art refs and shit

Sure!

The first thing you need to do is gather up all your work that you like and are proud of, whether it’s original or fanart, so you can choose what you want to put in your portfolio. If this is where you’re stuck, I want you to read these two posts!

Then once you’ve got all the stuff you like, I want you to choose your two best works. One of these is going to be put right at the start of your portfolio, the other is going to at the end.

Now what exactly goes into your portfolio depends on what discipline it’s aimed at, but you want to include a mix of completed works and the development work that went into creating those completed works.

Things like experiments with different techniques you liked, rough character concepts, life studies, etc. have just as much place in your portfolio as fully completed pieces of art.

In fact, things like life drawing are probably the most important part of your portfolio, as it shows your ability to learn and grow!

You’ll want between 10-20 pieces to go into your portfolio, definitely no more than 20!

What better day to end the year then with a basic guide to colouring- This is for beginners or intermediate artists. Colouring is a big part to an art piece, whether you decide to use colours or not, that’s up to you, but for the most part, having some knowledge on appliance of colour will really help you out!

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ARTISTS WITH AN INSPIRING KNOWLEDGE OF COLOUR APPLICATION! Please take the time to have a look at other artists work so that you ca research and get inspired!

Gullacass: Uses brights, dulls and pastels to create brilliant guro, pop and macabre pieces| DA + TUMBLR

TinyCalcium: Old friend of mine who explores brights and mustard colours and places them as a foundation for their work | TUMBLR

BeastPop: Talented with opposing and Triwheel colours. Outstanding cell-shading, and knows how to flexibly bend colour form to their will in popart. | DA

H0stel: Fantastic composition of light direction and applies colour to bodies based on ambient occlusion. | TUMBLR

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COLOUR SLANG: I use some strange slang to express colour types and shades as well as groups. Although they may not be canonically correct, I will use these terms to describe colour palates to the best of my ability! Analogous: Colours that are near or adjacent to each other on the colour wheel, EG: Red and Orange

Oppositional/complimentary: Colours that are opposed or opposite from each other on the colour wheel, EG: Cherry and Green

Triadic: Colours that form a triangle on the Colour wheel, EG: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These three colours when mixed together will make black.

Arrowtype/Quadcolour: Four colours, that generally form an arrow shape on the colour wheel.

Tetradic: Colours that form a rectangle or square in the colour wheel

Neons: The very brightest you can get a colour, be careful where you use them as they can look ugly together at the most. Try to use neons when you are adding bright glowing objects to your piece. Neons are great for highlights.

Brights: Slightly washed Neons. Appropriate if you have characters that are colourful.

Washed: Very washed brights with a hint of grey. These are also useful for colourful characters.

Pastels: Colour with white in them to make them seem light.

Baby Pastel: Pastel with even more white in them, good for subtle highlights.

Darks: Colour with black added to them. Used mostly for lineart.

Mustards: Colours with dark grey added to them

Earthen: Colours with brown added to them

Warm and Cool colours: Warm colours are colours that range fromMagenta to Yellow. Cool ones range from Lime to Fuchsia.

Straight tones: A greyscale palate. or a straight scale of one colour from black to it’s neon form.

Warm and cool tones: Warm tones are a greyscale mixed with warm colours and cool tones are greyscale mixed with cool colours.

Skintones: Warm washed or pastel colours generally used to colour in skin, but they don’t have to be warm at all! ( I will not show you a palate for this however)

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WHAT TO AVOID WHEN COLOURING: beginner artists, tend to go ahead and start by colouring their line art with neon and mustard colours. Neons are not necessarily good for base colours unless the character has a glow.

I often see lazy attempts to shade, often a beginner artist with use an airbrush and use black and white to shade and highlight their piece. This is not very effective, and I’m sorry to say… It’s kind of gross as well. Try to avoid being lazy. If you have a piece that has bold black lines, avoid using soft shading and airbrushing at this point of time.

Black and white isn’t always the best option when colouring in your piece, but it also depends on the style you are trying to convey. If you plan on only using straight tones to colour in a piece, black and white is good.

A GOOD BASIC WAY TO COLOUR For this basic tutorial I will show you a nice way to colour in a piece with bold lines. I will be using Minty’s Classic character as an example.

Begin with using brights that have been washed down a little and washed skin tones if your character is human based. Avoid using neons or mustards if you are able. If there is white on the character, such as the white on an eyeball or the teeth, consider using baby pastels. For Minty’s eyeballs I have used a baby pastel blue. I have chosen to use a darker and more washed version for her Irises.

With you foundation colours placed down, use a washed warm colour for the skin tone, such as a salmon. If the character’s hair or fur is warm coloured, use a pink or red orange to shade that as well. Use the cell shading technique. This may mean you will have to erase some of your shading so be sure to do this on another layer. For your baby pastels, you can use a regular pastel to shade it. For Minty’s eyes I have used pastel blue and lowered the opacity by a little.

For Highlights, I have chosen to use baby pastel yellow. I wanted the piece to be warm.

Applying a light airbrush over the top of the piece makes it feel a little softer. I have also applied the airbrush over the initial borders to create colour bleed, giving a very subtle reflective approach.

Colouring your line art layer, particularly if you have bold lines, can really make a piece look more interesting! I like to leave the overall outline black. You can gradient and bleed colour in your line art as well

Light tracing is a technique lots of artist’s use, where they run a sharp line of highlight next to line art to divide borders.

This looks a lot nicer than the black and white shading, doesn’t it!? __________________________________________

This is a very very simple guide to applying colour to your piece! If This helped, please reblog and share this guide around!

There’s three main groups: the flexors and extensors each take one half of the forearm, and the ridge muscles sit on top like a little tiara. Each group has it’s own unique form. Learning their anatomy will help you design awesomely dynamic arms.

Let’s try to make forearms manageable to draw. This is a body part most artists don’t quite understand. It can be real intimidating if you don’t know the muscles.

The arm has a simple chain design and the forms interlock down the arm.

To avoid the snowman effect, use straight, angular lines and look for asymmetries. Compare the apex of both sides of the forearm to understand the curvature better. Notice that the flexors reach lower on the wrist than the extensors and ridge muscles.

Look for this kind of thing when you’re drawing the gesture of the muscle groups. A wave rhythm where the curve on one side leads into the next curve on the other side.

I’ve had a general idea what these things did but wasn’t completely sure what their specific functions were. I decided to sit down and figure it out, and I have thrown together a short reference guide for anyone who is confused about them. I know there are multiple translations of SAI floating around, so if some of these terms don’t sound familiar, just know that I’m talking about the three settings that appear under the texture in the brush tool settings (note that this won’t apply to any tool types except for brushes and watercolor brushes).

I don’t claim to be an expert so if you find I’ve made a mistake, let me know so I can update it, thanks! :3

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BLENDING (Color Blending)

This controls how readily the brush will inherit any colors you are painting over with it. For example, a 0% blending setting will pick up no existing colors, treating it as if you were painting on a transparent layer. A 100% blending setting will ONLY pick up existing colors (provided there are any). So at 100%, the color you’re using won’t even show up, unless you move to a transparent area. Blending is not affected by transparent pixels, so if you’re drawing on a blank layer it will have no effect.

So you can see from this example that the color I’m using gets harder to paint as the blending increases and more of the existing green is absorbed, until at 100% it is just completely turning green.

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DILUTION (Opacity Mix)

This controls how readily the brush will draw on a blank (transparent) part of the layer. A 0% Dilution will result in the brush painting very easily onto a blank surface, while a brush with 100% dilution will literally not paint on blank parts of the layer at all. Dilution is ONLY affected by transparent pixels. So it won’t do anything if the whole layer is already filled in (even with white). Dilution can be thought of as the inverse of the Blending setting in some ways.

So in this example, you can see that as dilution approaches 100%, the color I’m painting with basically becomes invisible. In fact, if you were to switch to binary color mode and look at this layer, there would literally be nothing there anymore!

Keep this in mind - if you ever can’t paint for some reason, check your dilution setting, it might have gotten accidentally bumped to 100!

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PERSISTENCE

This one goes hand-in-hand with blending. Basically, it controls how easily a brush shifts color as you are blending from one color to another. Rather, how long it “persists” if you will. Like blending, Persistence is only really relevant when painting over existing color so it’s mostly unaffected by transparent pixels. Basically, the higher the persistence, the longer it will take for the color to shift as you make a stroke, and subsequently, from which color to which other color it is shifting is dependent on the blending setting.

So for this example I’ve done the same test with three different levels of blending. I turned off all pressure sensitivity (actually I just used my mouse) to emphasize the effects in a controlled environment:

If blending is at 0%, persistence fails to have any real effect. With pressure on, there is only the difference of having to push harder, but the results will be the same as far as I can tell.

At a happy medium of 50%, persistence increase causes the orange that the brush is picking up to last longer as it goes into the green, until it never shifts to blue at all.

At 100% blending, there was never any blue in the first place, because as we already know, full blending causes you to only pick up existing color. So the persistence setting changes only how fast the orange changes to green.

Persistence is dependent upon the blending settings, so having them somewhere in the middle will probably produce the most optimal results.

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CONCLUSION

Ultimately how you use these is up to you, and is largely dependent on what kind of brush you’re making and what it will be used for. And most of these settings are meant to be used together in unison, so play around with them a lot!

If you are confused, or not sure what settings you want or what settings you should be using, a safe bet is to put them all at about 50% - that will produce fairly average results that are easy to work with, and it’s easy to remember in case you want to experiment but don’t want to forget your settings in case you decide to switch back. 

thank you ^o^ idk if this is useful or helps lol but  i use this brush and blend it

Layout Hand-Outs by Rowland B. Wilson (1930-2005).

a series of composition tips i’d been sharing on twitter!

and since some people had asked, i’ve put up a pdf version of this on gumroad along with a layered psd of one of the example images too