♦ Art References ♦

Last year, I made a top 8 outfits according to tumblr notes (see here), so this year, I decided to do a top 10. Surprisingly, last year’s number 1 keeps its place, but none of the other outfits from last year came back! Honestly, these are not necessarily my own favourites, but sometimes, popularity is a bit hard to understand.

I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

BRUSHES

Pencil I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. Ink Pen Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Round Brush The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without. Flat Brush A brush tool set to flat bristle is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.

Watercolor Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects. Cloud Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

TEXTURE OVERLAY

To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!

Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!

Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.

Hope that helps!

Some hand references.

Sources 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Redid a post by fucktonofanatomyreferencesreborn with sources because they never source anything and I don’t want to reblog that post because I don’t want to support blogs who don’t give credit to people

(No, stating that the art is ~not yours~ and ~came from elsewhere~ IS NOT PROPER CREDIT. Many of these have usernames and such on them but not every single one and you still ought to link back to the specific piece)

since somebody asked for my brush settings, here they are! these are the brushes I favor 95% of the time unless I have to use Photoshop for something

there are kind of a lot ahaha sorry

they’re really nothing special, and I’m often changing certain things depending on my needs, but I’m happy to share the settings I’m currently using anyway c:

everything else is either completely default or doesn’t get used often

just keep in mind these aren’t necessarily set in concrete so I encourage you to play around until they suit your own style

just adjust opacity and size depending on how crisp lines you want

The goal is to allow for viewing of wip animations being made in Sai without having to load the project into Photoshop, Flash, or whatever your external timeline of choice is.  Essentially, you export each frame as a .png into a folder and then just overwrite them in the same way when you want to update a frame.

On load it defaults to whatever directory it’s sitting in, but if you want to keep it somewhere else you can select the folder source post-load.

Images are loaded alphabetically, so all of these are valid:

a.png, b.png, c.png

1.png, 2.png, 3.png

Frame1.png, Frame2.png, Frame3.png.

It runs off .png files because I don’t see why you’d use any other format in 2014.  If anyone desperately wants .jpeg support or something I can add a toggle though.

Image locations are loaded fresh upon each iteration and held within the program so you can add, update and remove frames without stopping it if you want to.  This means you can leave it open on a second monitor and have a looping preview without leaving Sai.

Shit runs on .net 4.5 since C# is cakewalk for stuff like this.

.RAR

.CS/Source file