The art of a lone owl

I’ve never really wrote a tutorial before so apologies if this is bad

1. okay first thing I do is pick three colors, a mid, dark, and light. I like to check the colors in greyscale to make sure there’s enough contrast between each one.

I then plop down a blob of whatever my middle tone color is.

2. next, I take my dark color and just sort of randomly place it around. I try to make sure there’s a good amount of both the mid and dark tones spread throughout. I personally like to keep it kinda messy. I also have pen pressure on for both brush size and opacity, so I can have some blending action going on.

3. for the next step I do the exact same thing as before, except with the light color.

4. aight this is where we start adding details. see how you just have a bunch of colors and edges where two colors meet? use the eyedropper and go to an area where two colors meet, eyedrop a color, and then use that color to draw in your grass blades. I do this at every point where colors meet. should note I personally like to use a square brush, but you can really just use anything.

5. you can technically stop at the last step if you’re going for a more simple look, but to add more details I go to the “empty” areas of solid color and just draw in random strokes using a color nearby. it’s just a way to fill up the empty space.

6. basically more of the same idea of eyedropping and drawing. for more variety so things look interesting, I like to add random plant shapes.

7. and so the grass doesn’t look too plain, I add random dots of color and pretend it’s flowers and stuff.

Hey friends!

Found some hands tutorial by me

I draw closed snoots pretty much the same way as opened ones, as illustrated in this one tutorial i did a bit ago! Same goes for drawing opened mouths from the front. 

for closed muzzles, I tend to do placement lines for where the base of the muzzle connects to the face (and also as a marker for where the bottom of the eyes are gonna go!) and a line down the center of the muzzle to help me place the nose and make the upper lip indent shape! This is something I honestly don’t do too much bc I mostly forget but it helps SO MUCH

end result from using said guidelines hfhfh

as for opened snoots, here’s a lil thing using the same formula as my first tutorial;

Firstly, I start out roughing out where I want everything to go! The purple line in the right image helps me place the top corners of the mouth, where i’ll be dragging the lines for the sides of the mouth in a sec. This is a good time to map out how you want your expression to go, since the corner of the mouth I find makes it easier to connect everything else as you’re going along. 

After you get that sorted, drag the lines (blue lines) down from the corners (it’s perfectly fine if the lines don’t match up with the corners, it doesn’t have to be exact!), which are the rest of the mouth. Now is a good time to go in and tighten up/stretch the mouth shape to however it’ll benefit your character/style/expression. My sona has pretty round shapes, so I keep things rounded for her most of the time. (unless i’m exaggerating her expression, then things tend to get a little bit sharp and asymmetrical)

CLOUDS!!! here’s how i do em.

Heyyy, @mastermeg commissioned me for a little tutorial on how I personally draw tears!

Da, da, da, daaaaaaaa…… that’s a little more dramatic than I had intended. I love all these wonderful Sai tutorials that get posted on here but I haven’t seen much attention payed to Sai’s Lineart tool which I can’t get enough of. I’m sure there probably are Lineart Layer tutorials out there - I just haven’t come across one so I’m just adding to the pile. The Lineart tool is so awesome it deserves any number of tutorials anyway. It’s so easy to use, it saves me so much time, and it offers so much control which I really love. Honestly, the tool is so easy to use that this is less of a tutorial and more of just a general encouragement to just whip it out and start playing with it. Yeah. So say we start with a simple line like this swirly-wirly thingy that I drew with the marker tool. Well, the first step would be to create a linework layer by clicking the linework layer button.

There we go. Now, a lineart layer in Sai is different from any other regular layer in Sai and it will bring up a completely new range of tools. I’m gonna briefly go through them but the best way to understand exactly what each does is to just try them out for yourself. There’s no substitute for experience or however the saying goes.

Pen - This is your freehand lineart tool and to best honest I don’t really use it that often. That’s just me personally. I have an expensive gaming rig that has all sorts of magic running under the hood but we all know that Sai’s memory management is pretty crappy and I don’t need the lag or crashes that come with this tool when working at a high DPI. You may have a different, entirely pleasant experience with this particular tool but for me, if I’m doing freehand inking, I’d much rather just use the regular Pencil tool.

Eraser - Kinda speaks for itself.

Weight - This one I do love. Say you’ve drawn a line - or a path as Sai calls it. With this tool you can adjust the thickness of the particular line by simply selecting the brush size and then clicking on the line.

Color - Same as Weight. Simply select your desired colour and then select the desired line you’d like to change. Very useful. For the aesthetic.

Edit - This one comes with its own subset of mini-tools that I’ll get into in a moment. But this is definitely a useful tool - for me it’s probably the most useful.

Pressure - This is the one that adds the character to your linework. I’ll explain further below.

SelPen - A selection tool. Pretty standard. Since the Lineart layer works in ‘Anchor’ points (which again, I’ll get in to further down below) I don’t really use this one.

SelErs - Selection Erase. Goes hand in hand with the SelPen. I can’t say that I personally use this one  much.

Curve & Line - The Curve and the Line tools are the cornerstones of the Linework layer. I’m explain both further down.

The Edit tool, as I mentioned, brings up its own list of sub-tools. And they definitely have their uses. Again, it’s best to play around with them to truly get a grasp of what they do but I’ll just run through them quickly before I get on with the main tutorial.

Select - For selecting anchor points of paths. Honestly, I don’t really use this one too much simply because hovering over a point or path and clicking will select it.

Move/Add - Now this one I use a lot. Moving an anchor will affect the curvature of your line if you’ve used the ‘Curve’ tool, or you can add curves to a straight line by clicking and dragging in between anchor points.

Delete CP/Curve - Kinda speaks for itself. It will delete an achor point in your line. Sometimes this can be useful for making your curves rounder if you’ve added too many points to it.

Deform Path - Again, kinda self explanatory. It will warp your line. I don’t really use this one myself but that’s not to say that it couldn’t have its uses.

Deform Anchor - See above.

Move Path - Instead of moving just an anchor or adjusting the curvature of your line you can move the entire line at once. Can be useful.

Duplicate Path - Does exactly what it says - creates a copy of your line. Haven’t found much use for this simply because I don’t particularly like copy/paste stuff in linework. Faults or differences add character.

Delete Path - deletes a line you’ve drawn independently of other lines on your linework layer. Can be useful as well.

Connect CPs - This is difficult to explain the benefits of. It’s one that should be experimented with. It basically joins lines together. I use it quite often. Just pick this option and drag from one anchor point to another to join them.

Pointed/Rounded - See the diagram below for this one. I find it very useful.

As you can see I used the Curve tool to draw a simple curve (left) and then I used the Pointed/Rounded tool to convert the curve into a point (right) by selecting the tool and then clicking on the anchor point at the height of the curve. I find it very useful. Anyway, back to our swirly-wirly thingy.

Because our swirly-wirly thingy is basically one long curve, I simply select the curve tool and start clicking. Starting at the centre point on one end, I click to add anchor points as I trace the shape of the object. Each point adjusts the curvature from the last point. It’s kinda hard to explain verbally or even visually but try it out and you’ll quickly see how it works.

Once I have a line over whatever I’m inking done I like to adjust the weight to suit my preferences. I like to work with thicker lines because they give more room to play around with weight. So to adjust the weight you click on the Weight tool, select a brush size and then click on your line. If only it were that simple in life.

Once I have a good weight selected I move on to the Pressure tool. The pressure tool gives you two options. Pressure for width and pressure for density. Width is like controlling the weight of the line at individual points and density controls the transparency. I don’t usually use the density option. As with traditional inking I prefer to denote depth, shadow, etc. with weight as you can see in the image above. To adjust the pressure, simply select the pressure tool and then select an anchor point. Click, hold and drag to the left to make the line thinner of more transparent and to the right to make the line thicker and more dense. As you drag, a percentage will appear over the anchor point you’ve selected. This can be useful for keeping things consistent.

That’s all well and good for curved lines but what about straight lines? That’s where the line tool comes in. It works exactly the same way except it won’t add a curvature to your anchor pints. Still very useful though. Especially when combined with the Weight and Pressure tools.

A very fast shadow study since some peeps from my last stream seemed interested in how I handle shading~

Source: Coyotemange

Just when you thought you knew everything about boobs… NSFW?

My darling friend Chizzi mentioned that there are a lot of booby tutorials out there are just predrawn boobs with the artist going HEY LOOK! HERE ARE SOME BOOBS! but not many that actually talk about the anatomical structure, and where to put the lines.  I was like, “Hey, I can probably whip something up.“  And so I spent my thanksgiving making this.

Proportions probably aren’t exact, but I did my best.  I also didn’t explore the various body types, but perhaps I could do a separate tutorial someday.  I hope you find this tutorial useful :)

thanks. i feel like i do it differently every time, but i made a little tutorial here that hopefully gives you a good idea of how it usually goes