Celia the Kitty

There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!

I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)

1. PureRef

PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.

Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.

The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.

I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.

There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.

2. Work Timer

This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.

I use this one to accurately track my hours, both to inform myself and for commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours counted and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.

I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant time that it ignores in ‘non-work’ programs by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.

3. Carapace

I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.

Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them ‘right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.

Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.

So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too. Also, if Mac users have any suggestions for programs that fill similar functions, feel free to share there as well!

Put a number in my ask box!:

When did you get into art?

What art-related sites have you ever signed up for?

Show us your oldest piece of art you have on hand.

What defines your artistic style?

Do you practice other styles/have you tried other styles in the past?

What levels of artistic education have you had?

Show us at least one picture you drew or sketched recently that you did not put on a public site.

What is your favourite piece that you have done?

What is your least favourite piece that you have done?

What do you like most about your art?

What do you like least about your art?

Have you ever considered taking commissions?

Are you looking to pursue a career in art?

What do you like drawing the most?

What do you like drawing the least?

Do you draw more fanart or original art? If fanart, what fandom do you draw the most of?

What would you absolutely refuse to draw?

What is your purpose for drawing?

What medium/program do you use the most in your art?

How would you rank your art? (poor, mediocre, good, etc.)

Do you believe there is such thing as “bad art?”

List at least one of your “artspirations.”

What do you think you could stand to improve on?

Do you have a shameful art past? (recolour sprite comics, tracing art, etc.)

Happy Halloween! 

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

The big post of things about hands!!! I don’t consider myself qualified to teach art at this point in my life, but I don’t see any harm in sharing observations I have made. In learning to draw hands over the past few months I’ve tried to take a lot of notes, with the end goal of hopefully creating a video tutorial one day. I personally learn better from videos than written or illustrated instructions, but I’ve never found any one video that really demystifies drawing hands. I believe that in order to tackle such a difficult subject it is important to understand what makes it difficult, and this is not often addressed. If you understand the problems you can systematically solve them…

Drawing the hand is almost like drawing a whole person. Similar number of “major masses” and a big range of motion.

Because the hand is so versatile, it’s hard to pick a pose when practicing. Most individual body parts are drawn from different angles, whereas the hand must be drawn from different angles and in different poses.

Hands have a lot of moving parts and from any given angle many of these will be partially or wholly obscured by other parts. Drawing “through the form” results in confusing construction lines that are difficult to interpret.

Hands are expressive and give big clues as to what a character is doing. Odd or unnatural hand poses detract heavily from your overall piece. Most people avoid drawing hands because of this.

The thumb flexes along a different plane than the four fingers and sits on its own deviant metacarpal. Drawing the hand in perspective is hard enough, but adding the thumb in relation to the rest of the hand at a convincing angle? Forget about it!

Hands are typically simplified into box and cylinder forms, but almost every part of the hand is a combination of angles and curves. No one simplified form really describes these parts.

Hands interact with other objects, like all the time. They’re tricky enough to draw on their own… this isn’t helping anyone.

Hands have a lot of bony landmarks, veins, and tendons, all visible at the surface level. These are obstacles when trying to render them realistically.

Hands are asymmetrical from every angle. Every part, every time.

I think that about covers the major issues we face when trying to draw hands. Now here are some observations and facts that you can use to fight back!

The width of the first three fingers (index, middle and ring) is the same as the width of the wrist. The pinky and thumb both emanate from the parts of the palm that overhang this line.

The palm of the hand is more of a pentagon than a rectangle (Thanks, Jim Lee!).

The length of the middle finger is approximately the same as the length and width of the palm.

The length of the phalanxes (finger bones in this case) diminishes in size as they get further from the palm. The second (middle) phalanx is 2/3 the length of the first (proximal), and the third (distal) is 2/3 the length of the second. You don’t really notice this since the first knuckle is “inside” the palm and we tend to think of the fingers as starting at the “finger crotch”.

The thumb has no middle phalanx, only a proximal and a distal one.

The thumb is rotated 90 degrees from the angle of the four fingers. So the fingernails point “up” and the thumbnail points “to the side”. This obviously changes depending on the pose, but the thumbnail never really points “up” with the other fingernails unless it is bent backwards, as in poses when all five fingers are pressed against a flat surface. It never really points “down” unless the hand is clamping or pinching… or operating a sock puppet.

The thumb has to sit lower than the palm so that it can flex underneath the hand. The first knuckle of the thumb is almost as far below the index finger as the pinky is far away from the index finger.

The “webbing” of the thumb connects exactly half way up the palm.

Hands are asymmetrical from every angle. Every part, every time.

That is all the knowledge I have so far, and now you have it too! I don’t think any tutorial, video or otherwise, can ever teach you as much as the thousand observations you will make from drawing a thousand hands. There is no substitute for practice. So practice by looking at your hand from the normal vantage point, and from a mirror. Practice from 3D reference like the Handy Art Tool. Practice by copying other artists and animators whose hands appeal to you. Most of all, practice from imagination. PRACTICE! Below is every reference that I can remember that I’ve personally used while practicing hands:

http://www.handyarttool.com/

http://youtu.be/BAQb-5VKxmg

http://nk-chan.deviantart.com/art/mini-hand-tutorial-68320552

http://kibbitzer.deviantart.com/art/Hands-Reference-321600866

http://kibbitzer.deviantart.com/art/Hands-Reference-2-322546252

http://kibbitzer.deviantart.com/art/Hands-Reference-3-330102275

http://kibbitzer.deviantart.com/art/Hands-reference-4-428109721

http://characterdesignnotes.blogspot.com/2010/09/hand-reference.html

http://characterdesignnotes.blogspot.com/2010/09/hand-reference-part-two.html

http://characterdesignnotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/hand-reference-part-three.html

The tutorial of how I achieve watercolor effect in Sai! :) I highly recommend using real watercolor paintings (your own or ones found on the internet) as reference.

And here you can find a few useful links: 

You can download the Sai file of this picture here: link 

Video process of painting another picture: link

The old watercolor tutorial: link

Sai brushes (none of them is made by me) link + file you need to open them in Sai: link

Awesome watercolor brushes made by Kyle T Webster: link

Hello! My fellow black writers, artists, cosplayers, blerds and and superhero aficionados. 

I recently published a bestselling book on Amazon and I was hoping for a simple reblog to garner more support for it. 

It’s on sale on Amazon Kindle for 1.99.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B012025TA6 Summary: After the death of his mother, Devin Maxwell joins Titan Force, an organization that collects supernatural artifacts using super powered agents. Devin quickly rises to become a brash, yet successful agent under the field name: Streetslam. He forms a pseudo family with his friends and fellow agents at Titan Force. Devin’s allegiances are put to the test after an enigmatic billionaire offers him the chance to revive his mother, but only if he turns on his new family and steals a mysterious item from the Titan Force vault.

Featuring: -A black main lead…with superpowers. -Anime style battles. -Characters dealing with depression, poverty, abuse, and recovery. -A diverse and robust cast, featuring strong black women, strong hispanic women, and a trio of super powered sisters. -Anime tropes such as BIG ASS swords, long evolving story arcs, a military organization that has no problem hiring teenagers, and even a character with animal ears.   Thanks for all the support!

His department under his leadership is making people with mental, physical and other issues seek work when they can’t. He has decreed that benefit claimants are scrounges and worse than shit.

He has an ongoing program to exterminate the weak, vulnerable and disabled from Britain.

Under the Geneva Convention this is classed as genocide.

Iain Duncan-Smith is one of the British politician in support of scrapping the Human Rights act, an act he can be held accountable for his hideous act of Genocide and mass murder.

Please use his full name and the words genocide. Tag them together. Post it on as much social media as you can. This needs to become world wide knowledge and people should feel free to contact the UN, European Court of Human Rights and organisations such as Amnesty International.

We, as in the disabled of Great Britain, need this man, and in fact the entire Tory Government to be removed before they cause all of the vulnerable people of this country to die.

Now you maybe wondering how to help, start by reposting stuff like this, tag it with Iain Duncan-Smith, Genocide and War on the poor. And make it big. Make it so information about this Genocide becomes one of the most found searches on google about Britain right now.

Working from home is the best. I love all of my coworkers, and instead of taking lunch and other breaks, I get visited at random times by all my favorite people throughout the day.

Sometimes it makes for long work days, but I love the flexibility I have to wrestle on the floor or play dress up for a few minutes in between work assignments.

Lighting is often underestimated in illustration – a lot of illustrators and beginning artists look at it as a decorative element, or as purely a tool used to showcase the form. A lot of beginning artists are afraid of shading and of using harsh lights. But even with the lighting mastered, even with perfect rendering and good understanding of form in space an integral element of the light remains missing in their pieces. 

Look at the samples above: the same character’s head has been used in every thumbnail, and the only thing I have tweaked was the cropping and manner of light used on the features. Every single one of these frames tells a different story and gives off a different vibe simply by using light to focus on the features I want you to focus on.

Read how lighting can be used to enhance character, mood, and interaction within your pictures below the cut.