Ughhhhhhh F**k Me

Alright, here’s my answer to, “How do you animate?” I cover a scant few fundamentals and how to use Photoshop to both arrange your traditional drawings into an animation as well as how to just draw your animation in photoshop.

Images that are not mine are credited. The rest are screen shots.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Just in case you forget this exists.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

Hello, friends!

Welcome to the third week of TUTOR TUESDAY! Today we are taking a look at the basics of perspective! This one takes a bit more time and patience, but learning perspective will take you leaps and bounds, I promise!

Hey, friends!

Meg here, and welcome to another episode of TUTOR TUESDAY! Today we learn to tackle different ways of breaking down and visualizing objects so that you have an in depth understanding of what you are drawing and why you are drawing it that way!

Character Ideas:

Character creation masterpost

Character Alignment Chart

More character alignment descriptions

Muslim Character questions

Characters with magical powers

Building a new character advice

How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)

Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page

Basic character profile

OC masterpost

Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)

D&D Character Building Tool

Character Design Ideas:

How clothing affects a character’s personality

Character Design Inspiration blog

Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by

Character design references and inspiration

Sources for POC character design ideas and models

Create your own character model using HeroForge

For horned characters

Body and hair types guide

Random outfit generator

Naming Help:

Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources

General advice on avoiding naming appropriation

Hispanic Surnames

Gothic Victorian names

Huge master list for character things in general

Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more

Another name masterlist

How to pick a character name guide

Yet another names masterlist

Creating Background/backstory:

Character Sheet/Development Sheet

Another character development list

In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet

320 talents and passions for characters

On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous

Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary

Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes

Random backstory generator

Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid

Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:

Comparing character height/height references

Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science

Describing what different voices sound like

Describing skin tones

Writing friendship interactions that are platonic

Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea

Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing

Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)

How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters

How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero

On platonic OC and canon character relationships

How to avoid Godmodding in RPs

When it’s cheap to kill off a character

Writing dialogue

Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters

Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs

Slang resources

Dialogue tips

Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships

It’s hard to find guided practice tools for artists, so here’s what I’ve been able to find. Feel free to add your own and build this list. 

Figure Drawing Practice 

Animal Drawing Practice

Quickposes.com

Posemaniacs.com

Wysp Practices (some of this needs payment, some is free)

Hands and Feet Practice (new!)

Just in case you forget this exists.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

A tool that I’ve found is really handy is a called the Cash Clock. It’s a simple program that measures both the time that you’re working on a piece as well as how much money you should be earning. You can adjust the hourly wage to whatever you feel is right. Simply start the clock whenever you begin working on a project right up until you’re finished. It can give you a clear indication of what you should charge for commissions.

No artist should make below minimum wage for their artwork.

The Cash Clock is found as a download here. 

My art tumblr

Well, every thursday the guys at www.monos.mx (soon my webcomic, Anterra Chronicles in english!!) are releasing some handy tutorials for you guys, i wanted to make an english version so this way nobody looses the fun!!!

Krita is a painting program that has been around for a while, and in the last few years, underwent major changes and improvements.  Because of these improvements, many artists are using it not just because it is free, but because it offers amazing features.  These are by no means all of the great things Krita has to offer, but simply some of my favorite features of the program.

1. The Brush Engines.

Yes, engines.  As in plural.  There are many.  And they all do different things.  There is no way you could possibly capture all of its possibilities with one screen shot, but here are just some of the possibilities. Along side standard round, square, and shape, and textured brushes, there are brushes that smear, blend, and create interesting abstract strokes.  There are brushes for filters, and one of my favorites, the Experiment Brush, which is basically a pre-filled lasso tool. 

Brushes also support weighted smoothing, or brush stabilizers.

This is incredibly useful for line art.  And while I do not usually use this feature, it is something that I feel many programs are lacking, such as Photoshop.

But its brushes aren’t the only thing about Krita with variety.

2. Color Selector Customization. 

Whether you prefer something basic, or something more complicated, Krita will likely have what youre looking for.  You are not likely to find yourself missing your other program’s color wheels.  There are even more options than this, and other color selectors.

Gotta love that customization.

Krita also has some great naviation tools.

3. On the fly rotation, zoom, and brush sizing.

With krita, zooming, rotating, and brush size scaling are all smooth, and dynamic with the use of hot keys.  These are features I miss when in other programs.  To zoom, Ctrl+Middle mouse button, hover over the screen to zoom in and out.  The same with shift rotates (press the ‘5’ key to reset rotation).  Holding down shift and draging your brush on the canvas dynamically changes its size, allowing you to see the change, and get the exact size you want without brackets. Brackets also work, if that’s what you are used to.  Krita also has highly customizable hot keys.

4. The Pop Up Pallet

The pop up pallet is a set of your 10 favorite brushes (which you can edit), and a built in color wheel that appears when you right click on the canvas.  It is incredibly useful for switching between those few brushes that you use in almost every picture.

5.  Real time, seamless tiles creation.

Pressing the W key in Krita will infinitely tile your canvas, and allow you to work real time on simple to complex tiled images.  You can zoom in and out to see how your tiles work form a distance, and paint freely to create seamless artwork easily, without having to check using filters and manually tiling. Very usefull for patterns, backgrounds, and games.

6. The Symmetry Tool

This one goes without saying, Krita supports both horizontal and vertical symmetry, along with a brush that is capable of radial symmtry with as many directions as you like.

Go nuts, kid.

There are many more reasons why this program is awesome.  And it is only going to get more awesome.  And the coolest thing about it, is that it is 100% free.  So go check it out!  There’s nothing to lose. Krita isn’t for everyone, it can be hard to get the hang of, and it is not meant for photo editing, it is a program completely focused on digital painting from start to finish. 

Just in case you forget this exists.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

a series of composition tips i’d been sharing on twitter!

and since some people had asked, i’ve put up a pdf version of this on gumroad along with a layered psd of one of the example images too

friday night tutorial time

this post is massive but i tried to cover both the conceptual and technical side, hopefully it’s somewhat coherent

continued under cut

Hello my name is Kimola (picture on the left). I’m raising money because my little brother (who’s picture is on the right with my mom) was murdered Friday, March 10, 2017 in Jamaica and I’m really scared for their lives and trying to get my mom and little sister out of the dangerous area that they live in. I moved from Jamaica to the United States because my dad brought his children out here years ago because of how dangerous the area is. However, him and my mom weren’t together, and when he left, he left her and the children she didn’t have with him in Jamaica (my little brother and sister). Now, it’s only my mom and little sister. The Immigrant Visa Application Processing Fee is $535 to first get my mom into the United States and after, get my little sister here. Anything would be greatly appreciated, even a dollar. My goal is to get my mother and little sister out here in Georgia with me as quickly as possible, please help if you can, and thank you so much for your time.

Just in case you forget this exists.