UNSILENCE

Kiriska: I previously listed a whole bunch of searches you can run for “phone charm straps,” which is the primary component you need for charms, aside from the acrylic piece. 

Lobster clasp straps are most popular because they’re a lot easier to attach to acrylic pieces than O-rings/jump rings, which require you to use tools to close it through the hole in your acrylic.

Most charm templates have holes set up so they’re close enough to the edge for standard size clasp/rings to fit, so as long as you don’t mess with that, you’re probably fine. Here’s ChillyPig’s template tutorial as an example.

Additional trinkets and what have are usually added to the primary ring, though some artists add additional rings to accommodate more trinkets. (Here’s a previous ask about where to get trinkets/baubles/extra charm flourishes.)

Also see: #acrylic charms.

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Hey friends!

I’ve had a general idea what these things did but wasn’t completely sure what their specific functions were. I decided to sit down and figure it out, and I have thrown together a short reference guide for anyone who is confused about them. I know there are multiple translations of SAI floating around, so if some of these terms don’t sound familiar, just know that I’m talking about the three settings that appear under the texture in the brush tool settings (note that this won’t apply to any tool types except for brushes and watercolor brushes).

I don’t claim to be an expert so if you find I’ve made a mistake, let me know so I can update it, thanks! :3

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BLENDING (Color Blending)

This controls how readily the brush will inherit any colors you are painting over with it. For example, a 0% blending setting will pick up no existing colors, treating it as if you were painting on a transparent layer. A 100% blending setting will ONLY pick up existing colors (provided there are any). So at 100%, the color you’re using won’t even show up, unless you move to a transparent area. Blending is not affected by transparent pixels, so if you’re drawing on a blank layer it will have no effect.

So you can see from this example that the color I’m using gets harder to paint as the blending increases and more of the existing green is absorbed, until at 100% it is just completely turning green.

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DILUTION (Opacity Mix)

This controls how readily the brush will draw on a blank (transparent) part of the layer. A 0% Dilution will result in the brush painting very easily onto a blank surface, while a brush with 100% dilution will literally not paint on blank parts of the layer at all. Dilution is ONLY affected by transparent pixels. So it won’t do anything if the whole layer is already filled in (even with white). Dilution can be thought of as the inverse of the Blending setting in some ways.

So in this example, you can see that as dilution approaches 100%, the color I’m painting with basically becomes invisible. In fact, if you were to switch to binary color mode and look at this layer, there would literally be nothing there anymore!

Keep this in mind - if you ever can’t paint for some reason, check your dilution setting, it might have gotten accidentally bumped to 100!

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PERSISTENCE

This one goes hand-in-hand with blending. Basically, it controls how easily a brush shifts color as you are blending from one color to another. Rather, how long it “persists” if you will. Like blending, Persistence is only really relevant when painting over existing color so it’s mostly unaffected by transparent pixels. Basically, the higher the persistence, the longer it will take for the color to shift as you make a stroke, and subsequently, from which color to which other color it is shifting is dependent on the blending setting.

So for this example I’ve done the same test with three different levels of blending. I turned off all pressure sensitivity (actually I just used my mouse) to emphasize the effects in a controlled environment:

If blending is at 0%, persistence fails to have any real effect. With pressure on, there is only the difference of having to push harder, but the results will be the same as far as I can tell.

At a happy medium of 50%, persistence increase causes the orange that the brush is picking up to last longer as it goes into the green, until it never shifts to blue at all.

At 100% blending, there was never any blue in the first place, because as we already know, full blending causes you to only pick up existing color. So the persistence setting changes only how fast the orange changes to green.

Persistence is dependent upon the blending settings, so having them somewhere in the middle will probably produce the most optimal results.

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CONCLUSION

Ultimately how you use these is up to you, and is largely dependent on what kind of brush you’re making and what it will be used for. And most of these settings are meant to be used together in unison, so play around with them a lot!

If you are confused, or not sure what settings you want or what settings you should be using, a safe bet is to put them all at about 50% - that will produce fairly average results that are easy to work with, and it’s easy to remember in case you want to experiment but don’t want to forget your settings in case you decide to switch back. 

hello! i dont have any process gifs but i put together a little tut for you, i feel like im overdue for a proper one :8) i want to make a more in depth tutorial on background painting (maybe a video?!!?!) but for right now i’ll just address your questions on texture if that’s okay!

here is an ultra basic bg we’re gonna spruce up. keep in mind i’m not going to talk about lighting and composition really so, try to put that out of your mind for now. anyway, there is no texture or edge difference in this yet. everything is smooth and samey (but there is a little bit of atmospheric perspective in the color). the most important thing at this stage is that every unique shape or plane is on its own layer. this is because all texture and lighting will be clipped to the corresponding layer.

sorry this is kind of ugly but this is how i arrange my layers LOL. everything is arranged on planes. i think of it like cut paper stacked on top of each other.

make a clipping mask for the texture you’ll put on each shape. i talk a bit about clipping masks and how to use them here. normally i’d have a clipping mask for texture, shadow, and light, so it can get a little crazy when you have a lot of layers but it’s invaluable for experimenting and getting things just right.

ALRIGHT SO LETS TALK ABOUT ACTUAL TEXTURE. i think about texture as having two functions: 1. to draw the viewer’s eye to where you want it to be, and 2. to describe the material/feel of objects. for our very first texture, we’re going to put some snow on the front tree. im using a variety of brushes, please check my FAQ for a full list. since i want the viewer to focus mostly on the front tree, i’m going to put the most texture on it. to answer your question about when i add texture, i usually just kind of follow my intuition and use it when i feel it’s needed. i will almost definitely go back and add/take away throughout the process of the image. a lot of things change and it’s cool to change your mind throughout. i don’t really follow solid “steps” for every piece, they’re always different for me!

now i am just continuing to add texture here and there. the middle ground trees get a bit of snow, but it’s subdued enough to not be the focal point. as well, i added some texture to the snow because i wanted the front plane to be the one you look at the most. everything behind the middle ground trees is wholly untouched. now we have a nice contrast between smooth/textured going on! and contrast/opposites is the key to guiding a viewer’s eye.

after all that i decided at last minute that the front plane could use some texture to differentiate it. but looking at it now, i’d probably go back and rethink it. that’s life.

finally! i added some color corrections and some gradients to push back the mountains and trees. i also added some falling snow and an overall paper texture to simulate a snowy feel without having to paint it all. the paper texture is behind the front plane, again to push everything behind it back. i would be very careful about putting a texture over everything, it can really flatten everything or make it look fake/gimmicky. clip it to shapes or erase where necessary.

lastly, a short word about more contrast. here, i am trying to push the contrast between soft and sharp. the only difference between this image and the last step is that i blurred and sharpened some planes. there are multiple ways to think about this, but for me, the photographic approach is easiest to understand and it’s just how i like my art to look. basically, i try to always make my focal point sharp and in focus, and blur other elements.

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!

Process gif of my Unknown pic as well as a second version that i like better otl where I messed around more with effects because I realized I made the original too cute and not creepy lol

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

 I’M GONNA TRY MY BEST TO EXPLAIN THIS because, man i feel u but at the same time I know very little about the technical anatomy when it comes to skulls ;;

Let’s do a sorta above ¾ view for this rlly quick, when I start out, I always like to establish one part of the snout at a time, instead of trying to just DIVE RIGHT IN. So I start by putting vague upper muzzle shapes here, just to get the direction goin’

NOW WE GOTTA GIVE THIS THING A LOWER JAW to help keep it symmetrical, I like to pull the lines from the corners of the upper lips. DON’T BE AFRAID TO OVERLAP, OVERLAPPING IS IMPORTANT IN GENERAL BUT ESPECIALLY WHEN DRAWING OPEN MUZZLES LIKE THIS!! See that line that goes from the upper right corner of the lip and through the top half of the muzzle? I basically use that as my guide to keep from pulling the jaw too far out, or too far in. Don’t worry if it looks a bit like they have an underbite either, depending on the angle, perspective will do that..it likes to fuk with ur brain a bit

OKAY NOW we’re bringing back the overlapping line because chins are still hard for me to draw and I change how i do it constantly but this is a good method to get a chin that doesn’t thrust too much outwards or inwards (unless that’s the specific jaw shape you were going for with ur character, then by all means do so!!! ) bring the line from the further corner of the eye, form the cheek, and bring it down (overlapping over the top jaw as we are wont to do) and bring it AROUND TOWN. You see here that it’s kinda boxy and I could probably curve that line some more to give a more slender look but w/e IT WORKS WITH MOST SHAPES

if you’re referring to something like the BND draw I posted recently, it’s pretty much a similar course of action, so let’s use this  asshole as an example because his mouth is obnoxiously wide when it’s open 

Start off with the upper jaw, again, it’s easier to piece these things together vs trying to shove all the shapes together at once (for me it is anyways) 

i’m doing this from profile view this time but you can see the overlapping lines still work!! I roughly places where the otherside of the upper corner of the lip would be on the side we don’t see and used that to help me get an idea of how far down the lower jaw is gonna go~! Don’t worry, it’s gonna look awkward most of the time  and it’s a perfect chance to go in and fix the length of the upper/lower jaw before you start adding in deets like the tongue and teeth! <:

there we go!!!! looks a lot less awkward LOL

you can also do something like this if ur feeling kinda toony (it’s really fun, simple yet effective!)

It can work for a lot of different styles, from realism to toony to my stupid doodles i do a lot when being a Serious Artist ™ is just 2 much for me :^)

Thank you! Any kind of tips? I’ve been thinking of making a tutorial/guide on scales, but i’ll list some things right now that seem important for the lights. (basics and very Photoshop-specific things alike)

     1, Material/texture references

I often look at my turtle’s scales, she’s my most valuable scale reference. Little dragon sculptures are useful too. Any kind of fish is good for iridescence. If you’d like leathery scales, try lizards. If you want metallic scales (or some other inorganic material), e.g. gold, pull a bunch of photos of genuine gold bars out of Google. Additionally you can look up refs of specific lighting conditions, because light affects color. I still use refs as a safety net for the important things, because there is always room for improvement/failure. D:

     2, A technique for preparing scales

Constructing the forms and drawing the scales is very monotonous when you want to put all of them in space properly. I don’t really have a shortcut for it, but refs and rough, quick construction lines make the job easier (see pic above).

For painting the scales: just paint their shapes with a single color on one layer, then lock their transparency and paint on them (i ditch the sketch, if i had one). I do the same with the shading on another Layer set to Multiply, normally. You can neatly compartmentalize anything like this. I keep a LOT of layers, dozens for color corrections, highlights and small details and tiny miscellaneous fixes, so i can modify them individually easily. There is more than one way of doing it, this is just my way.

     3, Random tips

- On gold-like scales i like to paint some highlights with opaque bright yellow on a new layer, set this layer’s style to Outer Glow, set that glow to a richer yellow on about 20% opacity and set the effect to something like Soft Light or Overlay. Experiment with it, it’s what i always do too to hit the sweet spot.  - As always, knowledge of colors, lights, shading, materials, textures, perspective, tools, painting techniques, etc. are universally helpful, not specific to just scales, but books could be/have been written on these subjects.- If you think you are done with the scales, sleep on it, and if you still like them after that, you win at life.