Cyvern.3914

What truly fabulous thing am I gonna give away this time around?  Guesses? Okay no, nobody has time for that.

Aww yee, look at that sweet weapon.  Okay, the bow is nice, too. Y’all are probably more interested in the bow than the plant of questionable morals, right?

So, yeah I’m gonna give away LEAF OF KUDZU (insert sparkly text there, use your imagination.  It’s so bright you have to wear shades).  You too have a chance at owning your very own snazzy plant bow by sitting around and reblogging or liking this post.  Unfortunately, I don’t really have much else to offer this time around, but hey a pre is always good to keep in the bank.

I guess I need to make some rules for this, yeah? 

One reblog and one like per blog. Nobody wants to see my purple, planty butthead all over their dash.

You do NOT have to be following me.  It’s cool, I post sporadically and my stuff isn’t what everyone wants to look at all the time.  If you are following me I’ll probably, I dunno, draw a bust of one of your characters or something.  I’ll ask, if you’re game then I’m game.

The winner has 48 hours from the time of the drawing to respond, please have your ask box open so I can send a message! 

This giveaway ends at 3PM (cst) on March 9th, 2018.  After that I’ll do the drawing. 

aaaaaaaaaaah this piece has been sitting arnd my desktop forever and i finally got a chance 2 color it!! a couple days late for vday but every day is vday if u try hard enough

Was thinking about G’s tar inspired shroud and then what was originally just gonna be a doodle ended up being a lot of fun to render.

iirc sweetfx by default comes with a tool that saves your screenshots w/ sweetfx on top of them but mine stopped working when 64bit gw2 became a thing so now i also use fraps to take screencaps

sweetfx is probably the simplest graphics shader out there but also really popular is gemfx and gw2hook aka reshade! gemfx is very popular and drains more computer power and can do nifty things like chromatic aberration and bokehs on top of the same capabilities as sweetfx. reshade/gw2hook is also more computer power draining, and is more complex to fidget with than the other two, but many people use and love it and it has capacities more similar to gemfx and can do very neat things with depth of field that’ll automatically give you that background blur

as far as editing in post goes tho, i tend to use this tutorial for manually adding background blur/depth of field: https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/creative-focus/ my protip w/ that is that there’s some neat ways you can use the selections from the pen tool to be very precise with where you place your blur and i prefer this as opposed to painting it on since gw2 is a videogame and ultimately everything is a hard pixel edge (using soft painty brush will result in a weird fringe around your character), and also using the gradient tool can help too

wrt cOLORS it’s very subjective but one thing i’ve noticed is that esp w/out shaders, gw2 is a very… murky game with a lot of green-grey tones. you want to probably up contrast and use a levels layer to reduce the green a bit and then up the red and blue in w/e balance you feel is good! sometimes it helps make it a bit more natural or pretty looking to reduce the green on the dark (leftmost) and middle sliders but actually add a hint more green on the bright (rightmost) slider!

it can also help a whole lot to make gradient maps and mess around with settings with those to tint your image a bit differently, if you don’t do that already! (i like making a gradient map with a dark-but-not-black semisaturated teal/blue or brown as the dark base and then a cream color as the light and then setting that usually to overlay/soft light/hard light!)