Micassi Picassi

Looking for a random city? Click here.

Looking for a random city that people have actually heard of? Click here.

Need a random surname for a character? Click here. (They also give prevalence by race, which is very helpful.)

Random motivations for your characters here!

Need some character quirks? Here and here! 

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

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

Hello!! Thank you so much!! ‘v’ I’m no expert at picking colors but I’ll try my best to explain some of my thought process.

For me, one of the most important parts is establishing the color and lighting in a scene before I even think about picking colors for the characters ^^ I find it much easier to pick colors for a character once I already have some kind of background color or scene since it means I just need to grab colors that look like they “fit in” that scene, instead of taking a wild guess.

It’s really important to me that I maintain a cohesive feeling in the piece, and this is easiest to do when I do that from the very start. It’s up to you how you want to do this (if you want to do this at all!) - for me, I have a tendency to choose initial colors that are more desaturated so they don’t clash too much. As I move forward in the piece, I’ll end up adding more saturated and contrasting colors.

A lot of these colors seem wayyy different from what the “actual” color of something is. It’s important to understand this distinction! Just because a particular color is, e.g. dark and desaturated by itself, doesn’t mean it will necessarily appear that way when presented against other dark and desaturated colors. Relative color is pretty amazing!

One last thing I like to do when I’m doing lights or shadows for a single object is that I won’t just pick colors that are simply lighter or darker - I’ll usually move along the color wheel and pick different hues as well. You can do like warm light / cool shadows, or cool light / warm shadows with this. This kind of contrast makes the piece a little more interesting to look at.

(i tend to default towards warm light / cool shadows by picking lighter colors of a hue closer to yellow, and darker colors of a hue closer to blue/purple. you should feel free to mix it up!!!)

Outside of all that, references are your friend! There’s a lot to be gained from photographs and other people’s artworks. I almost always throw together like 40 pictures to use as reference as I’m planning or painting something. So long as you’re not copying their color schemes exactly, don’t be afraid to use references!!

click this link

draw whomever you get

don’t worry about making it super-accurate, just focus on the characteristic parts of the face and have fun

the outcome might not look like the ref, but it will be different and more varied than faces you draw out of your head, an dprobably pretty rad on its own right!

I know for a lot of artists, especially when starting out, having smooth, steady looking lines can be a challenge, and maybe even seem impossible for some. So here are some tips and tricks to try out for getting your hands relaxed enough to give those swift flawless strokes you always wanted.

-Draw the same thing repeatedly and challenge yourself to go faster each time.

Just draw anything, use a reference if it makes it easier. Then draw it again while timing yourself. Repeat this with the goal of cutting your time down to a fair goal, and then stay at that time frame as you repeat the image until you feel more confident in the lines. 

For an even easier version, draw a series of geometric shaped repeatedly, circle and square being the most important, and try to eventually move up to stars. 

-Look where you want the line to end, not at your pen

I mean, it sounds weirdly simple and minor but I and quite a few other people have found that it’s better to visualize where you want to end your line, and focusing on that point as you draw the line to it. A lot of people look at their cursors/pencils/etc where they are drawing, and it gives an uncertain path for the line to follow, which causes shakiness and warped lines more commonly. 

-Tracing

Okay okay before anyone grabs their pitchforks, I’m not talking about art thievery. This is something no one’s going to see, it’s for practice.

Find images that you like, preferably 2D artwork as you’ll have clear outlines to work with. Simply practice tracing along the lines, and try to keep as in the lines as possible. Repeat this process as many times as it takes for your lines to become steady.