CHATTERBOX3000

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.

Alrighty!

So to make a repeating pattern: 

1. Open a canvas and draw in the center WITHOUT touching any of the edges. 

2. [Below: Light cyan lines] Divide your canvas into four equal parts.

Make four guides framing the canvas, and two across the middle. 

For the ones in the middle, View > New Guide > Horizontal or Vertical for needed orientation > type in 50% to get the exact middle of your canvas. These are photoshop shortcuts, may be different on your programs. 

3. [Above: Yellow arrows] Make sureyou have ‘Snap’ checked under View > Snap, then select each quarter of your piece > layer via cut > move diagonally to the other side.  

After you’re done moving things diagonally, you can either turn off Snap so your doodling won’t stick to the center lines, or toggle the guide visibility off (Ctrl+;). Merge the layers back together. 

4. Draw in the middle without touching the borders, color the entire thing if you plan on doing that.

5. Setting your image as a pattern After your image is done, merge all layers into one > select the entire canvas (Ctrl+A) > Edit > Define Pattern

Open a new canvas bigger than the one you made the pattern on, and paint bucket it in! (Instead of the Foreground button at the top when paint bucket is active, select Pattern then your pattern)

If you aren’t using a program that lets you define patterns, merge everything into one layer and duplicate & tile them manually. 

Cernay-la-ville

Hiya! Sorry to take so long to reply! I’ve been under a huuuuge workload the past months, and I when I finally got more time for myself I was just too tired to do anything else than simply rest. But here it is! I listed couple things I could think about how to think when you animate. Of course this is only my personal list, so I understand if someone disagrees.

It goes a bit in-and-out the range of actually animating things - but I feel like there cannot be one without the other, so here we go! 

Hopefully this will be helpful!

1) Animating is SLOW

The biggest advice I can give is that animation is not easy. It’s hard. It’s tedious. It’ll always take like double the time you think it will. And that’s not on a scale of hours, but days and weeks. You think your scene will take 3 days to rough out? It’ll probably take 6. You think you can clean it up in 1 week? Book in 2,5. Just get some coffee and continue. It’ll be there. Eventually.

2) Take breaks

After a while you’ll become blind to the animation you’re making, so remember to take breaks. Take 30 min break, and when you get back to your animation and play it through you can usually spot a thing or two you just couldn’t see before. It’s also good for your body - I have to admit I tend to sit at my desk way too long hours, but I’m trying to get better.

3) Work out

I feel like I say this every time, but be considerate of your body. I’ve seen so many people having problems with their wrists and elbows, and the best thing to prevent those is to exercise. It also clears your head and ALMOST prevents you from getting sleepy while animating.

4) Start loose

I tend to start with really loose thumbnails in order to get the movement I want. Sketch those thumbnails in so loose that only you can tell what’s happening. You want to feel the movement, making the character pretty comes later. If I start with the construction, I realize half way that the character moves more like a machine than a living thing. Of course this is different for everyone. Some people can be like super humans and draw the final line in one try - I’m not one of them.

5) Kill your babies

Don’t be scared to ditch something that doesn’t work. Of course you want to keep the perfect looking key that you used so much time to finish, but if the movement doesn’t flow, it’s fine to get rid of it. You can use it as a base for your new better drawing

6) Toon Boom vs. TVPaint

These are the two programs I’ve used for 2D animation (+ Photoshop, but that was a bad idea). I actually started with Toon Boom and learned about TVPaint only later. I really like both of the programs, but they have some significant differences.

Toon Boom

Toon Boom is really advanced, bit confusing, originally vector-based 2D animation program. It’s really good, but learning to use it is bit of a work. I started with Toon Boom, and I’ve done most of my personal animations with it. My favorite part of the program is the vector line. You can tweak the line, resize, recolor, do almost anything you want even after you’ve finished your animation. Of course sketching with vector doesn’t feel as good as sketching in Photoshop, but nowadays the newest Toon Boom has been really improving with the feeling of the drawn line and they have even introduced bitmap based layers.

TVPaint

Thank you, I really love to ink :’3

Aside from a couple years of practice, there are two important PS brush tricks I learned to make the lines extra sharp (which i value above all else cause I like them CRISPY).

First, I add a texture to my inking brush and put it on “color burn”. That will increase brush sharpness without changing its actual shape

Second thing, when I export the image, I always use the “bilinear” option. That’ll prevent photoshop from adding any softening gradation around the lines.

Photoshop Splatter Brushes Mini Leaks Sampler Set from Nicolai on Vimeo.

So here we go, a post about my drawing process, hope you can get something out of it.

I start from searching a composition/character pose by making a bunch of tiny thumbnails (pic.1). They don’t take much time and keep me from useless over-detailing.

When I found something I’m satisfied with I upscale the thumbnail to desired size. Now to get from here to lineart I can take one of three routs: Pic.2. Proper. I don’t take it often enough. Pic.3. I’m an expert, hold my beer. Pic.4. Savage. Works for little drawings/doodles.

Generally, my sketches are varied from bunch of vague lines to roughly constructed objects and more or less anatomically correct “mannequins”(if it’s for a bigger picture), and stuff like clothes I often leave to figure out later in the lineart. I tried to do very elaborate sketches in the past but they would get cluttered and brought more confusion than actual help. Also inking would turn into a burden, because when every little detail has already been laid out, going over everything again felt like I was doing the same thing twice. After all, an undersketch just needs to provide some guidance so a better picture could be built on top of it, it doesn’t matter if it’s clean or looks “good”. And you know that popular problem of hating your lineart because you think that a sketch looked much better? If your sketches never look nice in the first place then that problem is solved, ha! Okay, that may be an ill advice.

For inking part I can’t say anything substantial, I’m afraid. A demonstration of how it goes down is all I can offer, so check two videos at the end of this post.

Now, onto coloring. Going to take advantage of the moment and promote this efficient way of filling in a lineart. I keep seeing people filling in with a brush, and it hurts my non-existent soul when someone desperately tries to not go over the outer edges of the inks; oh honey, what are you doing, grab a magic wand and save yourself some time and effort.

I often keep coloring simple (either giving picture an overall tint of one color, using related colors, or two complimentary colors), because I have hard time managing lots of different colors at once. But I also don’t forget that rule of making hue of shadows opposite to hue of light. On pic.5 there are some old tests of using opposite hues for light and shadow, tad bit extreme but descriptive examples of my approach to shading.

After all of that I might through some correction layers on top of the picture. My favorite crutch is gradient map, it can add an atmosphere to dull coloring, gather a picture full of colors that don’t go together very well, or simply liven up a grayscale drawing.

I rely heavily on different layer modes and correction layers. When everything is separated like that it’s very easy to change color and lighting. There are people who seem to know exactly what result they want to achieve, so they just paint directly on flats, goddamn wizards. I’m never sure of what I’m doing so I stick to my convoluted layer juggling.

And to wrap it up here are time-lapse videos of two recent drawings.

COFFEE QUEST CONTINUES!

Join our coffee adventure!-  Or at least check out more Art Goodies here:

Photoshop CC Keyboard Shortcuts by Theme Hive - more goodies here

Revamp of my compilation of Photoshop CC keyboard shortcuts for Mac and Windows machines.

The list includes:

Keyboard w/ shortcuts

General tools

Image cmds

Layer cmds

View cmds

Select cmds

3D cmds

Filter cmds

This list uses the US International keyboard layout, which means that some shortcuts may be different if you’re using another layout, though the vast majority of them will be the same.

THANK YOU! ANON!

I stopped the coloring of the shirt here cause I guess you get the basic idea. If you wanna see more of the coloring and the brush I use you can look HERE! Also you can see how not just folds but shading can define a form HERE!