Tips, tricks and ideas for drawing

IT EVEN HIGHLIGHTS THE ULNA BONE  

Arm view: Red = Deltoids (all three heads are in one color) Blue = Latissimus Dorsi Green = Biceps Brachii Yellow = Triceps Brachii

Forearm: Red = One of the wrist flexors Blue = Brachioradialis

Back view, left side: Red = Deltoids (all three heads are in one color) Blue = Latissimus Dorsi Green = Infraspinatus, Teres Minor, Teres Major Yellow = Trapezius (all groups one color)

This fabulous bitch

She makes a shit ton of poses (like 16,000 or some crazy nonsense).  I used this lovely lady to draw so much as a teen.  Whether it was some nerdy pose for my Mary Sue as fuck OCs

or for full on fight sequences

or for tragic deaths of my OCs in the arms of a totally OOC main protagonist.  

this bitch hooked me up.  

And with the wildest, craziest stuff that you could see in your head but had no way or resources to reasonably draw like

or this

or this

DUDE!  INASNE SHIT!!  So I was using her for a pose reference and decided, you know what, I owe this bitch some cash.  Lemme dole it out for her.  BUT then, I looked and saw she only has 286 fucking patrons!!  This chick gives out free shit and spends countless hours arranging these shoots and setting this stuff up.  

I’ll fork up the cash, SenshiStock.  You’re worth it.  

I have some hours before work so I’ll use them to actually detail why I’ve found CSPaint to be so efficient for bastard-aligned painters who like to take shortcuts.

This will seem familiar to most of you guys, but this functions a little bit different from Photoshop. It turns everything you draw on the layer into editable curves, but retains the aliased smoothness of an ordinary raster layer. Practically a cheat to access the whole suite of amazing tools CS offers for lineart. Such as:

The vector eraser is The Best™. You can be as messy as possible and this tool erases the excess. One pen-flick and it’s done. Much faster than cleaning it up by hand. You can also tweak the settings of this brush to encapsulate more/less lines as you erase but that’s getting a little more involved. Anyway, last thing:

Maybe the only thing better than the vector eraser. There are multiple settings, but these three are the most handy. You can smooth wiggly edges, connect broken strokes, and tweak the width/weight to exactly how you want it. This also has a ton of settings you can play around with. It’s great!

Gold Painting Tutorial by CelestialFang

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

live stream on twitch :) 

free animation programs

the 12 principles of animation

51 animation exercises (from beginner to expert)

glen keane animates a scene

adjustment layers: specifically the hue/saturation slider in this case, allows you to color correct quickly

lasso tool: for sharp edges!

alpha lock: useful for painting within a pre-defined area (especially useful when painting characters)

x (hotkey) : toggle between foreground + background colors- let’s you easily blend between 2 colors

ctrl/cmd click : quickly change current active layer. Especially useful if you’re burdened with too many layers (or just very disorganized)

clipping mask: similar to alpha lock, but can add details without changing/ painting directly on the previous layer. I often use them to test out + apply gradients.

layer styles: I didn’t use any in this image, but the possibilities for layer styles endless, from simply adding a quick outline (useful for die cut demarcations when making stickers!) to creating more seemingly complex appearances. Here’s a gif of Nick Carver using layer styles (a combo of drop shadows + inner shadows) to quickly make the illusion of snow but with simple strokes.

ending on this:

Disclaimer: Art isn’t a science: there are no definite proofs, there is no “correct” methodology, there are no facts. That’s not to say there aren’t cool ideas for you to explore. I don’t claim to be the best animator, I’m just showing you what works for me.

OK, so we want to start animating a character. One of the most important things about characters are the faces. It can really throw off a perfectly good animation when you see the face deform into something you can’t even recognize. What we want is consistency, but how do we get that? Well I can think of three ways : Make face guidelines, generate a 3d animation and rotoscope it, or get a clip from real life and rotoscope that. I’m just going to focus on the first one for reasons I’ll explain later.

You should start with a rough sketch, I like using simple shapes, but a lot of pros just go straight into outlines of the major forms.

OK, we got a very basic construction of a head (eyes, mouth, neck, etc). Now to keep our parts of the head consistent relative to eachother, we can add another guideline to help us (I used a triangle).

Now I made up some hairstyle and eyes on the first frame. Then I applied it on the other 3 keyframes and added inbetween frames to make it smoother.

You see how the eyes and mouth are within a certain boundary. This is really helpful to get it looking believable. Keeping the ratio is critical to make your character’s face consistent. Now remove the guidelines and you get a half-decent animation.

You can expand your animation to do whatever.

You can do all this relatively fast if you feel comfortable with drawing your characters. 

You can also use 3d. The problem with 3d though is that it takes alot of time to get assets made, rigged, and animated. By then you might as well render it and keep it 3d. I should say, a lot of modern day 2d animations do use at least some 3d. I’ve noticed it a lot with backgrounds and that’s understandable since you don’t want to redraw every single frame as the camera pans. 

As for rotoscoping, I think it’s a bit vacuous. Most of my favorite animations are done with exaggerated movements of different body parts to accentuate emotions (e.g. mouth getting bigger when angry or surprised). This problem applies to 3d as well, but if you’re skilled enough (and have enough time) you can make great animations that have this exaggerated element.

*This works for other “styles” that are more realistic.

The thing to keep in mind, is that the skull is a complex shape, and it follows that the face is also a complex shape. Having simple shapes still helps because those complex shapes fit inside simple shapes.

Anonymous asked you:

Hey, is it okay if you like do a tutorial on trees and shrubs? PS: I looooooove your art and tutorial they are just soooooo wonderful, inspiratonal, amazing.

Here’s a new tutorial on stars, specifically the glaring kind that you see in a lot of deep space images! ✧

ok! this will sort of cover how I approach animating anything.

before I start I just want to mention two things:

- I highly highly recommend Photoshop CC for this, programs like SAI or GIMP will give you a hard time- Photoshop snuck in some premiere/flash things into it which will make it so much easier.

- I’m self taught in terms of animation, so I can’t go into the traditional technical aspects of animating, but I’ll be going over some things I’ve encountered.

now to how I animate!

photoshop’s workspace menu in the top right has a built in set up for animating called ‘motion’, you’ll want to switch to that. I use the essentials for drawing and only switch over after having everything done and I’ll explain why in a second. 

you could also just add the timeline window but this will save time. this isn’t the same document- don’t worry everything you’ll’ve done will be kept this is just changing the interface.

I do recommend saving a copy of what you’re doing before your animating if you aren’t completely comfortable.

this menu here is where you create your animation and it’s where you got to think about what you’re doing, and I’ll explain what each does, entering either of these modes will bump up the file size and put a little more strain on your computer.

I’ll cut it here because it’s kind of long and image heavy, but I explain the different types of animation in photoshop, give some examples, and some general tips for animating things (from experience)

friday night tutorial time

this post is massive but i tried to cover both the conceptual and technical side, hopefully it’s somewhat coherent

continued under cut