#wanted to play around with gradient mapping with this one

[raincosmos]

FURINA DE FONTAINE !

like / rb & credit if using

[blaithnne]

If I may, how do you typically approach choosing colors in your art? It always has just a lovely feel to it, so I was a bit curious; don't feel pressured to answer ofc :]

I’ve been using a lot of gradient maps lately, they work by switching the greys in your piece with a corresponding colour according to its value. Basically, I colour in black and white, grab a gradient map, and then I adjust the colours by hand until I’m happy with it. This isn’t the only kind of colouring I do, but it works great if you’re in a rush or you’re struggling to find a good starting point for your colours. I’ve been operating under a time crunch for these Sketchbook Week drawings and the Plenism promo stuff I made, so for all except one I used gradient maps. I’m actually in a bit of a funk with my colours right now soooo I’ll come back and do a proper colouring tutorial for my style once I’m happier with how my non gradient mapped colours are looking !

[1x20]

hello and welcome to my tutorial on how to create gifs like this one! full explanation under the cut, but if you wanted to take a little peek at the gifset attached to this tutorial, here ya go!

for the purposes of this tutorial i am assuming you know

how to make a gif

what vhs footage looks like

STEP ONE: MAKING YOUR GIF

choose your footage and plug it into your desired software of choice! i use photoshop for this so i can only attest to the efficacy of these methods in that context

as for shot selection, you could feasibly choose anything. however, i prefer shots without too much movement in them - makes it look more like a home video.

because of the heavy amount of colors and filters, i'd recommend a gif somewhere around the 40-50 frames! but of course you can play around.

oh i also set the frame delay to 0.08 seconds. this is slower than most gifmakers tend to set theirs, but it makes it run buttery smooth imo.

STEP TWO: MAKING THE COLORING

here's where we get vhs specific. if you're unfamiliar with vhs footage, i recommend clicking through this youtube playlist! if you're not interested in the coloring, skip to step three (smart object fuckery + filters)

now while making a set i tend to choose some primary colors for my gifs. in the gifset i linked above, i chose to work with blue and orange-y yellow. in some of the other gifs i'll be using as examples (from an unfinished set) i chose green and yellow.

to create the above coloring i generally use these steps:

1) curves

i'm a maniac so i use the same curves layer to initially edit the luminosity AND colors of my gifs. the purpose of this layer is to edit brightness/contrast like i normally would and already start the process of changing the colors a little bit. this is my curves layer for the blue house gif:

to make the gif go from the left image to the right image:

as you can see i used the brightening curves to make the footage a whole lot lighter. i also increased the reds to get rid of the cyan tint a lot of blue footage has, slightly increased the blues, and once again decreased the greens to get rid of any cyan. this does make the blue hue a bit more purple, which is a nice bonus!

as for the gif of the boy, that one's a little harder to show a before and after for, but i'lls how the curves for good measure:

the original shot was already quite bright so i only edited the brightness a litttle bit. because i knew i wanted the gif to be green and yellow, i increased the greens, decreased the reds (except in the shadows), and decreased the blues (to get yellow)

2) channel mixer

now the channel mixer layer takes a little getting used to so i recommend experimenting. ALWAYS USE THIS LAYER ON THE COLOR BLENDING MODE for a more even result.

i use channel mixers to sort of... unify the colors a bit more. for the house gif, for example, i increased the blue channel to +110% blue, but decreased the blue in the red (-12%) to retain the yellow in the window.

if you want me to explain this more in depth, send an ask! it'll be kinda longwinded though

before / after of the boy gif with curves/channel mixer.

3) levels

this is where it starts looking more vhs-y! vhs footage has light shadows and dark highlights.

first, set your levels layer to luminosity blending mode to retain your beautiful colors.

then, crunch the hell out of your gif to make it very... mid.

this may feel a little wrong at first but i prommy it'll look okay at the end. a before/after for the boy:

now that's starting to look familiar right?

4) color fill/gradient map

because i want to unify my colors/make sure my gif is saturated, i usually add either a color fill or gradient map layer. in the case of the house, i chose to go with a dark blue color fill:

because the coloring of the boy gif was a little more complex, i decided to go with a brown to green gradient map.

this will make the shadows yellow, and the highlights green.

BOTH THESE LAYERS ARE SET TO OVERLAY. i usually fiddle with the opacity of them until i like it, but it's anywhere from 7% - 17% depending on what i feel like that day

5) curves (again)

this layer is probably useless but i do it anyway to make myself feel better. this is just a regular curse layer to up the brightness a tiiiiny bit and amke sure everything's clear. also it helps counteract the darkness your overlay color will add in.

6) color balance

this is my most subtle layer so i won't be able to show before and after but i fiddle with the color distribution a little until i'm satisfied. set this layer to color blending 'cause that's what you wanna affect!

i decided i wanted the house gif shadows to be a little more purple, for example, so i added in red (+3), magenta (-1) and blue (+1). etc etc. do what feels good!

STEP THREE: SMART OBJECT FUCKERY AND FILTERS

OKAY that was a lot. sorry or you're welcome. but good news: now's the fun part. convert your animation to a timeline, then select both your coloring and gif layers, right click, and select convert to smart object.

now that your gif's a smart object, i usually crop it. i tend make vhs aes gifs a 4:3 ratio (so 540 x 405 px) because that's what vhs footage was usually recorded as! crop your gif, resize, and then we can continue.

1) color bleeding

vhs footage usually bleeds its colors - this manifests as a short of... weird subtle halo around any object. the way to recreate this in photoshop is to duplicate your smart object.

set your copied smart object to color blending. now move it to the side a couple of pixels (i usually do around 5px, but you do you!)

as you can see, the tree and chimney (and everything else but less prominently) have a yellow shadow to them. this is exactly what we want!

2) filters

now's the time to add your filters and make it look like shit (but on purpose!) first, select both smart objects and convert to smart object again. this will ensure the filters apply to all layers evenly.

i use the following filters:

unsharp mask (amt 35%, radius 4px) - this will subtly add some sharpening but only on the edges of objects

add noise (amt 7.5%, distr. uniform, not monochromatic) - this will add the signature vhs grain.

box blur (2px) - i edit this to be 75% opacity with the little arrows to the right, just to make sure you can still make SOMETHING out when you're looking at the gif. MAKE SURE THIS FILTER IS ON TOP OF YOUR NOISE FILTER. tumblr will kill your gif otherwise

4) ONE LAST THING

usually at this point i'm not happy with either the saturation or levels. (usually the levels). so on top of your smart object, add another saturation or levels layer and fuck around!

in the case of the house gif, i thought it was too bright still so i set my output levels to 13 and 216. for the boy, i thought the shadows were too dark, so i set my shadow output to 11.

BEFORE & AFTER:

aaaand that's it! thanks for reading! if you have any questions, feel free to come to my askbox, i'm always happy to explain my process. happy giffing 🥰

[tickfleato]

how to make cool blobby turing patterns in photoshop

i'll preface with i learned the basic loop from skimming a tutorial on youtube, but as someone who prefers written tutorials i'm sure many would appreciate one! also, the second part of this is some of the visual effects i figured out on my own using blending modes and stuff.

i'm using photoshop CS4 on a mac so some buttons and stuff might be in different places on windows and newer photoshop versions but all the actions are the same. my canvas is 1000x1000 pixels.

UPDATES (i'm hoping these'll show up whenever you open the readmore?)

it's possible to do something similar in krita using this plugin, made by the love @arcaedex

it's also possible to do this in photopea, a free browser alternative to photoshop! the results are pretty much identical.

FIRST off you wanna get or make a black and white image of some kind. it has to be one layer. can be noise, a photo, a bunch of lines, whatever. here's mine, just some quick airbrush lines:

now find the actions tab. idk what it looks like in newer versions of photoshop but you probably won't need to dig!

hit the little page thingy to make a new pattern. once you hit 'record', it'll record everything you do. the little square 'stop' icon will end it.

now you want to do a high pass filter. you can mess around with the radius to change the size of your squiggles, but the tutorial had it set to 6. experiment!

now add the 'threshold' adjustment layer. i use the adjustments tab but i think there's also a dropdown menu somewhere. keep it at the default, 128. merge it down. (control or command + E or you can right click it like some kind of weirdo)

and finally, the gaussian blur! the radius of this affects the shape and size of your squiggles as well. i like to keep it around 4.5 but you can mess around with that too.

after that, hit 'stop' on the action you're recording, and then repeat it a bunch of times using the 'play' button, until you have something you like, like this:

WOW!! that was fun!! and only a little tedious thanks to the power of macros. anyway, here's some fun layer blending stuff i like to do. it's with a different pattern cause i made this bit first.

anyway, using a black and white gradient (or a grey base that you do black and white airbrush on), make a layer with the vivid light. this will make the blobs look thicker or thinner.

then, for cool colors, do a gradient map adjustment layer over that:

and finally, my best friend, the overlay layer. just using a gradient here bc i'm lazy, but feel free to experiment with brushes, colors, and blending modes!

NOW GO. MAKE COOL SHIT WITH THE POWER OF MATH. AND SEND IT TO ME

also these are not hard and fast rules PLEASE mess around with them to see what kind of weird shit you can make. here's a gif. as you can see i added some random airblush blobs in the middle of it, for fun.

[lovewireds]

been meaning to post my designs for these little guys forever. insane splatoon rambling under cut to explain design choices and lore related things ... read my autism boy

btw this is a repost from our art side blog this was written and drawn like months ago <- minorly rewrote some things tho

thx splatoon users drfreeman & drcoolatta for fueling my splatvrai autism brainrot ... i hate u /J

GORDON

idk how to explain this but Theoretical Physicist is inkling coded . maybe its cuz splatoon species social hierarchy

Native ink color is Orange, but he has Dark Brown tentacle roots.

Uses custom weapons to attach in place of his prosthetic; It works best with Splatlings but can be adjusted to attach other weapons.

If the thing above didn't make it obvious, he's a Splatling main. He switches out depending on his mood though.

sighhhhh technically an Agent... stares at the ceiling...Main character...

His arm loss is like pretty much the same as in-canon but it's with the octarian army shrugs. don't ask me why he doesn't just regenerate it cuz hes a squid thats for me to know and you to find out. (get partially sanitized loser)

Born & Raised in Inkopolis pre-splashtags; He wasn't informed of the switch to Splashtags being expected when participating in most activities around Inkadia.

TOMMY

I forgot why i made him an inkling why did i do that. I think it was bc i didnt wanna make them all octolings but i was wrong srry we all make mistakes /hj I ALREADY REDREW HIM ONCE IM NTO DOING IT AGAINNN

Native ink color is orange-brown.

His hat has an eye guard for sensory reasons; He covers up as much of his skin as possible because he doesn't like the feeling of foreign ink on him.

He isn't a specific weapon main, he just uses any long-range weapon to minimize the possibility of getting ink on himself. If he has enough guarding, he prefers to use N-ZAP '89.

Makes his own gear for sensory reasons as well :) It's legal when ur dad's the G-Man.

Exclusively plays in Turf Wars, Anarchy Battles, etc with friends. He hates playing with people he doesn't know.

Born in Splatsville !! He feels like a Splatsville resident. His occupation is resident I cannot imagine him doing Anything

His dad is that creepy curtain in one of flounder heights windows /j

BENR(E)Y

Octoling bc I wanted him to be sanitized :) Other than the visual part of being sanitized, I thought him being clinically dead fits /hj also lore reasons below

Pre-sanitization, his native ink color was blue.

Great Turf War veteran; He didn't do anything in the war itself, he was just enlisted lol. He was primarily security for the Octarian Domes in the years after the war. Yes, that also means he is over 100 years old.

"Raised" (debatably) in Octo Canyon.

E-liter main (4-star Base + 5-star Scope) and avid squidbagger. He also uses any heavyweight weapons (dynamo, tenta, etc)

Absolutely hates working at Grizzco, he only does Turf Wars and Anarchy Battles. He only works at Grizzco during Big Runs. The type of guy that does X battles.

Professional Anarchy / Ranked / X Battler btw. That's literally 90% of what he does.

Got on Gordon's azz over him not having a Splashtag; i wonder what that parallels.

BUBBY

Genuinely don't have a lot to say about his design. He gives off Splatoon 2 Octoling vibes (showoff /hj) also i wanted to make his hair wispy like it should be.

Native ink color is a light blue-gray gradient.

The drawing doesn't give it credit but I swear those are glasses not goggles .. they're opaque-colored slanted oval glasses !! ^_^ u can interpret them as spiked or just eyelashes, both are right.

oh also the text under bubby says "Is Best" in some splatoon font we downloaded awhile ago . i think it was ripped from splatnet

Blaster main. I don't know how to explain this one but it feels right.

helps with the practical Map props (ie ink rails) and with some weapon gear manufacturing ^_^ tech guy

COOMER

Was going to make him an Octoling for the convenience of making his hair curly but i didn't want to make all of them octolings + i think his personality generally fits Inklings more.

Native ink color is an off white gradient.

Slosher main cuz he likes moving his arms. this makes sense to me. Also is a fan of Splatlings and other Shooters.

i felt ill trying to design coomer without making his eyes two lines with eyelids

War Veteran...Stole some octarian tech and got fucked up super limbs. Cyber Inkling stealing from octos !! [inkadia crowd goes wild] /j

anyways outside of the war™ he's a data researcher. just generally. he does shit with splatfests and eggstra work.

If you splashed him with ink he would stand unmoving. He would not shake it off.

DARNOLD

Ok i'll be honest the Octoling choice is primarily bc Octolings have the afro style & inklings have no textured hair styles (i didnt have the energy to design smth that could work) . His personality fits octoling too though :3

Native ink color is red-orange.

The fucked up guy that makes those drink effects people never use ( i use them ... )

He doesn't participate in Turf Wars or Anarchy Battles, but he works some gigs at Grizzco for extra cash every once in awhile !

the type of guy that goes after flyfish cuz no one else will . god bles !!!

not a lot to say about his design & his place in inkadia , it kinda speak for itself . he just wants to get by and make his drinks in peace . #autism ... he is pretty much exactly the same as his canon self

[ursiday]

im curious, how do you color your lines? they always look so pretty!!!

Thank you! I pretty much just use a bunch of layers lol I start with something like this in just one color (I used a soft round brush on like 70% opacity for lining this)

Then on a new layer in multiply I go over all the parts I want to stand out more in a different + darker color. I also make a clipping layer to lighten certain parts of the lines from the first step. Explaining which lines I color is difficult to describe but I'm mainly thinking about defining the edges of distinct objects and the light source

You can stop there but I like to add some kind of color filter top of that. My favorite way is make a solid color layer on exclusion mode above the lines > merge all visible layers on a new layer > set this to "color" layer mode so it colors all the lines underneath, but there's a lot of ways you can do similar stuff. I think a gradient map would probably be easier and give you more control for a similar effect

Then I add flats on a multiply layer above all that. TLDR I like to have variation in value of the lines and then vary the hue depending on the value. I don't have a method for how I pick the filters or line colors really I just play around with what I think looks nice with the colors of the piece 🫶

[mikaorangeart]

[lip smack]

I wanted to do another fully-fledged piece, but I couldn't decide on subject matter, so it just ended up being Benrey. One day I'll draw something that isn't just a character standing around.

Bonus: these alternate color versions that I stumbled upon while playing with gradient maps

[mikelogan]

gif tutorial

i was asked to make a tutorial for this set i made, so let's get right into it!

first things first, i downloaded the music videos from youtube in 1080p using 4k video downloader. unfortunately, the quality of youtube videos always seems... not great, to put it simply. plus these music videos are from the 90s, so they've been upscaled to 1080p after the fact. all of this works against us, but i've definitely worked with videos of lesser quality than these, so at least there's that!

when i gif, i import video frames to layers rather than screencapping. this comes down to personal preference. after everything has loaded, i group all my layers together and set the frame delay to 0.05. i then cropped my gif to 540x500.

the next step in my process is sharpening. i did play around with my settings a bit given the quality of the footage and the dimensions of the gif. i compared both @hellboys low-quality video gif tutorial to my regular sharpening action and my vivid sharpening action and in this case, i preferred my normal vivid sharpening action. i used this tutorial to create the action for myself, and you can find other sharpening tutorials here. this action converts my frames to video timeline and applies sharpening.

once my gif is sharpened and i'm in timeline, i begin coloring. i wanted to simplify the amount of colors used in these gifs, again because of the video quality -- i knew it wasn't going to have the crispness i would normally like for my gifs. here are my coloring adjustment layers and their settings (not pictured: my first layer is a brightness/contrast layer set to screen) (explanation in alt text):

all of these layers and their settings will vary depending on your footage and its coloring (and obviously, feel free to make the gradient map whatever colors you like if you aren't going for this exact look).

pretty basic coloring, especially with just slapping a gradient map on top (my beloved), but at this point, i still didn't like the quality of the gif, so i added a couple textures/overlays.

i put the left one down first and set the blending mode to soft light and the opacity to 8%. depending on what look you're going for, you could increase or decrease the opacity or play around with different blending modes. i like using this texture with lower quality footage because even when it's sized up a bit, it adds some crispness and makes things feel more defined. for the second texture, i set it to overlay and 75% opacity. we love and respect film grain in this house.

now for the typography! sometimes i really enjoy typography and other times it's the bane of my existence for the sole reason of just how many fonts i have installed. anyway, here are the settings i used for this set:

make sure the color of your font is white and then set the blending mode to either difference or exclusion. i can almost never see a difference between the two, but for this set, i used exclusion. below are the blending options (double click on your text layer to bring up this menu or right click and select blending options).

now we have to add the warp effect. with your text tool still selected, click this icon at the top of your screen:

from the dropdown menu, select twist. these were my settings, but feel free to play around with different warp options and their settings. the ones i use most often are flag, fish, and twist.

this last step is completely optional, but it's an effect i use in most of my sets with typography. duplicate your text layer (select the layer and ctrl+j), turn off the layer effects (click the eye icon next to effects), and set the blending mode to normal. right click on the layer and select rasterize type. right click on the layer icon itself and choose select pixels.

at this point, you should see the moving black and white dotted line showing that only your text is selected. then go to edit > stroke. here are the settings i almost exclusively use.

this is what your text should look like now:

using ctrl+T, move the layer off the canvas so you can't see any of the text anymore. you should be left with only your outline. click anywhere on your canvas to de-select the text we just moved. use ctrl+T again as well as your arrow keys to nudge the outline over to the left 2px and up 2px. this is personal preference as far as the positioning, but i almost never move it any other way. you can leave it like this, which i sometimes do, or you can set the blending mode to soft light like i did for a more subtle effect.

and that's it! rinse and repeat for each gif in your set or use a different warp effect on each gif to switch it up! if you have any questions about this tutorial or would like me to make one for anything else, please feel free to ask any time!

[darckxlady]

could you please do a tutorial of your game of thrones 'so much for stardust' gifs where it has the ripped paper textures? it's so pretty, and i'd like to learn how to do one with just the texture in the middle and two gifs on either side, like half and half and just having a rip in the middle. it's so cool how you did a gif in the middle though so i wanted to ask as well! all of them are so cool looking. you are extremely talented. if you don't want to though i understand :) thank you

TORN PAPER EFFECT + BLENDING TUTORIAL

thank you so much for your sweet words, dearest anon and i'm sorry it took so long to answer but it's here now so i'll try my best to explain <3 disclamer: this is the first tutorial i ever made, it's very screenshot heavy and it assumes the basic knowledge of ps and gifmaking. if there's something you don't understand, don't hesitate to ask <3 so, let's get to it!

1. PREPARING THE BASE As you can see in this shot there's a lot of space between Rhaenyra and Alicent and that makes it perfect for the ripped paper overlay without hiding much of the base gif. So the first thing i did was to crop it like this:

Also you want to make sure that the highlighted box (delete cropped pixels) is unchecked! After taking the usual steps for the animation (creating frames from layers, reversing the frames, setting frame delay) you continue with the video timeline and convert your frames into a smart object. psa: if you don't have the motivation or the time to play around with coloring here are some psds i recommend: 1, 2; as for the sharpening i think this one is the best.

now that you have your smart object sharpened and colored what you want to do next is drag it to the end of the canvas and duplicate it. after that you move the copy on the other end like the original and make sure it's under the coloring layers, like this:

After that you have to create layer masks (the highlighted icon above) for both smart object and the copy and change the blending option of the copy to screen or lighten (whatever looks best!). So this is how it looks now:

pls ignore that there are no layer masks on the smart objects i just added them after changing the blending rip </3 Now, as you see both gifs are like fighting eachother for their rightful place on the canvas. (fgfgfdf) To fix that you have to use a soft round brush to delete the parts you don't want. (feel free to play around with the brush however you want to get the result you want!) Here's my result:

2. THE OVERLAY

Now for the both gifs you want to use for the ripped paper effect you pretty much apply the same steps as the ones you did with the gifs for the base. Here are the two gifs i chose:

Before blending both gifs however you want to create a clipping mask for each of the smart objects coloring layers, like this:

And now you're ready to blend both gifs together! You choose the group with one of the gifs and change the blending again to screen or lighten and place the said group on top of the other. So this is how it looks now:

optional: if you feel like the base gif doesn't pop out enough you can always add a gradient map on one of both gifs and play around with the opacity and the color you think fits best.

Then you add a layer mask on the overlay gif group and again play around with the brush to delete what you don't want. So this is the final result:

ps - don't repeat my mistake by placing the group with the layer mask under the other group. it should be on top and the blending option should be lighten or screen.

After blending both gifs together, you're ready to place them on the base. So first thing you want to do first is place both groups of each gif in one single group together. Then you duplicate the said group in the psd of the base gif and create a layer mask. This is how it should looks:

Now, in order to create the ripped paper effect, you'll have to download a ripped paper brush pack. This is the one i use. After loading the brushes in ps (if you don't know how here is explained) you're ready to begin! Change the size and angle however you'd like to make it look how you want. And if you want you can move the overlay gif by choosing both groups in case you aren't happy with the adjustment. This is how it looks like so far:

We're almost done! Now you have to find a paper texture, (i got mine from google) place it between both groups of your gifs and create a layer mask, like so:

What you have to do here is pretty much the same thing you did with the overlay gifs. Still, make sure there's enough space for the text you want to write in. However, if you think that the space isn't enough you can just delete a bit more of the overlay gifs. Here's mine:

3. THE TEXT

You're finally ready to type out the text you want! If you're having troubles with choosing the right font and size, here are my text settings:

You can always play around with the angle and if your text is too small, zoom in so you can place it just how you like it. And since i'm a bit lazy to deal with it later, i choose to add the highlight color while it's still zoomed. You just have to add an layer above the text and use a soft round brush with opacity from 70-75% and flow from 15-18%.

For the repeated text you want to make sure you create a big space for writing so it can contain the whole space of the torn paper. Also, write where the text will be seen only and use the tab button to skip the space where the gif is. This is how it looks:

Once you're done with writing the repeated text, you want to select all the character layers and the highlight layer and move them under the overlay gif and on top of the paper, like this:

With the layers still selected and in order to contain the text within the paper the last thing you want to do is create a clipping mask. And that's It. You're done! This is the final result:

[ika-archieves]

how i make color palettes of my ocs before i pick one, an art tutorial?

hello, whenever i made a new design for myself i found a way to make lots of color palettes and pick one! i see this method more in paintings and rendering but not much on character designs? here are some examples i used that on.

it helps me so much when i feel experimental with colors. here are what you need

a wip character design. sketchy or pixel art works better since the colors can have some anti aliasing issues

a program with gradient maps. i'm using clip studio paint but ik photoshop also has it. like i said this is used more on photos or paintings

and here's what you do!

draw your character. i'm making a new fursona for myself but anything should work.

2. decide on their markings/color placement in grayscale. i recommend doing grayscale so you can easily see the values. split your grays into however colors you want. i like doing 5-6 the most. i reccomend duplicating the color layer if you wanna try multiple palettes.

3. this part is program dependent but in csp's case go to edit > tonal correction > gradient map.

4. i made a few default 5 color gradient maps but if don't use gradients like me i reccomend making the graph like this so they become solid color. split the map into however many colors you used. i'll add a color to the red-orange one bc my character has 6 grays.

5. replace the colors by clicking below specified color. it all depends on your creativity and what you want. experiment til you like it.

6. fuck around, try stuff, put them together to see if you like any of em. i made 9 to see if i can focus on one of them and i actually ended up loving the bottom right. it really makes them shiny

7. (optional) if you like a palette you can further and play with colors while keeping the palette. you can use color balance (in the same menu as gradient map in csp) or layers to mess around, have fun!

also a color tip because people seem to compliment that a lot in my art: digital art has millions of colors! don't be afraid of using wacky tones unless you're going pantone. if you want to get something physical i recommend being open to alternative colors as they tend to be more limited. i know whoever is doing it will try their best to keep the colors close.

color theory is something i don't...care much about mostly because this is something i'm doing for fun. i'll consider it in professional work.

[kozachenko]

(Click the image for better quality)

Yipeeee that Keiki and Mayumi fanart I posted the WIP of is finally done woooo- This piece was a very experimental one that I'm kind of OK on. Maybe because I've just gone insane looking at it for so long and I'm my own worst critic lol.

Artist's Notes;

So I've once again been playing around with my rendering style, mainly because I have been wanting to improve my lighting for a while now and as I was just scrolling through Tumblr, I saw some of the official art for that one webcomic-turned-animated-TV-Show Lackadaisy and was immediately inspired. I also have seen a technique a few times in the past where the lineart and shading are merged together, so I've been meaning to try that for a little while.

I did some experimentation on this one sketch of Keiki I posted in my sketch dump and I really liked the results of it, so I carried those over to this piece.

I ended up scaling up Keiki and Mayumi from the original WIP because I felt like they were both getting lost in the composition, and I'm glad for that because I think it works a lot better. I'm not a fan of how Mayumi's sword turned out at all, but it's not really meant to be the focus of the piece so eh. Overall, I think I could do better with my colours, probably because with Keiki and Mayumi's colours, I did them flat in greyscale and then used a brush on the overlay blend mode to colour all of them over, after which I changed the base layer for their colours from white to yellow and then lowered the opacity so it all went together better. I also decided to use gradient maps for a lot of the background elements, mainly to experiment with getting in my values first to make them pop out more. I ended up finding a really nice sky gradient on Clip Studio Paint that I really liked, and that kinda helped to establish the colour scheme of the background a lot. I think the whole "start in greyscale then colour" thing really works better with painterly styles rather than more illustrative ones, and while it is good at making sure your values are more readable, I honestly don't think I have the skill level to pull that off yet. Honestly, I think I've been looking at this drawing too long or maybe I added too much to it, but I wish I could've made the colours less monochromatic, but I'll just save that for the next piece I do.

I do love how the flame (...well it's more of a weird space rift than anything in this piece) and the lighting turned out, those were fun to do. I was initially struggling with the flame and how Mayumi is positioned in front of it before realizing "Oh wait! This is a weird abstraction of a weird creature! I don't have to follow the laws of anatomy!" and just dislocated it's flamey bottom jaw from the main body. I also changed the colours of it since I was really not liking how incredibly bright it was when it had lighter colours. Again, the gradient maps served the more painterly style of the flames well.

I also love how Mayumi turned out. I could do her sleeves better but that's more of just me needing to study how those types of sleeves fold in that position more. I'm also very happy with the posing, the technique I used for that was taking photos of myself in the positions I wanted, blocking in the silhouette and then modifying that by adjusting it to my lines of action that I drew on top of the original photos, and then sketching over the silhouettes and drawing in the shapes of the hands overtop of the photo if I needed to get the fine details right. As for what I do to take the pictures myself, I use a tall chair I have, prop up my phone with a phone stand, put on a ten second timer and scramble to get in position. Yes, I did have to use a bunch of thin markers I had to try and get the hand positioning on Keiki's pose right, yes I do have a fake sword that I used to get the positioning of Mayumi's arms and hand right, the sword was for an old Halloween costume from several years ago. I really like how both Keiki and Mayumi turned out in this drawing, I'll have to play around with these designs for them more in future drawings.

Also, if you wanna know why I draw buildings like that, when I watched Fantasia 2000 as a kid (One of the Disney movies where they make really beautiful animations to classical music) the way they drew the buildings in the first few sections Rhapsody in Blue segment (the jazz one with the cities) changed my brain chemistry and now whenever I need to draw buildings really quickly, I refer back to that. Since the buildings aren't really the main subject, I didn't put much thought into them.

As you can tell I am very tired of this piece, mainly because I made things harder for myself by overcomplicating the process compared to what I usually do, mainly with the whole "starting in grayscale then adding colour." I'd honestly just prefer having a black layer set to colour that I can just toggle on and off when I need to see the values, but it was good to experiment. And that was mainly the point of this whole drawing, to experiment. I'm definitely going to have to play around with this new style I'm going for, mainly because I liked how it turned out a lot in the augmented Keiki sketch, and also because I want to find ways of making it suit my style more. I also really want to keep experimenting with my lighting like this, it's very fun. Last but not least I am never starting in greyscale again because dear god I do not like the workflow it forced me into. I don't have a problem with the method itself it's mainly just a skill issue lol.

If you wanna read my headcanons for these two, I put them in my WIP post, so you can read them there if you want to. The more I look at this the more I prefer the simplicity of my WIP. I might go back to this and just take away the fancy colours and effects to see what it looks like without all of that stuff and reblog this post with that drawing, but for now, I don't think I can look at this drawing again for a while.

[improvapocalyps]

"Okay, yeah. If you kill a red name, killed a red name-" "I'll give you a life for that. That's the deal." "We'll be back together like buddies again, Bdubs."

In participation of Extreme Timed Challenge Gift Exchange hosted by @extremetimedchallengeexchange!

[gifs, full storyboard, behind-the-scene rambles under cut]

past 48h animatics: MCYTETC2023, ETC2023

[Red Lives-Suspicion; Prayer-Determination; Fireworks]

Fiddled with gradient maps this time for some additional colors :D I would have colored in the eyes as well, but I didn't have enough energy left when the event hit the 47th hour xD

Also played around with camera movements. Respect to people who do fan edits and other forms of video/ assets editing 'cause keyframes are so 😭

13 hours to draft storyboard this time! Last year I used 16 but with waaay more frames idk how I accomplished that. Probably bc this year I'm drawing more than three(3) characters lmao

Progress Timeline:

[13th hour] finished storyboard/ draft (plany off time...) [25th hour] lineart for the first 10 seconds (wuh oh) [36th hour] lineart for the first 25 seconds (oh shit oh fuck gotta shorten it) [45th hour] finished Bdubs' part (NOOO I DONT HAVE TIME FOR ETHO)

ngl kinda glad i cut it in half rn 'cause i'd have to spend time figuring out shadowDog's design /lh

Designs I used for Lizzie and Joel (old art from 2022 and 2021 respectively) (holy shit i've been here for 3 years???)

Joel *shakes fist* i hate u and ur stupid beard

[Lyrics vibe/scene planning; hours before disaster]

I think most of the drawn parts didn't deviate from the initial idea. Mostly timing adjustments and building upon the vibes. The parts that were changed the most was the "And you caused it (×3 combo)".

Went from "vague flashbacks" to "following Etho and co. out of the cave and back to Scott's base while implying who Etho blames with single character focus shots".

The first one is Scott because he suggested the idea. Like, obviously he's to blame. It's not like Etho went along and cemented the deal himself. Scott totally peer-pressured him into it.

The second one is Etho because... well the scene ends up kind of being like. The sight of the Snow Fortress triggering a flashback. (EthosLab the content creator deliberately turned his camera towards the Snow Fortress and holds it there for a second instead of looking at the huge lava pillar right in front of him. What is WRONG with him.)

But also like. Clocks are kind of special to Bdubs right. Whoever gave him a clock basically has his (temporary) loyalty or at the least earned a favor from him. So like. If he hadn't gifted Bdubs the clock, which signifies a closer(?) bond, maybe Bdubs wouldn't be so devoted to him (wrong). Also serves as a call-back/ reference to the "Prayer-Determination" shot ("pray with clock" in the scene planning screenshot). I like to think that Bdubs weighted his options and thought about "if he will kill/ who to kill" a lot while following the other Red Names. And in that scene he's like, convincing/ motivating himself. Remembering who/ what he's doing this for.

(It is also meant to be part of my giftee's other prompt: "an exploration of the doubt one or both of them felt during the heart transfer that didn’t happen after Bdubs killed Lizzie, and the following guilt Etho felt." The Etho section starting from "we're setting fire to our inside for fun" til the end of the animatic is based on that prompt.)

After a brief period of self-blame, it's time to shift it onto someone else! Because you're in denial! If Bdubs hadn't gone red, then Etho wouldn't have to offer the deal. If Bdubs hadn't want to stay as teammates, then he wouldn't agree to the deal. If Bdubs wasn't so devoted to Etho, then he wouldn't have attacked Lizzie and gotten himself killed.

Then the animatic ends with the end of the session :D

...That's longer than I expected but also not that long. If you read through all that, tysm :] Tell me your thoughts! Have a good day/ evening/ night :D

[reveriememory]

Astarion x Tav OC

Cat and dog energy. These lovebirds roam in my daydreams! Insight about this drawing in the Read More.

Draft - Sketch & Lining - Coloring

The draft was revamped a few times, especially with my Tav’s body angle. I forced myself to be quick with it as my goal for this drawing was something “quick” and simple…ish. Since it was only headshots, I was curious to see what I would prioritize considering I lifted off most stress from full body anatomy.

Sketch and lining are together because I basically did my final sketch then sculpted in the lines, meaning I cleaned and erased the edges to my liking. You can tell Astarion got a HUGE improvement! Liquify tool is a life saver! I allowed myself to be a bit messy, or at least forgiving about line quirks. Technically, I didn’t line the pupils and hair, as I’ve learned to work off its silhouette. I block in the shape, Alpha Lock, then render/color. It’s an awkward in between but for the sake of nice images, I adjusted them to fit the line art, otherwise I’d have to leave them bald.

Coloring, I work through sections, so here I jump around a lot! I had a lot of fun figuring out how to mimic traditional art, and kept swooning at how cute this was LOL. I had a lot of fun with my new brushes and the setup inspired me to keep working. Although, that could also be the 8 hour sessions of BG3 talking. Astarion was very scary to color, so you can imagine how HAPPY I was to have pulled this off! He took the most time. Goes to show just how comfortable I was with this style of drawing that I didn’t feel super drained!

Finalizing

I was going to call it done at that first one, but decided I could do more. Here is where I just messed around with different ideas, adding layers and color adjustments. In this case, I wanted something to compliment the traditional feel and really send the message across. I did a white border just as I would’ve years ago, when I did traditional art. It felt right to write in my signature instead as well. I used to love using gel pens. The final image has a little gradient map color filter, just to tie the colors together. I like giving my drawings a nice dreamy warmth to them.

Conclusion

I need to draw these two more. Astarion is a painful muse. Bury me with this drawing. I should do a proper character study on my Tav. He’s a sweet little redeemed Durge, I like to think of him as Astarion’s bloody droplet. Also I need to actually play Durge.

I’m so happy with this drawing. ;)

[hordraomin]

Krita tutorial the way I know it.

Basics: What is where.

Gimmicks.

Specific advice on specific tools.

Basics: What is where.

Upon opening the program this is what you're met with. First of all, must comment: The layout is HEAVILY editable so you can just drag menus anywhere you want, even leave them floating amidst the sheet you're drawing on.

You can create custom art templates, I have two o'mine here as both have my signature background color.

As well, you can edit the custom document settings, as in what size you want it, what resolution, even the initial content of the image. As well you can create from clipboard: Just copy some image from your browser and Krita will recognize it (useful for making meme edits lol).

Now, once you have your file, I will show you what is where.

Brushes:

Brushes are easy to edit and there are tons of free bundles to download online. I myself only got one bundle, Jackpack (bit hard to find now due to original source being lost, it is still available but bit tricky to come by).

There. Are. Tons.

Some of these are my custom brushes for calligraphy in neography, you might even guess which ones. You can edit existing brushes, make new ones from the ones you've edited without changing the original, and all sorts of stuff (more below in the third chapter).

There are numerous packages of brushes once you enter Krita, but only one/two are available when you first open it. To unlock them all, click here:

And make sure all bundles are dark gray in color (example of both dark and light below).

Now Tools Options: those will pop up depending on what tool you're using.

Symmetry: Fun stuff. You can drag the lines depending on how you need them and then center them back to the center of the screen if needed.

Gradients and Textures also have their tools options, you can play with those to get the feeling what they can do (more in third chapter).

The Filters tab is useful too. Blurring, motion blurring, color mapping, artistic filters and all that: Quite fun.

Gimmicks.

Krita allows you to customize your workspace freely. Floating menus, tabs, anything you want. It has quite many drivers at that-

To access the workspace templates, go to Window and choose Workspace.

Krita allows for copy-pasting any image onto the sheet. Though, for me it sometimes crashes if I accidentally copy-paste text into it without choosing the Text tool first.

The software allows for both raster and vector work. It is basically Photoshop sharpened to be used by artists primarily.

There are some interesting mechanics regarding the Eraser (default bind E).

You can use it with any brush, allowing for textured erasure/quick work. Good for sketching.

You can use it on gradients (given there's a transparent point on the gradient preset).

There's a Multibrush tool:

People say Krita is good for animation but my brain can't wrap around it yet honestly @~@.

The keybinds:

B - Brush tool.

E - Erase tool option.

M - Mirror (useful for checking accuracy from a new angle).

Ctrl - Color pick (when used with brush or other color-using tools).

Shift+L.Mouse+drag - Changes the size of the brush by dragging left and right.

Ctrl+E - Merge layer with the one below.

Ctrl+G - Group selected layers.

Ctrl+A - Select whole sheet.

Ctrl+Shift+A - Deselect everything.

F - Bucket tool.

G - Gradient tool.

Ctrl+S - Save document.

Ctrl+Shift+S - Save As document.

Ctrl+N - New document.

Ctrl+O - Open document (will be seen in a new tab on top of the sheet).

Ctrl+C - Copy selected layer or selection.

Ctrl+X - Cut selected layer or selection.

Ctrl+V - Paste copied/cut layer or selection.

Q - Multibrush tool.

R.Mouse - Interesting thing: Opens up a quick selector for brushes and colors you've already used in the piece.

1 - Zoom 100%.

2 - Zoom to fit the piece vertically.

3 - Zoom to fit the piece horizontally.

4, 5, 6 - Turn 15 degrees (4 and 6) or undo the turning whatsoever (5).

Ctrl+I - Negative filter applied to layer.

Ctrl+U - Color editing on the layer.

Ctrl+Y - Soft proofing mode (for color mistakes and stuff like that, mostly annoying for me tbh).

Ctrl+T - Transform selection/layer.

Ctrl+R - Square select tool.

Ctrl+J - Lasso select tool.

Honestly you can just hover your mouse over tools and see their shortcut binds, as well. Or edit them in Settings.

Specific advice on specific tools.

Brush:

Brush editor is a great tool for making custom brushes, and it even has a sratchpad to test them out. Lots of settings, but no need to be afraid; Most of them you might never use on purpose.

Use Brush Smoothing for great and pretty lines in lining pieces or making calligraphy.

Gradient:

The four icons to the right top are:

Mirror gradient.

Arrange by lightness value.

Arrange by color value.

Space the stops evenly.

Click the gradient to add a new stop. The three things to the left are:

Make the stop use Primary Color.

Make the stop use Secondary Color.

Make the stop use a fixed color.

[emilyscully]

gif tutorial

@bakedbakermom requested a tutorial on how i made the gifs in this set, so i've put together a little walkthrough of the process for this gif under the cut!

(disclaimer: this tutorial assumes that you already have basic photoshop/giffing knowledge - i.e. how to make and colour gifs using correction layers, how to use things like layer masks, etc. if you don't, i recommend these tutorials, they're very comprehensive)

alright! so as stated before, i'm not going to go in-depth here on the basics of gifmaking. for this one in particular, i blended three gifs, but we'll get into the third one later.

(i should also mention that blending gifs as i did here is usually easier if you have scenes with shadowed/dark areas like the ones above, so to keep that in mind when picking your scenes! i also find it easier to use scenes where there isn't a whole ton of movement going on- again, not a requirement but it's easier to plan and position gifs if the characters aren't moving across the whole canvas)

first, i started by making the base gifs of mulder and scully in "paper hearts". both are cropped to 540x540 px, and the same length (around 50 frames). i did some standard sharpening, brightening, and adding contrast (my usual process is curves, a b/w gradient map set to "soft light" at around 20% opacity, and messing with the levels a bit) before using selective colour and hue/saturation layers to highlight the teal and peach colours in the gif. sometimes this is enough colouring on its own, depending on the gif and the look you're going for, but in my case i wanted to add more.

so, on top of my colouring, i used a combination of layers set to "colour" and "hard light" to paint over the background of my gifs in teal and peach. on mulder's gif i also used a gradient fill layer in the two colours set to "colour" and used a layer mask to erase anywhere i didn't want the colour to be. the opacity levels for all of these layers again just depends on how vibrant you want your colours, i just mess with that on a gif-to-gif basis.

so we have our two gifs, cropped and coloured to fit the palette we want. next, i converted each coloured gif into a smart object, by selecting all my layers, right clicking, and hitting "convert to smart object."

once that's done, you should be able to click and drag one of the gifs onto the other gif's canvas, so that it's sitting on top. then change the blending mode of the top gif- most people use lighten or screen, this again depends on the look you want and the gifs you're using. for this one, i used screen. it'll probably look something like this:

at this point you can move your gifs around and position them as you like. for mine, i just moved scully a little off to the right, as you can see. in order to get rid of the part that's covering mulder's face, i added a layer mask to the scully gif and used a large, soft brush set to black to erase it.

(another note: i didn't need to do it here, but if you want to move/erase parts of your bottom gif, add a layer of solid black underneath both gifs.)

usually i would stop blending here, but for this set i decided to add a third gif, so i made and coloured the gif of mulder and scully holding hands, using the same methods as the first two. this one was cropped to 540x405 px to make it fit better on the canvas, since i knew i only wanted it to cover the bottom part.

i converted it to a smart object and dragged it onto the same canvas as the other two gifs. this time i used "lighten" as my blending mode, positioned it in the bottom right corner, and again used a layer mask to brush away the parts i didn't want.

on top of all three gifs, i then used layers set to "normal" and "hard light" to brush some extra colour onto the gif. this part i also just play around with on a gif-to-gif basis, but for this set i mostly used a combo of colour, hard light, and normal layers at varying opacities until i got the look i was going for. i generally just like to use big soft brushes to add colour around the edges, as i did here.

now, i have a bunch of texture/grain pngs saved on my laptop that i like to add to gifs for some extra flair, so i opened one of those and cropped it down to 540x540px. i then added a gradient map to give it that peach colour. (any textured png/jpg should work fine for this, as long as you have your gradient map set to black and white/your accent colour)

like i did with my gifs, i converted the texture + gradient map to a smart object and dragged it onto the shared canvas. i set the blending mode to "screen", with the opacity at 70%. i like to put these textures underneath the extra colouring i've done on the gif, as seen here. i don't always do this, but i feel like it sometimes helps the texture blend into the finished gif. you can also use a layer mask if needed to erase any unwanted parts of the texture.

now for the text!

for these gifs i used the font "IM FELL DW Pica" in both regular and italic, in black, at 16px. i didn't do anything fancy with the text itself besides adding a drop shadow in the blending options (right click on the text layer and hit "blending options).

then, underneath the text layer (i was working one word at a time) i used the rectangle tool to draw a small rectangle around the text- i wasn't too picky about the size or evenness since i was going for a collaged look. i set the colour of the rectangle to a light cream colour, and added a drop shadow in the blending options.

then i just selected both the text and rectangle and duplicated them using ctrl+j, changing the text for each word and adjusting the size of the rectangles as needed. once i had all of the words on my canvas, i just moved them around until i found a positioning i liked. again, since i was going for a purposefully scrapbooked look, i didn't overthink this part.

i exported my gif the way i usually do, with these settings:

and that's it! i used pretty much the same process for all the gifs in this set, give or take. hopefully this little walkthrough made sense, but i know i'm not always the best at explaining my process, so if anything needs clarifying feel free to shoot me an ask or dm!

[confusedananass]

(instagram)

Tutorial in After Effects under the cut.

• Create a new composition and call it Split.

• Write your text, pre-comp it, call it Text or whatever you want.

• Create a mask from the center to one side (top/bottom), change anchor point to the top.

• Bring down Scale property and unlink it, keyframe the text to go from 100% to 0% in 1s towards the anchor point.

• Cut the layer at the end.

• Duplicate pre-comp.

• Select the bottom one, click M to bring down mask properties, invert the mask and move anchor point to the bottom (so the text scales to the bottom).

• Duplicate Text pre-comp one more time. Select it, press M and delete the mask, move anchor point to the center. Create new keyframes to scale it from 0 to 100 in 1s (properties unlinked). Select both keyframes and delay it by 1 frame. It makes the text look like it’s scaling from the center.

• Change bottom and top text color by adding Fill effect to the pre-comp.

• Easy ease all keyframes.

• Select all pre-comps and duplicate them, put them at the top and put them at the back to extend your animation (or arrange in your preferred order if you’re doing a phrase like me). So far it should look something like this:

• Create new comp Wave of 10s, add your Split comp.

• Create new Solid layer, call it Map, add Gradient Ramp effect, make white at the left, black at the right and hide the layer.

• Select Split pre-comp, Right-click → Time → Enable Time Remapping and extend the layer to the end.

• Add loopOut() expression to Time Remap.

• On Split pre-comp add the effect Time Displacement, on Time Displacement Layer select your Solid layer (Map), and on Source select Effects & Mask.

• Change Time Resolution (fps) to 250-300.

• Add Fast Box Blur effect, change Blur Radius to 0.5.

• To bring back the sharpness add Curves effect, change the Channel to Alpha and change values (see screenshot).

• Play around with Max Displacement Time [sec] on Time Displacement effect depending on the look you’re going for. I set it to 0.5.

• Now this whole animation is driven by our Solid layer (Map) we created. So if you make any changes to it, the animation changes too. For example, you can change Ramp Shape to Radial on Gradient Ramp effect, and see how it changes your animation.

• I additionally added some texture on the text, used Track Matte and added wiggle(5,500) expression to the Rotation property so texture would be constantly moving. Also added some additional effects to the new Adjustment Layer on top such as Roughen edges, Turbulent Displace, Posterize Time and Noise. Let your freak flag fly - it’s a matter of taste and creativity of what you do with it. Your animation should look something like this: