RIDE THE LINE IN LUNAR LIE

001. about me!

order of the blazing moons ( hestia or arcturus ) : introject heavy system, tsukasa tenma irl!! wonderhoy!

i will try and tag for eyestrain and other common triggers, but it may slip my mind and gentle reminders would be appreciated!! i also will not add alt text / plaintext unless asked, but feel free to ask! on requests - i have violently unmedicated adhd and a boatload of chronic fatigue, so i can only guarantee inconsistency. please be as specific as you possibly can when requesting, also!! ily

002. dni ...

NO DNI, i personally believe they're a waste of time! idk if my views will affect my postings here. dni if im on your dni, basically - antis can interact, i don't mind! anyone can use my edits and anyone can request anything they'd like ( unless it's on my blacklist ).

003. whitelist / blacklist !

whitelist:

project sekai <3 and hoyoverse medias ( a la genshin, hsr, zzz, etc. ) feel free to ask for anything though, if i can get good transparent images you can definitely shoot your shot!

blacklist:

media with live action / real people :( vivziepop and yaeklore both personally annoy me mildly so they're off too. and if i can't find enough good transparents for a character i will auto-deny your request, sorry!

on clip studio paint, you access the gradient map interface by clicking edit > tonal correction > gradient map! it took me a while to figure this one out but it changed my life.

that'll open up this beauty. the default gradient map is black > white, which turns your image greyscale! ( make sure you have everything you want to recolor on one layer, since it'll only affect your selected layer! )

you can import other people's gradient maps from the asset store, which i do sometimes and is a whole other can of worms, but this tutorial will deal with making you own!

here's what a default black > grey > white looks like on our image.

it's so dark! we can use the little arrows down here to push around the colors.

let's try pushing the white back and...!

look at that! fancy! but i want to add a dash of color to this!!

for the sake of this tutorial, let's say i want to do a nice, warm orange one with dark purple as the shadows. you pick the arrow, and instead of moving it, you click the box beneath "specified color!" that'll change it to what you want. for general reference, darker colors go left and brighter colors go right!

look at that! it looks good, but... well, there's not a big range of colors, is there? why don't we fix that!

see the little notches along the bottom rectangle?

if you click that, it'll add another color! the color defaults to a middle value between the colors surrounding it. and bam, you have a new arrow you can change and push around! let's adjust some colors now, shall we?

before, it looked like that. now... it looks like this!

i added some darker colors and shoved the arrows around. you can see the way i like to do things - lots of darker colors in the left for contrasting shadows, but around the middle and right things get simpler. this is because you want the focal points to be bright, and if there are too many things going on there, it'll look messy.

the left looks better than the right one, right? make sure to keep your colors and values cohesive, and the program will do the rest of the work for you!

now for the final step - and this one is REALLY IMPORTANT if you want to make several assets using your new map!

CLIP STUDIO PAINT WILL NOT SAVE YOUR GRADIENT MAP FOR YOU. IF YOU APPLY THE MAP AND CLOSE THE WINDOW NOW, YOU'LL LOSE IT!

see these buttons? they're below all the existing color palettes. you'll want to click the leftmost one, "REPLACE SAVED GRADIENT". this will replace the original black > white gradient with your new one!

and that's how i use gradient maps!

this is the one you asked about, the one i used for the ruikasa layout! it's themed around the song "DEVIL KICKBACK" by vane lily.

here's how mafuyu looks with a couple other gradient maps in case you're interedted!

( remember what i said about keeping the focal point bright? practice contrast, haha...)

hopefully that helped!! im talking from experience when i say that using gradient maps seems pretty nebulous at first, but it's not too hard! as far as i know, it's actually much simpler of a process on ibispaint x and procreate, so hopefully you can figure it out regardless of the program you use!! let me know if you have any other questions or need anything else, my friend! and thanks again for the ask!