards the characters. to save time, put your drawing visible on a top layer as you do this so that you dont have to edit the ENTIRE background, just what you need

THE RENDERING

ok so heres a big one imo. after youre done, youre gonna have to fuck up the quality at least a little. well not that u HAVE to but like..... to match the standard quality of a td screenshot? ive never seen a td screenshot in perfect hd quality outside of stock art. so u could blur ur drawing just a little bit. maybe add in the teeniest bit of chromatic aberration (just set it to 1 or -1). not ALL of them together but u do whatever u gotta do

my personal favorite is blurring just a little and then saving it as a jpeg (around 65-80%) so that its pretty crunchy and looks all the more real

obviously not a NECESSARY step but just something to point out. especially if ur background isnt the best quality so the characters have to match it

this one from yesterday i didnt even redraw topher bc i was lazy and he looks fine enough. i just put danny onto the pic to cover the other character. so i blurred danny a little bit and then saved it in a pretty low quality so that they match one another. look at those pixels. that crunch.

SO THE TLDR IS just trace and copy your references as close as possible. if you cant find a reference for your character, try finding another character w something close enough

[chickensauras]

Hi, I love your art so much! And I'm so curious about your drawing process! What program do you use? Do you sketch first or just freehand the line art? Stuff like that.

Your drawings are a huge inspiration for me and I'd really like to know how you do it, sorry if that makes me sound like a desperate fan but I kind of am

TwT

Ha dude your good, but also uh damn >.>;;; preciate ya. Uhm first off I have no idea what im doin ever and am an unorganized person- but ill tell ya what I got :U

Ok so. I just draw on my tablet- like a galaxy s4 tab. Its NOT a gd iPad, but basically I 'draw on my ipad'. Pros and cons to this, but big pro is I take it everywhere and can draw any time

I draw in medibang- the mobile version (with wifi turned off so no ads)- cause its good for comics and I dont even know how to do fancy rendering stuff, so I dont need all'at. You just add comic panel, I usually set the line between 6 and 10, you get a box, then set kerning (vertical line spacing) and leading (horizontal line spacing) to whatever you want and: boom. Easy panels.

As for drawing process.. it varies. I dont have a lot of examples, but there's almost always some sorta sketch layer, even if its REALLY vague- but its just as often overly detailed. Sometimes sketch layers even get colored or shaded or whatever ┐(‘～` )┌ in the first example you can see the turquoise lines- lol thats the sketch layer and the rest is just free handed over it, but in the next image, thats all sketch layer and it has colors and shading, and the last is an example of how it ranges even on the same page :Þ

Also, with comics, the biggest pain in the ass is actually working out paneling for me, cause that's what establishes pacing and determines how much room you have for characters, background and dialog. If comics aren't your thing, thats fine, ignore this- but if they are, def read up on paneling and page layout- pretty pictures are great, but readability is more important imo. A good place to start is def 'understanding comics: the invisible art' by Scott McCloud but there's also YouTube videos that go over things like timing and flow in comics

Also- separating background :U I don't always remember to do this, but try to separate your background and character. Then you can do things like erase the background around where it touches the characters or even add a lighter outline so they don't get lost in the sauce. Can also use different colored line art to help distinguish them. All can be seen here :U (see how 1 of the leaves hes stepping on is lined brown instead of blue? S'cause it's not in the background layer

Oh also also! Do shit in whatever order you want. I've seen people try for efficiency by doing all the sketching, then all the line work, then all the colors in organized gos- and if that works for you, great. There are def advantages to that. Buuuttt. Idk man if that feels like a slog.. just start coloring shit when you get tired of line art. You may hafta adjust stuff, but you figure that out before you colored everything. I regularly have panels next to each other lookin like:

.... this turned into me tryin to give advice instead of just sayin what I do >.>; sorry bout that. But last thing. May or may not be helpful. I never turn time-lapse recorder on cause it tends to make medibang lag, but I have 1 whole time lapse video :U Its dragon ball z AU stuff, but if it helpful, great- if not, nothin lost adding it :T I know it moves quick, but you can see in it I do 1 initial vague sketch, a better sketch, then the final lineart. Then also a buncha coloring and junk.

[piratedllama-art]

Your process videos really ruined your art for me. I like your concepts but you're just painting over photographs and it's... weird. You don't seem to change anything to be uniquely 'yours'... just painting over photomanips which doesn't come across as genuine, especially considering the contrast between your photomanip illustrations and freehand work. Have you thought about working more on references and actual studies?

been thinking about how to answer this for a couple minutes now so here we go

What I do is a variation of photobashing-- really just painting over photos to achieve realism. After everything is rendered to how I want it (I usually take out a lot of extraneous details from backgrounds), I stop using the reference photos to do my own lighting, effects, etc. Small details to create the ambience that the base photos don't have.

I definitely get what you're saying here because I've seen other realism artists get variations of this same ask. My particular paintings rely on this uncanny realism that I can't reproduce as effectively when I eyeball things (especially perspective). The "weird" is part of it. I could just do a photomanip but instead I meticulously painted over every detail instead--what does this add? What does it take away? Do my hours of effort mean anything when I'm just "painting over photographs"?

Anyways, when I do traditional art, everything is drawn by eyeballing. I do lots of studies digitally and traditionally.

[wirewitchviolet]

Lazy Uprezzed Paintovers Drive Me Up the Wall

So I just randomly saw a trailer for the PC and Switch ports of the first 3 Etrian Odyssey games, and like... I understand why people keep doing this, but seriously WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP DOING THIS!?

This is a really crude comparison I just slapped up in MS Paint. I just hunted up the original resolution art for this monster, pasted it over a screenshot, ended up with a black background eating the tail and all but one leg because... that’s what happens when you paste a .webp into MS Paint, and I freehand scaled it up at possibly a slightly wrong aspect ratio, but see my point here is that even with the sloppiest distorting-est lazy job I could have done here, just scaling up the orginal pixel art by 500% looks a hell of a lot better than doing that then using it as a base for someone to quickly trace over the line work then hitting it with a couple gradient fills, or whatever the hell it is people keep doing.

I’m going to move on to some other examples, but just humor me with a couple key details here. Look at that corner of that cheek. In the original art we’ve got this ragged little notch in there like a chunk got cut out and these big thick warts kinda falling into the gap. In the redraw that detail is just completely gone. Above that we have another nasty scar, all gouged out under the eye and healing up weird. Which in the redraw just becomes this thin vague X. Is that even still supposed to be a scar? I could just see it as a cheek line now. We have eyes going from this real intense glare to just kinda dopy and vacant. A shadowed mout where we can only see a couple teeth to... those specific 7 visible teeth in clear vew and alot of exposed gum suggesting it doesn’t have any others, nor a tongue. The other visible scars, which are already kinda cartoonishly implied on what I’m not going to deny was always kind of just a big tomato-y blob of a body are really de-emphasized and the one on the leg I didn’t lose in the black loses some three dimensionality as we just do whatever with the line weights.

You can really see this sort of thing though with ports of the Ace Attorney games. Here’s someone else’s griping example of what they did to my poor boy Edgeworth here.

Apologies again as that old shot seems to have been through a ringer of resizes and format conversions, but do I even need to say anything here? Now LOOK AT THE FREAKING JUDGE!

You tend not to see so much of this with 8 and 16 bit games getting modern updates. With older pixel art, people seem to have it sort of enshrined in their memories, so you either get nice straight upscales of original art, or you get some kind of effort to recapture the vibe with actually new reimaginings of the characters, either hand-drawn or rendered.

(Yeah I know this isn’t a remake, it’s still a great example of updating classic sprite art for a higher resolution, shush.)

I don’t know if it’s the color depth, the actual size of the screen in the player’s hands, or the games being more recent, but I feel like in people’s rosy memories of GBA and DS games, there’s way more detail than the actual 256x192 pixels they were working with in reality, so it must feel like blowing it up and doing a little smoothing is going to work out, but it’s still low resolution pixel art. The stuff that looks real good is the stuff where someone hand-editing each individual bit of visual information is applying techniques to imply more detail than can actually be displayed on the screen. If you up the resolution, and you don’t go in and actually add that detail in the denser pixels you’re then working with, it’s always going to look just awful. Stop doing it. Please.

[dragonicstyle]

this week's progress....

For bigger sprites, I really do have a better time freehanding spritework instead of trying to work off a base body sprite. I had the same realization back when making sprites for CotO, but yeah working from the exact same sprite bases is really... limiting for me lmao. It literally took me more time trying to get this sprite looking good in the confines of the sprite base than just drawing over it.

Anyway, I realized I MAY wanna run back Knight01's color palette in the sprites. It's a lot easier to make things out with Mage01's varied colors compared to Knight01's primarily white palette... I'm understanding why games sometimes have wildly different tones of color between the character's big rendered art and their small sprite art (beyond old consoles' color limit). Easier to see what's what without everything being a shade of white or accidentally blending in the background.

Ya realize something new every day that's tha beauty of life and all.

[cranity]

Okay for the anon who asked about my process, i’m an idiot and accidentally deleted the ask so here we go.

I go about it a few different ways:



Sometimes I use myself as reference to set up my composition and poses, and ngl it looks super goofy but it works and I find it to be a lot faster than thumbnailing or sketching. Afterwards I do my lineart(no sketch). Then comes the part were in a separate layer I use the paint bucket tool to color the surrounding characters (the red part). I hide my line art layer and underneath the red layer I’ll fill in the blank space with another color (in this case light blue). I delete the red layer and now I have my characters colored, mostly. On a new layer on top of that I block in the colors that I might use and then use my light blue layer with locked transparency to fill in the gaps of color. I usually merge these two layers so I don’t have a step-by-step of this. After my base colors are done I will color in my line art.

I will still mess around with the colors some, once I get to a point where I like I’ll add texture or text if need be.

However, a lot of the times I will freehand my poses. My line art can be considered a very cleaned up sketch since I usually don’t sketch a base. I personally find that a lot of the drawings energy is lost when you sketch something and then line over it. If I do use a rough sketch I use a huge semi transparent brush so that I don’t get any details in and risk losing that energy in the process. Its more like creating a rough silhouette.

For shading, once I have my color palette roughly picked out in my head I just blob it in and then “sharpen” it

Backgrounds are a whole different beast and most times I would just say fuck it and freehand it in (left). A few times though I’ll actually try, like on the right I used Adobe illustrator’s 3-D space to create some buildings.

Here’s a speedpaint of something I fully rendered (x)

My process changes around a lot, but this is roughly how it goes most of the time!

[drawpile-dev-diary]

Drawpile 2.1 architecture overview

Recently, I dusted off the old "Rustpile" branch (my attempt to integrate my experimental Rust based reimplementation of the paint engine to Drawpile itself) and, to my pleasant surprise, discovered it was in a much better shape than I remembered. So, I've been reading through Drawpile's code and drawing a diagram of its overall architecture to get a better idea what it would take to complete the integration.

Here are my notes on the current state of Drawpile's architecture. If it seems unnecessarily complex, that's because it is. There are vestigial structures that no longer make sense and are streamlined away in the Rustpile version. But more on that in the future, here is the present:

The CanvasModel class that contains the state of the canvas, including the layer stack itself, as well as associated models needed by the GUI.

The StateTracker handles drawing commands and applies them to the layer stack. A big change in version 2.1 was that brush state is now entirely local, what is sent over the wire is a list of precomputed dabs. This made the protocol much less stateful, meaning the only thing the state tracker needs to keep track of anymore is the undo history. The Rustpile equivalent is called "CanvasState".

LayerList is a Qt list model. It is used by the layer list GUI widget. Its content is kept in sync with the actual layers in the layerstack.

LayerStack contains the actual layers, as well as other things related to the actual canvas content: the background tile and the annotations.

Layer contains tiles which contain the actual pixel data. Layers are sparse: fully transparent tiles can be presented by null pointers. This is an important optimization, as when multiple layers are used, most layers tend to be mostly transparent. Layers and tiles utilize copy-on-write, which makes copying layers very efficient. This is essential for the undo functionality, that relies on snapshots of the canvas state.

AnnotationModel is a Qt model that contains all the annotations. Annotations work much like text layers, but are not true layers: their stacking order is undefined, there are no guarantees that they render the same on all clients and they are always drawn on top of the canvas. This is a Qt model so that it can be easily accessed via QML (which is not yet implemented, so there is presently no need for this to be a Qt model.)

LayerStack Savepoint is a snapshot of the LayerStack's content. A savepoint can be created from a LayerStack and can then be used to revert the LayerStack to that point. This is unnecessarily complex. In the Rustpile implementation, whole LayerStack instances can be copied cheaply and lack interior mutability thus have no need for savepoints.

A LayerStackObserver is registered with a LayerStack to be notified of changes. An EditableLayer is created to wrap a Layer and add editing functions to it. It notifies the observers of the owning LayerStack when changes are made. In the Rustpile implementation, there is no EditableLayer wrapper, as layers cannot be mutated in place. Instead, all editing operations return an area of effect object that describes the affected area. These can be merged together and dispatched to observers when the LayerStack is updated.

A layerstack can have multiple observers, but in practice just one is enough. A specialized observer class instance that caches the flattened canvas as a QPixmap is shared by all GUI widgets (the canvas view and the navigator.)

The AclFilter stores the state of the access control list used to filter incoming messages. When a message is received, it's first passed to the AclFilter, which either accepts or rejects it. Certain messages affect the ACL itself (e.g. those setting layer lock bits.)

When a Recorder instance exists, it writes a copy of each received message into a recording file that can be later played back. When playing back a recording, ACL filtering is not necessary, since rejected messages were not saved. (For debugging purposes, rejected messages can be stored but marked as such, so they are ignored during playback.)

The Lasers, UserCursors and UserList models store the state of laser pointer lines, the positions of each users cursors and the list of logged in users, respectively. They are Qt models used by the GUI widgets. (Lasers and UserCursors are Qt models only for use in QML, which isn't presently done.)

Additionally, not visible in the diagram, is that the state tracker and the layer stack are referenced in various places:

In the layer list dock, the layerstack's censored bit is checked

The layer stack's view mode is set by an action in the main window

The layerstack is used by the flipbook window

The built-in thick server uses the layer stack, state tracker and ACL filter

The reset dialog needs access to the state trackers savepoints

The canvas view item and navigator reference the cached pixmap layer stack observer

The canvas scene references the annotation, laser and user cursor models

The canvas view widget needs to know the size of the canvas

The annotation editor references the annotation model

The canvas saver runnable needs a copy of the layer stack

The document class references the state tracker and the layerstack

The playback controller uses the state tracker

The annotation tool uses the annotation model

The bezier tool creates preview sublayers

The floodfill tool needs read-only access to the layer stack

Freehand tool needs read-only access to sample colors

The selection tool copies pixel data and creates temporary eraser sublayers

One big problem with the present architecture is that when the paint engine is heavily loaded (for example, when logging into a session and downloading the session history,) it blocks the main thread which leads to the GUI locking up and even disconnects as network traffic isn't being processed.

The solution to this would be to run the paint engine in a separate thread. However, this has proven challenge. From the list above, one can see that the layer stack is referenced in many places. The current workaround is to periodically relinquish control back to the eventloop when paint command execution is taking too long. However, the Rustpile work is an opportunity to fix the architecture to be more multithread compatible. Since in Rustpile, LayerStacks are easily copied, one can be kept around in the main thread for read-only access while a new version is being processed in the paint engine thread. More on this later...

[ot3]

My approach to flat colors + limited palette drawings

This is a follow up to this post  i made about how i go about figuring out a color palette for my limited palette drawings. an anon asked me about my actual technique of finishing them so this is gonna be an explanation of how I work in a limited palette with flat colors. I ended up with these thumbnails for a sketch last time so we’re gonna work from here and I’m gonna sort of walk through how i got to the finished version

first things first: every part of this process is just developed as a result of me messing around. take my advice with a grain of salt and if you think you know a way to do something better/that makes you more comfortable. go with that over what I say.

I’m honestly a little surprised when people express confusion about how i draw like this because it’s SUPER simple - literally all you’re doing is just stacking solid color blocks of shape. its very imprecise despite how sharp everything ends up looking. 

First things first is that you want to decide how you will be handling your edges throughout the duration. Do you want your shapes to be ultra-sharp and precise, or do you want a little bit of a wobblier, grainier edge? Both can look good but it’s VERY much a matter of situational basis. i’ve been favoring looser and grainier shapes so that’s how i’m going to be working on this. 

on the left here, you can see the shapes made with precise rectangular selections and an untextured pen, on the right, freehand drawn shapes and a grittier pen. There’s something immediately pretty different feeling about them. So play around with that first - its not something that’s fun to change halfway through! But lets step back a minute. It helps to work large to small. The two biggest shapes here are these orange chunks and everything gets stacked on top of them so i’m gonna do that first. 

Now, a key feature of what i do: clipping masks. almost all digital art programs have them. What a clipping mask does is it constrains the pixels of a layer to the transparency of the layer below it. Here I have the light orange layer, and then on top of it the buildings and billboard are clipped to the orange. Most of you probably already know this and I’m overexplaining a bit, but there was a time when i didnt know how clipping layers worked and someone had to explain it to me.

now you’ll notice the shapes of the buildings are rough, and sloppy. here’s the fun part: since this is all about stacking shapes, only your exterior edges matter. this all gets filled in. be as sloppy as you want when you’re making your shapes. in fact, the outside edges get trimmed out a bunch to when i do this - i go in and erase them clean. Don’t be too finnicky about drawing perfect and precise! its a waste of time. As long as the silhouette is what you want, the interior can be a nightmare.

Working this way, it’s important to keep your layers stacked in a way you can make sense of. Right now there are four layers here: the background dark orange, the two main orange rectangle shapes, and then the buildings on one layer and a billboard on the other. I rack up a LOT of layers doing this and it makes it annoying in some aspects, but being able to freely recolor any one chunk without losing my detail is a key aspect of this.

So, I block those out

Next, I do the same for the smaller chunks that are still main shapes. There are once again, a lot of layers here. The top layer is the hair - you can see the head showing through it. The head and arm underneath the hair, same layer. Then the cup. Then the light green pieces of paper. Then the dark green ones.

The cup is technically farther forward than the head and arm so you would think it’d go on top, but the point isnt to recreate the foreground and background hierarchy with layers so much as it is to group things in a way i can work with. The cup goes underneath so it can be grouped with all the other objects on the table. 

now, i just go and fill in all the shapes. i forgot to do the blinds but i get them later. you might notice a lot of these shapes are pretty rough, which was harder to notice before they were filled in. Now that I can see better, I go in with an eraser and clean up the edges until they’re the shape I want 

sometimes erasing leaves little bits of ‘noise’ around objects like on this napkin here. i like to keep a little bit of this noise for texture, but if you dont like it make sure to get rid of it! if you’re working very crisp this will stand out a LOT

Next up is to add some detail onto the objects

I flipped the canvas here because the head shape was wrong - the ears were uneven and i wanted to fix it. I want to go about adding detail onto the billboard and buildings. i do all detail with clipping masks - but the objects are clipped to another layer and so nothing can be clipped to them. instead, i unclip them and just erase by selection for the same effect

all of the text on the papers is clipped to the papers below it. the buttons are clipped to the phone. the yellow photos and card are actually another independent layer on top, in case i want to recolor them separately. im indecisive and end up recoloring things a lot. For the most part these objects are starting to become recognizable as more than just shapes

i go in an add the details on the background and character now. theres some more stuff on the table. the lines of the face and ears are on one layer, and the flats of the eyes below that. Here’s what each group of layers is, and what they look like on their own

The background/bottom chunk. Just the table, window, and shirt.

The middle bit. All the stuff on the table and the blinds.

Finally, the top, which is just his head and arm. 

now this stage is the bare bones of the drawing. you can more or less tell everything that’s happening. it reads. but its very much lacking in something - it doesnt have a ton of depth or interest. and adding that additional detailing, the dept and interest, is where stuff starts getting REALLY tricky and subjective. 

im gonna take you to a much simpler scenario to show the sort of options i go through at this stage

ahh its our dear friend, sphere casting shadow. this is, more or less, the kind of image we have. you can tell whats happening but it’s lackluster. there are TONSSS of ways frm here that you can go add interior detail to a shape once it has been established. here are some quick and SUPER rough examples

from top left to bottom right: flat cel shading, softer airbrushed/gradient shading, halftone, and a textured brush. Each of these has their strengths and weaknesses. They can also be combined.

for example, here’s the solid cel shading being used to contain a gradient/airbrushed detail. This image - probably the single oldest piece of my art i still willingly show people - is entirely colored with gradients being contained in cel-shaded chunks. It has a sort of soft, luminous quality but without losing its crispness.

here’s a super quick bust with some variations of stuff going on. obviously this is no masterpiece but you see how different types of detailing can interact with each other and be used to distinguish materials too. 

With the mob psycho comic I did, the detailing that wasnt line was done using a variety of halftones of different shapes layered on top of each other

by contrast parts of my ace attorney comic use a textured brush and have a sort of blended, papery feel

any of them can work for pretty much anything as long as you are using it with intent. practice around. mix styles of finishing together. find a comfort zone. the more you do it the more intuitive it becomes and at the heart of it this process is a very intuitive way of drawing because of how far removed it is from realism.

Now here is the trick - light and shadow.

Everything up to this point has been very flat and adding detail helps but there’s only so much that can accomplish. To get HEAVY light and shadow you need to think about things differently. I think if there’s any part of this process that’s complicated, its this one. 

To truly get the most out of your palette, you need to pick chunks of an image to be in higher/lower light and then either ‘step up’ or ‘step down’ the colors in that chunk. here’s what I mean.

Here’s our ball with a beam of light on it. Everything Within the beam of light is one step in our limited palette lighter than anything outside of it. Here’s how I go about doing this: the shape of the beam of light is below everything else. Then, once I have the shape blocked out, i select it. With that selection in place, i go to EVERY SINGLE LAYER that’s effected, lock the opacity, and recolor that chunk. So what’s going on here is that there is only one more layer - the beam of light, below everything but the background, and the rest of this effect is just caused by every layer above it now being two-toned following the exact same silhouette. THIS is why it’s so important to keep your layers separate - if the shadow and highlight had been painted onto the base directly, i would not be able to do this without significant effort. 

This works with all of the finishing techniques I talked about above

A combination of cel shading and half toning, all stepped up to give the appearance of heavier light on one area.This is also how I go about rendering transparency in this style. All of my layers are fully opaque and I allow the colors to do the work of conveying transparent material

Here’s our ball with the patterned/textured brush  shading, being viewed partially through a window

it’s obviously not a very representational way of working, but as long as your audience UNDERSTANDS what you’re trying to convey, then you’re executing it successfully.

So with that, now we’re gonna go and finish this drawing.

For this one, I decide a big central shadow is necessary. In the original thumbnail, he was backlit, which I still plan on doing, and that wouldn’t make sense without casting a shadow.

I’ve had to change the colors of some objects entirely in order to get this to work right. This is what I mean when I call this an intuitive process - some stuff felt weird, so I changed it. This also involves a bit of problem solving. The newspaper is now unable to be separated from his hand. Sometimes changing the color of an object makes that object look better, but ruins its relationship with the objects around it. It’s up to you to learn how to adjust and finagle things until you get it where you want.The paper he has and the napkin underneath it also all blend together now.

The next few parts of this process are REALLY just trial and error, where I toss a bunch of spaghetti at it until it works. It’s hard to decide what to screenshot, because I don’t know what will or will not be part of the finished drawing. To that end, you can watch the recording of this drawing here. This video isn’t edited at all so it contains a couple of minutes of really shitty sketching, and then all of the color thumbnailing work i did in the last post. Actually getting started on these final colors begins around the two minute mark. It is also sideways, I am sorry I don’t know why. 

Now, here you can see where I���ve more or less worked things out. His hand’s not on the cup anymore because my friend pointed out it didnt have an arm attached to it. I added some halftoning to make a gradiating effect in the sky and on the table to give the impression of a sunrise. His eyes are different but as of posting this, I don’t like them and am probably about to go back and change them again. The Cup now has a shadow and some rim lighting. His hand is in shadow. The stain on the napkin is big enough to define the edge of the paper on top of it.

Little things like that. 

The more you draw like this the more the way you need to think about your space becomes natural. I hope this helps and I wish you all the best of luck!

[hazelenergy]

How I Digitally Paint like a Scenic Artist/Designer

Aka: how I did this and put my degree to good use. 

LONG POST WARNING

Step 1: Research. 

First off, get to your image search. If you are going to be using Google, you may want to type “-pinterest” in the search to eliminate the countless boards. 

I had to figure out clothing that is vaguely late 1800s. I found a multitude of reference images that were fancier clothes- but I wanted to find images of clothing for kindred across all social classes. Photographs from the era and paintings are your friend. They will more accurately showcase what was worn. 

After Fashion research comes location research. The 1890s in America is known for the rapid industrialization. Factories were getting bigger and work days were getting longer. But, I wanted the moonlight to be cascading into the place, illuminating the scene. This means I needed to find a structure that had skylights or let sunlight in. And the best images I found? Slaughterhouses. Fitting, huh?

The same rule for fashion still stands- if you can find photographs or paintings from the era- they’re better. There are tons of places still standing today from the 1800s. But today, they look WAY different. Ya know, Abandoned! So just be sure to take this into consideration if you search “abandoned slaughterhouses” or go trespassing like I did.

Lastly, pose research. Finding the poses for a fight scene can be tedious. So, I enlisted some help from a few fight choreographers and stunt men. You can record their fights and play them back at quarter or half speed. You can also get a mirror and flop on the floor a bunch. I did both. This lets you see the action/motion lines you are going to replicate in the drawing.  Heres how we initially did fina’s pose:

And sometimes you have to go back and get a clean shot. I ended up using this pose for the axe.

Step 2: Set up and Background!

When you open a new file, set it to the dimensions and resolution you want. I was working at 600. Usually, I’m working at 300-350. You can always reduce resolution. Its hard to prevent fuzzy lines if you increase it later. 

I cannot stress the following enough:

You work background to foreground. Big Shapes and areas to little shapes. Work your way forward. What this means is you need to fill in as much space as possible first. Then build your details. I prefer working as follows: Big Solid tones, Soft shadows, Dark Shadows, Highlights, then final blend. Once you finish this, put an overlay on top. This knocks everything back and helps create the illusion of depth. See this at work with the video below or here

Step 3: Figure Drawings + Composition

Utilize that research and images you collected to pose your characters. I create subfolders for each set of figures. Organization is important here. This will help keep you on the right layer and prevent the eternal digital artist struggle of “Fuck that was on the wrong layer!”

Even after you move on to lineart and shading, Keep the sketch layer as a reference. You may need to see what youre original notes/ figures looked like as you do the lineart and shade. Don’t be afraid to move them around and alter the composition rn. You want to be able to make changes. Make notes! Detail light sources! 

I’m about to through out some art jargon:

You want to think about asymmetric balance. The easiest way to achieve this in an eye-pleasing manner is to use the Fibonacci spiral. Yeah. This boi:

Place your figures and actions in a similar sequence to the spiral and the viewer’s eye tends to naturally follow it. This is sometimes called the Golden Ratio in the art world. 

Doesn’t need to be perfectly on the spiral. You can break it- but its an excellent tool to plan how things move in the piece. 

Step 4: Lineart

Once you got things sketched- its time to do the lineart. I’m using clip studio paint’s standard brushes. Nothing fancy. I often switch between the G-pen and the For Effect Liner. Mapping and Turnip are for thicker lines. 

Usually I set these pens to a specific thickness depending on where I’m drawing.

My background figures are lined at 0.05 thickness, the midground is .1 to .2, Fina is .3 and the foreground is .4. I set my stabilization high to help keep my lines smooth. Stabilization 100 means there’s a significant delay between where the pen is and the cursor. I like the stabilization to be at 20 for freehanding and at 50 ish for outlining. Dont become completely reliant on the stabilization though. Good and smooth lineart is drawn from the arm not the wrist. Your range of motion is severely limited if you only move your wrist. Practice moving from your elbow and you’ll be surprised how much smoother your lines get. 

Once I finish lining the figures, I usually go around it with an outline. This does three things: 

1. Solidifies the figure and cleans lineart for paint bucket tool. More on that in the next step.

2. Its a stylistic choice. Helps give it that comic book feel with a heavy outline. 

3. Pushes figures forward or back in the composition. Thicker outline helps denote that a figure is farther forward than another. My background figures have no outline to push them away 

Step 5: Digitally coloring

For each figure you are going to select outside the lineart. 

Create a new layer under the lineart

Invert the selection. Paint bucket. You should now have a solid shape of the figure under the lineart. Do not deselect.

Create a new layer above the one color. Title it solid colors. Paint in thick, solid tones. I like to use the mapping pen and turnip pen to color in my solid tones: skin, clothing, hair, etc.  

After that, deselect. Create a multiply layer if you can. If your program does not have a multiplier function, Pick a tone you want to use for shadows and lower the opacity (usually 30-40% I like to use lavenders or blue tones). It will not be as vibrant, but you can edit it in post. Select off of the solid colors layer. I like to start with skin tones. Use the airbrush tool to create soft shadows. You don’t want to create harsh lines on this layer.

Then repeat this process with harsh lines.  

Then knock it all back with an overlay. If you dont have the ability to create an overlay, you can again drop a solid color and lower the opacity, but you’ll have to mess with the color balance/ brightness/contrast to let all the hard work come through. 

You’re going to repeat this for every single figure. Here’s a few color theory tips though.

Your overlay colors should be darker (not more vibrant) in the foreground and lighter (avoid using pure white) in the background. This helps with the depth of the piece. Things closer tend to be darker (not always true, depends on lighting)

You can choose to use color theory to aid your shadows. Instead of choosing black or grey for shadows, choose a complimentary color. I used a lot of green for this piece, I used red for really dark shadows. Its not that black drains color- its just loses some depth if not used carefully. 

Keep your colors consistent. Helps unify the piece. You can strategically break the consistency to draw focus. For example, Fina is the only figure with a true blue overlay. This helps her stand out from the other figures who have reds and greens. 

Step 6: Touch Ups and Final Renderings

Now comes the most tedious part. If you’re like me, your computer fans have been whirring for the last few hours trying to render this monster of a file. If you havent already,  SAVE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD

These are the last four layers I have for the entire piece. Here, I am trying to create effective and believable lighting. This kind of work I have only been able to achieve in clip studio or photoshop. You can do it with normal layers, but choose your colors CAREFULLY. Stay away from pure white. Carefully utilize your knowledge of light and shadow to create soft highlights. Harsh lines tend to be a stylistic choice for me. The final layer, subtract, dulls out harsh red tones. I used this as a final overlay to help put everyone and everything in the scene. Without it, things are a little too green and skin tones are a little too blushed for vampires.

The challenge here is I want to tone down the red, but not lose the vibrancy of the blood. So, shift it to a blue. This also helped reinforce the “nighttime” effect. Its only a slight change.

Final thoughts:

Whenever you finish something, its important to reflect.

1. I am so FUCKING PROUD OF MYSELF. This is easily one of the most complicated pieces I’ve done in a while- and I’ve made 16′ tall faux stained glass. Brag. Let yourself feel awesome cuz you just made something awesome. 

2. I timed myself on the piece. I could have easily spent another 7 hours on it. But its important to know when to stop messing with it. Partially for budget reasons but also when you get down to the details you can make yourself go insane. Theres also a ton of detail work I lost cuz of overlays or its just too small to notice. Fina’s face? hard to see cuz its not close enough. 

3. I needed to take frequent breaks for this piece. That was good. Resting and stretching was very important. That is one of the reasons why I was able to work so fast. 

4. I started doing more digital art in April 2020. I have to say, practice makes perfect. I practice drawing and digital painting for at least 3 hours a day. 

That discipline has allowed me to improve so rapidly. So- I don’t wanna hear shit about I can’t possibly get this good! Or I couldn’t even draw a stick figure! BULLSHIT. You can. Get yourself some free software like Krita or Autodesk sketchbook and start playing! 

And thats what I got! Thanks for coming with me on this long post! 

[rathologic]

OK its posted i can talk about it now. classic stamatin family art commentary

- freehanded the entire thing which im v proud of! did one analog sketch, then scanned and modified it a whole bunch...

- peters hand had an extra finger that i didn’t notice for 90% of the process!! this has happened before!!!

- andrey and eva’s earrings match :) peter’s ears are pierced too but he doesn’t have anything in them

- the background isnt very rendered because i sort of... put it together from memory just as a basis for the “final” background... and then decided it was good actually LOL. discord mutuals know why i remember this view off the top of my head

- my favorite part personally is the texture of eva’s dress top thing! least favorite is the stamatin shirts those took so many redos and im still not thrilled with em

[patrick5311011]

Week 5

To start the class off there was a number of freehand practice sketches to be completed. This would prove to be a great practice and allow for personal sketching ability to be improved over time. Some of the freehand tasks were harder than others but this allowed for more thinking and visualisation to be used to achieve the end result. I spent more time on the more complex ones but with the continual attempts at achieving a good result. I believe i pushed my visualisation and created a solid example for what i need to practice in the future! The best examples can be seen below, these document line weights, shadow and texture/shape.

The second task was to re-design a bottle shape in a developmental style. This was done using sketching and photoshop. Originally i took the idea to paper and figured out a number of shapes. This i then took to photoshop using the masking tool with the brush. Then using opacity and brush hardness shadows and highlights were added to lift the image of the page. The the addition of line weights and texture was added with the brush tool. This also added a concept feel to the design. Then personal touches were added such as the splatter brush, shadow angle, background banner, opacity changes and titles. Overall i am happy with the results and i will be converting a photoshop file to a preset for future use for concept style projection. This will create a constant and professional look to the design development!

This weeks tasks were both challenging ad enjoyable. I believe this week has opened my eyes to further digital rendering and sketching techniques.

[felix5257736]

Week 5 - Sketching Workshop

Week 5 has been a really interesting yet challenging week as we were introduced to digital rendering. Whilst I had difficulties, I gained a lot from both the lectures and the studio task.

Part 1: Freehand Sketching 

Part 1 was surprisingly useful, I didn’t realise that it would be beneficial or even necessary to warm up for sketches, and by the end of the process, I felt that my sketches were more accurate and intentional. I learnt that its really important not to rush into sketching without being appropriately warmed up, it prepares you both physically and mentally and results in a better standard of work.

Ellipses are something that is going to take some time and practise to get right, (see Fig. 5) as such I will need to work on this in my spare time. Overall I am glad that we were introduced to these techniques and I would recommend them to anyone attempting to sketch in the future. 

Part 2: Digital Rendering

I felt I learnt a lot from completing the digital rendering task this week, and I enjoyed the opportunity to translate some previous experience using photoshop into this task.

Sketches:

The purpose of these sketches was just to get my thought process going prior to beginning the digital rendering. Whilst I didn't use all them, I learnt that it was actually a really good thing to do as it helped me establish what might look good and what will not.

If I did this again, I might try to complete these initial sketches to a higher standard, so there is less design decisions to be made when the sketches are translated to photoshop. 

Process Video:

The video below shows my process from start to finish during the digital rendering task. Overall, I found it really challenging, many portions of this video see me going back on mistakes and completely changing elements of the composition. I struggled with understanding the layering and masking and the overall complexity of this. I overcame this partly through re-watching the recording of the week 5 lecture.

Despite reviewing the lecture, I still struggled, partly due to the quality of the recording, but also I would do the same thing as Rob, however it would result in a different outcome. This was highly frustrating and took a lot of perseverance and help from resources like Graphics Wizardry and Michael DiTullo on youtube to overcome. In the end I managed to find workarounds for the issues I was having, and I am reasonably pleased with he result.

My advice to anyone trying to do this task is again to ensure that the foundations are correct. It was very easy for me once I had the correct layers and masks to edit and play around with designs, however when the masking and layers were wrong, nothing would really go as planned. This says a lot about setting yourself up for success right from the start, and I will do my best to achieve this in the future.

Final Composition:

Overall, I am happy with the result, however if I were to do it again, I would I put more time into the shadowing as it isn't as effective as I thought it was going to be. I chose to use green for the background as it is a neutral colour that represents health and good luck, and as this is intended for presentation, I thought it may help the customers remember my design as positive. I considered putting notes or centre lines on this composition, but in the end it felt unnecessary for such simple products, and might have cluttered the page.

[dorcas5191143]

Week 8 - Photoshop Rendering

I found this week’s task to be the most intriguing by far.  We used Adobe Photoshop to create a digital rendering of a hair dryer.

Having used Adobe Illustrator for a few years now made switching to Photoshop a bit easier than starting off as a total beginner to Adobe products.  The walkthrough we are provided with is also very helpful in guiding us through the entire process.

Starting with a sketch...

We started with an already made handsketch, which we had to change the levels and saturation of in order to use it as an underlay for the digital sketch.

Levels

We used “Levels” to adjust the brightness, contrast, and tonal range of the image so that the background is white and the outline is clean and crisp.

Creating Paths

The “Pen” tool is used to create a path that outlines the hairdryer.  As an Adobe Illustrator user, I am very familiar with using the pen tool.  It is important to use as little control points as possible to create a smooth curve that is not jagged.  The curve can be adjusted using the “convert point” tool by pulling the handles of control points.

Select Inverse

As I filled my clipping masked groups using “Edit > Fill”, I realised that selections of the background were made instead of the actual object.  Hence, I had to redo the clipping masks, making sure I clicked on “Select inverse” every time.

Subtract Mask from Selection

Similar the Rhino, trimming is available on Photoshop.  The only difference is instead of trimming a path, a selection needs to be trimmed.

Blending Mode

Blending mode changes the way a layer reacts with the layer underneath it.  Creating 2 layers, one with the “Multiply” mode, the other with the “Overlay” mode allows shading and highlights to be added to the render respectively.

Rendering - Lighting, Shading & Highlights

The Brush tool (shortcut: B) is used to add shading to the hairdryer to make it more photorealistic.  Using the brush tool with a mouse is quite tricky as I have to be very steady with the way I handle the mouse.  I might look into other methods of rendering such as using a tablet which could makes drawing freehand curves easier.

Gaussian Blur

The glow around the LED lights are made using the effect “Gaussian Blur” found in Filter > Blur.

Texture

This feature is great for making surfaces appear more matted.

Opacity & Colour

Opacity is another word for transparency.  Adjusting the opacity of different brush strokes creates the effect in the shaded box.

Reflection

This exercise was quite a relaxing and enjoyable one.  It was great working in a group because when one of us got stuck, the others could help and in doing so we all learnt more than we would have if we did the task individually.

I’m quite satisfied with the final rendering of the hairdryer. The only thing I didn’t like was the air inlet texture.  The array of small circles are too uniformed and even though you cannot tell from afar, it actually looke quite odd when you zoom in.  It would look more realistic if the circles were arranged in a radial manner and varied in size.