Delphinox

By: @osirisosito

Date: July 2018

More: This cat will be 1 yr old on Nov 15th and his mailbox is open for gifts.

Thought this was a joke but

Hey there, thank you for such a lovely message! I am so glad you enjoy my art and it is a pleasure to read messages like this, I really appreciate these and it is never a both at all <3 Thank you! As for my art process I doodled something tonight to put together a mini tutorial type thing:

1. I draw the image (this time using biro and pencil) and take a photo with my phone as level, clear, and flat as possible, then email the photo to myself and download it onto the laptop. The first thing I do is desaturate to get it black and white, then edit the brightness and contrast a bit. Loads of people use scanners here which can help or hinder, my old scanner was always too harsh and tended to destroy the saturation within the lining which I could never seem to get back and lord knows how badly scanners chew up colours.

2. Slightly cropped and contrast settings edited. I always add a blank layer and add an alpha channel to the original image which seperates the lineart from the background so mistakes (like the head collar) can be fixed with the eraser tool and some brush if necessary.

3. I usually don’t add whole colour to my stuff but here I added very weak bases for the character fur colour. I tend to use the opacity levels a lot on layer, these colours were actually a garish golden and a deep greyish brown but I set opacity to about 25% on the whole layer to give a saturated look which I much prefer, malinois colours are hard to replicate otherwise, in this specific piece.

4. Now I can add the splashes of colour if I want just using a brush underneath the lineart layer. I can fix up the rest of the mixtakes with brush and eraser (badly- don’t zoom in) and usually end the piece by adding a signature if I forgot, and fiddling with the b+c a bit more. The final piece looks a little like this:

I know this is a little bit of a pooer example because I dont usually do soft character portraits, but with any piece the process is the same: photo > b+c and desaturate > alpha channel > touch ups and colour > flatten > b+c. Recently I didnt start playing with curves and colour values and all sorts but the type of stuff I do generally just needs a process like this. One of my most recents used the invert tool too. I think this ended up as about 7 layers but I tend to make layers for one detail, then merge it, then make another etc etc

As for programme I actually use Gimp which is a free version of photoshop but the good and legal kind of free. I think mine is 2.8 but I’m not too sure, it is a little clunky but fine once you get used to it and I have been using it ever since I got my first tablet around 6 years ago. I used to have photoshop elements 10 for a while which was admittedly much smoother but I have been through a few laptops since then so Gimp is my go to. Getting to use it was mainly trial and error and definitely hindered by the fact that I don’t do digital art as such ever. I am still learning stuff and finding out new features but there are lots of forums online and its a good cheap alternative to photoshop or sai (is sai still a thing? It was all the rage when I was first starting out uploading art) without coughing up a lot of £££

As for the actual physical art, I have this post here for you with some examples and explanations!

req’d by @warriorprose

aaahhh more for the collection