#blackowned

PAYPAL IS TRYING TO SLIP THE RUG UNDER US. Or they may have said this and just no one read about it or noticed/knew.

OKAY SO BEFORE YOU SEND ANY MONEY FOR THAT AWESOME COMMISSION YOU WANT TO BUY FROM THAT AWESOME ARTIST. PLEASE STOP AND READ THIS.

Paypal changed the look of how you will fill out information and send money. Thus, you need to be super careful. Don’t go all willy nilly through and be like “Yeah yeah yeah send” you need to stop when you see this screen right away.

Before you proceed, you will first notice one major thing: your address is showing. What you need to do if you are ordering a DIGITAL WORK (aka, it is being sent to you via the interwebz) is you need to click on your address and there around be a drop down menu of 3 (or more) options:

No address needed

Your Current Address

+ Add a new shipping address

Be sure to select “No address needed”, it is very important that you do. If you leave your address in there, Paypal will assume that you are to receive a physical package. A physical package which needs proof that exists physically. Paypal will want the artist to provide shipping labels and tracking info on said package. This is bad, very, very bad. Artists can get in trouble if they cannot provide these things.

Please, if an artist asks to send you back your money so that you can send it again correctly, do not be offended. You are paying them to do your commission, how can they do your commission with no money?

Then go to order status and set to “Processed/Service Rendered.”

This will let paypal know that the order was a digital good, and no shipping was required.

I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

BRUSHES

Pencil I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. Ink Pen Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Round Brush The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without. Flat Brush A brush tool set to flat bristle is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.

Watercolor Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects. Cloud Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

TEXTURE OVERLAY

To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!

Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!

Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.

Hope that helps!

Some of the slides from my color shading/rendering lecture.