Equiping an armor tutorial

I'm an artist and medical student, and I use art to help me pay some bills.

I built a free, helpful tool because to help prevent other talented creatives from undercharging, as I really see this a lot online.

It's a calculator with a built in reality check

Input your survival costs and expenses

True billable hours

Get the rate you actually need to charge to hit a 20% (or whatever you choose) profit margin.

It generates the rate, a template negotiation email + final invoice.

Plan to keep this tool free, ad-free, and open to everyone.

🔗 Check your math: fairpaycalc.artres.xyz

If the "Thriving Rate" calculation empowers you to double your quote on your next job, please consider hitting the "Buy me a coffee"button. It keeps the server running and the code flowing <3

A Necropolis layout from last year. I still work on Necropolis here and there, but anytime I start to pick up the thread, to find my way, the job pulls me out again. The struggle of making television has demanded almost all of my time since July 2020.

Getting to make cartoons with so many talented people has been a huge, all-consuming privilege. It's taken me five years on the job just to get my legs under me, just to begin to feel that I know what I'm doing. It's taken everything I have just to keep my head above water, to get something resembling our crew's talent and effort and intention onto the screen. For that entire half-decade I have longed to make comics, to write stories for myself, to draw for myself. But there was always something that needed doing.

Recently I've realized that denying that part of myself, telling it to wait its turn through one more script revision, one more review, one more retake, one more episode, one more season--it's taken a toll that I can no longer afford to pay. I don't think I can keep going unless I take some time to write and draw and explore outside of the studio production system. As we fight through post on the third season of My Adventures With Superman and start writing the first season of Lantern, I'm looking for ways to work and lead that will get me some of that time back--and my teams are really coming through for me.

But even if I can find that time, I still need to decide how to spend it, and where to put the things I make. I need a place away from the urgency and deadlines and pressure of the studio. Tumblr has always had the best community, is where I've always been the most comfortable, so I'm gonna start here. I will cross-post some of what I do here to other, more hellish parts of the internet, but this is going to be home for a while.

I hope that those of you who never left don't mind me coming back. I hope that those of you who've nested here in the meantime don't mind some new-type Oldtype showing up. I just want a place to be myself, instead of being studio production equipment.

Thanks,

Learning color theory through oil painting is more difficult than learning it through gouache & watercolor, primarily because it takes way more time to find mass tone and mix everything and also it's much less obvious to easily and quickly discern if a paint pigment is highly staining or transparent.

Oil painters like to seem like they have the richest and most storied traditions in color theory to past down but also inevitably they are the most likely to retain an extremely limited chroma palette based on classical palettes for the sake of classicism and not always make that fact very apparent to a beginner aside from saying it's an "old masters palette" watercolor/gouache painters are bad at using paints that are not light-fast and clinging to them despite having better alternatives, but generally still understand chroma gamuts and pigment importance better or at least talk about them more.

When you're mixing paints, the earth colors (browns) don't need to handled and thought of as brown. Ask yourself if the brown is yellow, orange, red, or leaning towards a black (which would be treated as a violet or blue, depending on whether black is warmer or cooler).

Yes there are cool reds and warm blues

Any reference color wheel that places red on the very top hurts my feelings, stop doing this just because you learned "roygbiv". Yellow is at the top and the Indigo-Blue range is on the bottom because this also means the color with the lightest possible value is opposite the color with the darkest possible value, so you have the colors arranged with a value scale from top to bottom BUILT IN.

This makes me think makeup artists have good color theory, having to understand undertones of skin, warm v neutral v cool toned red lipstick....

Yes!!! I mean first of all, makeup artists are artists.

and they are ALSO ultimately just blending pigments to produce certain colors and effects, so yeah professionally do study the basics of color theory and then necessarily have to adapt it to their medium. And they tend to generally add like, what you talked about with recognizing cool/warm/olive/neutral undertones and such as a big consideration to their canvas.

And that IS why people will say "this is a cooler red lipstick" (although even cooler than that would be magenta or fuschia!).

I think the only thing I've noticed wrt to honestly mostly beauty influencers and not actual professional MUAs is that too many people buy an eyeshadow palette of cool tones in the palette and then put it on and complain it pulls "too warm for their cool skin." And it "isn't actually a true cool tone palette."

I just want to grab all these people by the face and say:

"Shhhhhh. Color temperature is relative. Although you have cool skin undertones, you ALSO have blood under your skin which will inherently make your base skin-canvas slightly warm no matter your foundation shade. So when you put any kind of pigment that isn't fully opaque onto your skin, the transparency WILL be warmed by your skin because you're alive and have blood still. The eyeshadow palette IS a cool palette. You're just not a vampire, which is why that cool taupe shade suddenly looks different from the mass tone in the palette."

These influencers would understand this better if they did some watercolor painting on pre-tintedpaper and then compared it to painting on pure white.

Handprint.com is hands down the most comprehensive scientific explanation of how different color wheels or palette choices work. It's big and dense and exceptionally thorough. I skim frequently and find myself always learning more. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html everything is done using watercolors as a reference point but a LOT of this translates to other mediums. For the record his CIECAM color wheel is what I consider to be the best (not 3 dimensional) color wheel for artists. Period.

He uses pigment numbers for some of the most common watercolors rather than specific paint brands or color names to place the pigments. It's also a case study in why yellow being at the top is the best because it also means you have a value scale from top to bottom (since black paints are just dark violets or blues, ultimately.)

When you look at this, you can start realizing more and more why the earth colors can be used as if they were like, straight red, or yellow, or orange. Like if you wanted to make a limited palette, you could use "burnt sienna" as your dark yellow (which will make the whole palette lean orange!) Or it could be your orange or you could use burnt sienna as your red. (Look at gamut masking links below)

Seriously it's good to try and swatch your medium (even really quickly!) Within a CIECAM Artist's color wheel. Below are two of my attempts:

From loose memory and then mapping pigments roughly.

He also discusses the difference between visual complements and mixing complements!

Anyways absolutely try to read bits and pieces. The whole site is amazing. Handprint is amazing.

Also:

https://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com and James Gurney's book: Color and Light: a guide for the realist painter. James Gurney is the dinotopia guy. That book is also amazing for painting fantasy with lots of fantastical examples. Here are two short videos on gamut mapping and gamut masking. Accompanying blog posts.

No surprises here! His book also charts pigments:

Actually these are my four favorite books hands down:

Color and Light: a Guide for the realist painter - James Gurney

Color for Painters: a guide to traditions & practice - Al Gury

The oil painters color handbook - Todd m casey

Artist's master series: Color & light - 3d total publishing. This one emphasizes digital!

The first two have been out for awhile now and you can more easily find them cheaper/used online than the latter two which are relatively newer and hefty hardbacks.

Also, from personal experience: al gury is a sweetheart angel who is a huge crazy cat man. I adore him, he's so kind and helpful. I think it's a little late to join the current session (although they did only start Jan 28, so you can always ask! Class videos are recorded), BUT he frequently offers a class on color that is fully online through PAFA continuing education, as well as other classes. I haven't taken it yet, but I HAVE taken other classes online with Al and he's really great.

Oh also online gamut masking tools:

In krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/gamut_masks.html

https://claudiamatosa.com/resources/gamut-masking simple tool

https://mypaintingclub.com/blog/post/39-The-Gamut-Mask-Tool another tool with more complexity