art, man.

I’ve never really wrote a tutorial before so apologies if this is bad

1. okay first thing I do is pick three colors, a mid, dark, and light. I like to check the colors in greyscale to make sure there’s enough contrast between each one.

I then plop down a blob of whatever my middle tone color is.

2. next, I take my dark color and just sort of randomly place it around. I try to make sure there’s a good amount of both the mid and dark tones spread throughout. I personally like to keep it kinda messy. I also have pen pressure on for both brush size and opacity, so I can have some blending action going on.

3. for the next step I do the exact same thing as before, except with the light color.

4. aight this is where we start adding details. see how you just have a bunch of colors and edges where two colors meet? use the eyedropper and go to an area where two colors meet, eyedrop a color, and then use that color to draw in your grass blades. I do this at every point where colors meet. should note I personally like to use a square brush, but you can really just use anything.

5. you can technically stop at the last step if you’re going for a more simple look, but to add more details I go to the “empty” areas of solid color and just draw in random strokes using a color nearby. it’s just a way to fill up the empty space.

6. basically more of the same idea of eyedropping and drawing. for more variety so things look interesting, I like to add random plant shapes.

7. and so the grass doesn’t look too plain, I add random dots of color and pretend it’s flowers and stuff.

instant oatmeal packets with fruit in them - $3 probably and this can be breakfast all week and maybe even a lunch or dinner too since you usually get 10 packets

bag of rice - $2-3 depending on size. 1 cup dry rice makes enough for about two meals depending on what you add in. if you get cheap rice, rinse it before cooking

canned beans - usually under $1 per can - mix the can with your rice and you have a meal. chili-spiced beans will make bean tacos. Rinse non-spiced beans before adding to anything.

Tortilla - usually around $3 but you get like 8-10 of them. Tacos, wraps, and quesadillas are all fair game here

lettuce - $2 max around here, either a head of something or bagged precut depending on preference, use as a salad or on tacos

protein other than beans of some sort - probably $5-7 for meat, $2-3 for eggs. sometimes I can get bags of frozen chicken breasts in this price range and each is usually 2 meals if I add in a bunch of veggies. fry/scramble eggs and add to any of the options. 

your favorite stir fry sauce - $3ish

vegetables - $5ish. literally anything that you can 1. fry in a pan and 2. you’ll eat. fresh carrots are usually pretty cheap. get frozen if it’s cheaper and you’re strapped for cash/prep time on this part. 

alternative to stir fry:  pasta (~$2), fresh tomatoes (~$2), cheese (~$3). 

Adding also: the single most nutritious food on earth is potatoes in their peel. Potatoes + some milk and butter = everything you need. They don’t last all that long, but they’re fairly cheap and the quickest cheat to “How do I not fuck my body up.”

(Cooked potatoes’ll last a while in the fridge. Potatoes nearing the end of their useful lives? Cook them to half-done first, figure out what to do with them later.)

Easiest baked potatoes: slice thinly but not paper-like, spread like cards, brush with oil (a silicone baking brush is totes worth the little it costs), spread salt and pepper (a little less than you think you’d like), cover with foil, stick in oven or toaster-oven at 150C for 40min. (If you have the patience, at that point click up to 180C, remove the cover and add 10-20min.) Reheats well, lasts in the fridge longer than it’ll take you to nom.

Dead-Animal-Free Whole Protein: some legumes + some grain. AKA rice and lentils, or rice and beans. (Maybe some fried onion for flavor; onion’s cheap and stays good a descent while. Fried onion makes everything taste better and keeps forever in the freezer, so frying up a bunch and keeping portions is not a half-bad idea.) (If going for the beans option - lentils are cheaper around here but fuck if I know what it’s like in your area - dump some tomato sauce and oil in; canola or soy are best health-wise, and far cheaper than olive; avoid corn.) Oh, what does instant couscous go for in your area? It keeps for fucking ever, it’s usually cheap, and it takes well to any and all added taste.

If you get to choose, black lentils taste the best and need the least soak-time (0-20min), green lentils are best for cooked stuff and red lentils are best in soups. (Red lentils + potatoes + root vegetables of choice + spices; cut into small pieces, cook, run through the blender if you wanna [stick blender’s awesome], freeze in portions.)

When possible, get instant soup mix. Get the good instant soup mix. (The kind that’s not made primarily of sugar, yeast or both. The rest is optional.) Dump 1/2tsp (or more, but start on the low end) into couscous, or chicken, or sprinkle over potatoes being stuck in the oven. Whatever. It’ll make most cooked-food-type things taste better. And again, lasts forever on the shelf.

And speaking as someone who is also living off oatmeal, beans, and brown rice, if you need recipes, I have them! 

Today I made 16 bean soup with chicken sausage and it was crazy good and I got 8 servings out of the one batch (froze half). I usually get the cheapest beans I can find, and GOYA bags of beans are usually $1-2. I soaked them overnight,rinsed them, and threw them in a gallon lidded saucepan with 2 boxes of chicken stock (also on sale for $2), two bay leaves, sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery, some garlic from a jar, about two tablespoons of dried herbs de provence,and the “fancy” bit was adding $6 bourbon and apple chicken sausages. You can actually sub veg stock for chicken and skip the sausage and make it vegan and it would still taste great.

Oh and I’ve been doing steel-cut oats. I don’t buy the name brand ones, I just pick whatever store brand/generic I can get for less than $4. They take about ½ an hour to make, but they’re super tasty and I make 2 cups of dried oats at a time with dried cranberries and that’s breakfast for 4 days at least. 

This is an amazing talk that really addresses the connection between trauma and creative burnout. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025018/You-re-Not-Broken-Finding

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.

thank you!!!!! im gonna give Two (2) tips about comics that helped me quite a bit in different ways!!! one about coloring stuff easily!!!! one about comic layouts!!!!!

First is!!! The Flatten+Multifill plugins for photoshop!!! They allow you to!!!! just copy your lineart!!! And it fills in the colors!!! All you have to do is bucket fill the actual colors you want!!! No more spending hours outlining your lineart and not coloring between the lines!!! im bad at explaining!!! here’s an example!!!

lineart!!!! what the heck do you mean i gotta color all those little parts!!!! thats gonna take me hours!!!!! so i duplicate my lineart!!!! put white under it!!!!

enter multifill!!!! bam!!!! i just click on the plugin and it does this!!!!! I dont have to color all those myself!!!! all i gotta do is use the bucket tool on those!!!!

then!!!! flatten plugin!!!! this one’s not free if its used on a big file but its so useful!!!! that way when i color in i dont have weird colored lineart!!!! 

i havent had those for long but GOD it is. so useful. so fast. i cant wait to use it on my next long comic this is gonna save me HOURS perhaps even DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!

second tip!!! comic layout tip!!! I’m actually!!! real bad!!!! at comic layouts!!! well maybe im good at them but!!!! its not something that comes to me easily!!!! UNTIL!!!!!

i bought @millionfish comic FRUITCAKE (among…. many others…..) but THIS ONE IN PARTICULAR…. see this one has This Comic that is very good, but in the physical version it starts??? with them saying they designed a simple template for this comic that’s been the base for every comic they’ve made since AND I SHALL SHARE IT WITH YOU

like DUDE!!!! THREE GRIDS OF 2x4. YES. GOOD. LOOK AT THEIR COMIC, BACK AT THE TEMPLATE, BACK AT THE COMIC, BACK AT THE TEMPLATE.

ive used it for some comics!!!! look:

(reminder: rule of thirds, always good)

hi! great question. you are correct that RGB (red, green, blue) is additive, meaning that when you mix red, green, and blue light together, they create white. this is how every screen shows color. and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) is subtractive, meaning that when you mix those colors of light together, they create black.

additive color starts with black and adds color to create light, while as subtractive color starts with light and adds color to create black. this is why RGB is used in screens, and CMYK is used in print and ink. and also why something looks different when you paint it in photoshop in RGB, then switch it to CMYK. the luminosity of colors that comes from the light in a monitor is sometimes lost.

so onto your question, it’s a good idea to pick one color space (rgb or cmyk) and stick to it. if you ever intend on printing your work, then working in cmyk is prudent. if you are keeping your work digital, then staying in rgb is fine. i rarely print my work so i stay in rgb.

when it comes to complementary colors, both are correct. in CMY, the complementary of red is green and in RGB, the complementary of red is cyan. this is because RGB and CMY are interdependent of each other, it just depends on whether you’re painting with light or with actual pigment (ink or paint).

check these out if you need a visual aid! i found them here which explains the differences a little more. remember that complementary colors are two colors that complete all primary colors of that color space. so, in RGB, the complementary of red is cyan because red is a primary and cyan is made up of the other two primaries, green and blue in this case. if you ever get your hands on a strong light and a colored gel, you can try this for yourself. if you cast a pure red light onto an object, it will cast a cyan tinted shadow. same with green/magenta and blue/yellow.

if you’re wondering where the traditional RYB (red, yellow, blue) color model comes into play here, it predates CMYK, which is a relatively recent and scientific conclusion of color. it is similar but more rudimentary due to there not really being magenta and cyan pigments available for painters for a long time.

to sum it all up, theyre both correct because one refers to color created with light and one refers to color created with pigment. if you plan on printing your work, then use cmyk. if you are keeping your work digital, then use rgb.

Digital Art by Stuart Lippincott

Stuart Lippincott is a visual and motion graphics artist from Bentonville, AR, USA. He is creating a digital art every day and sharing monthly collections on his Behance profile.  

How to Draw Bird Wings by SPARROUU

Found some hands tutorial by me

under the cut because it got really long: