We Draws Something

Hello!

After a period of silence on the articles’ side of the blog, we are back! And this time with a new great list of PS extensions and tools that designers and painters will love!

1. Colour Constructor

Colour Constructor is a brilliant little program that helps you design colour and values in a very simple way. Especially for painters, this program demonstrates how colours, shadows, and lights of your choice interact on a 3D object.

Colour Constructor is a study and workflow tool that is designed to help you design the colours and values for a painting or image you are making according to a light source and ambient term.

Ahmed Aldoori made a test video of the program and you can watch it here.

2. Coolorus

Coolorus is an amazing colour weel plug-in made for Photoshop.

Coolorus is the right choice for creative people willing to improve their painting workflow. It saves time, and helps you choose better colors thanks to Color Schemes, Gamut Lock and the power of triangle HSV representation.

3. Chameleon Adaptive Palette

Chameleon Adaptive Palette is a flexible - and very pretty - palette panel designed for the love and happiness of concept artists and digital painters.

Chameleon Palette is a single panel that changes according to your needs. Each of the strips provides a different color function, but they all have the same principle.  They automatically and intelligently generate ranged colors swatches or palettes based on the one you just selected. From whatever source, canvas included.

4. Prisma Palette

Prisma Palette is a particular Photoshop plug-in that generates different colour palettes for areas in shadow and areas in light.

Prisma Palette generates individual gamut masks for any number of light sources; mapping exact local colours to lit colours within the colour space.

5. Lazy Nezumi

One of the most popular applications used by designers and digital artists, Lazy Nezumi lets you take control of your lines. This powerful Windows app helps artists draw smooth lines with different features and options, such as Position Smoothing, Pressure Processing, Scripting, a set of rulers, and more. 

Lazy Nezumi works with Photoshop and many other art programs, 2D and 3D. You can check the list of supported products here.

6. AD Brutus Symmetry

AD Brutus Symmetry is a Photoshop CC panel that helps artists work with almost realtime symmetry.

AD Brutus Symmetry uses Photoshop guides (vertical and horizontal) as Axis for the symmetry, but it’s not limited to guides, it also works with selections and for fastest use we can assign shorcuts to the main functions.

Note though that while Photoshop still doesn’t have any mirror painting tool, other softwares such as Corel Painter, Krita, and CLIP Studio Paint do.

7. BrushBox

There are many Photoshop extensions and panels that help artists organise their brushes in folders, but we’ve found that BrushBox really outshines them all. Though a bit pricey ($15), especially considering that similar products can be found on Gumroad for less or even for free, BrushBox can do everything and more when it comes to managing brushes. 

Like with a layer panel, artists can organise brushes and tool presets into groups, colour code them, search through presets by name and type, and much more.

Note that the brush preset panel in the new Photoshop CC 2018, however, has this same management feature.

Other articles:

10 inspiring and helpful YouTube channels for digital artists

6 inspiring Art Podcasts for digital artists

hopefully this reads well lmao but i drew this for anon 

if you want to draw a bipedal animal that is not usually bipedal, there are 2 routes u can use to make it look balanced and not just like a dog standing up begging for treats like the guy on the left. 

the main thing to understand about digitigrade legs (including hoofed legs) is that the ankle is always under tension - it has to support the entire weight of the animal. the mechanism to support that weight is the achilles tendon (in red) and if the animal is standing up then the tendon is always taut. because of this taut tendon attaching to the heel of the animal, you won’t actually see much visible calf muscle, and the leg will appear deeper than it is wide (from the front anyway) 

for a more upright stance (right) you have to mess with the proportions a bit and straighten out the leg, so it looks a bit like a human on tip-toes. this guy, however, could not possibly revert to all-fours comfortably. 

if u want to keep the sense of tautness in the legs, you have to make sure the angle of the ankle isn’t too extreme, because then it looks like it could fold in on itself at any moment. 

Okay so I followed this video about foreshortening and…

GUYS

SHIT

SO YOU WANNA DRAW CATS AND DOGS BUT THOSE PESKY SNOOTS GET IN THE WAY

Here’s a hopefully helpful tutorial on how to draw them from memory but it also helps to understand and break down how to see their structure when you use reference!

Remember, it’s always best to learn the anatomy of an animal first before trying to stylize it. This way you know the rules and can choose which ones to break!

SO this is gonna be a long post so hold on to ur butts

I always start out with a really messy base sketch just to figure out the very basic form/shape/idea of what im drawing is going to be. I dont worry about details or anything in this step. (I’m using a very simplified drawing to show this process for the sake of time/my sanity)

From there I add a cleaned sketch on a second layer which usually ends up looking like this.

I always sketch in pink because thats whats the easiest on my eyes. Both of these steps I have my stabilizer on 10 & I am using the marker tool with these settings (obviously not at 100.0 size though but you get me)

For the linart layer, I change my stabilizer to s-1, and use the standard pen tool with no fancy settings.

I almost always delete teh sketch layers after I’m through with lineart because I work better with fewer layers.

For the color layer, I select the negative space, or outside of the lineart & then inverse so it ends up like this

& then fill in that layer with my base color (Sometimes I use grey, other times I use the main color of whatever character I’m drawing)

I usualyl add details on the same color layer, but if its a complex design I’ll do them on a layer above the base color. For the most part though I stick to as few layers as possible

& then when I’m done I add some half assed shading/highlights and a solid color background/outline and I’m usually done. 

by the time I’m done my layers usually end up looking something like this

TAKEN FROM HERE: https://sites.google.com/site/houseotwisted/junk/20drawings

1. Draw the most common appearance for your character. This is your comfort zone. (Color)

2. Draw your character from the front, the side, and the back. This is something called a ‘turn sheet’. It’s a little boring to do, but will be very helpful to you in the future to have on hand.

3. Draw your character from the front, the side, and the back, but have them in nothing but their undies at most. This is to show off how your character is built. Drawing nothing but a straight pant-leg with no structure under it is no way to learn! (Skip this if your character doesn’t wear clothes)

4. Draw your character at three different ages than they currently are. (Must be noticeably different. No ages: 4, 5, and 6, etc.) Color one of them.

5. BANG! Your character just heard a loud noise right behind them. Draw their reaction!

6. Draw a bird’s eye view of your character.

7. Draw your character feeling very happy. Show body language.

8. Draw your character feeling very angry. Ditto.

9. Draw your character feeling very sad. You know the drill.

10. Draw your character with a different body type than they usually have. This helps you map distinguishing features onto different ‘templates’.

11. Draw your character if they were the opposite gender.

12. Draw your character as a different species than they normally are.

13. Somebody has just handed your character a live duck. Draw their reaction. Keep them in character.

14. Mary Sue the HELL out of your character. (Due to being asked “What is Mary Sue?” several times, I have included a link to the evil that is Sue: [Click if you dare.]

15. Draw your character lifting something heavy. (no magic allowed!)

16. Draw your character in an opposite role than they appear in your story/continuity.

17. Draw your character doing something they enjoy.

18. Draw your character doing something they do NOT enjoy.

19. Draw your character in a dynamic pose that is not a profile shot (from the side).

 I’M GONNA TRY MY BEST TO EXPLAIN THIS because, man i feel u but at the same time I know very little about the technical anatomy when it comes to skulls ;;

Let’s do a sorta above ¾ view for this rlly quick, when I start out, I always like to establish one part of the snout at a time, instead of trying to just DIVE RIGHT IN. So I start by putting vague upper muzzle shapes here, just to get the direction goin’

NOW WE GOTTA GIVE THIS THING A LOWER JAW to help keep it symmetrical, I like to pull the lines from the corners of the upper lips. DON’T BE AFRAID TO OVERLAP, OVERLAPPING IS IMPORTANT IN GENERAL BUT ESPECIALLY WHEN DRAWING OPEN MUZZLES LIKE THIS!! See that line that goes from the upper right corner of the lip and through the top half of the muzzle? I basically use that as my guide to keep from pulling the jaw too far out, or too far in. Don’t worry if it looks a bit like they have an underbite either, depending on the angle, perspective will do that..it likes to fuk with ur brain a bit

OKAY NOW we’re bringing back the overlapping line because chins are still hard for me to draw and I change how i do it constantly but this is a good method to get a chin that doesn’t thrust too much outwards or inwards (unless that’s the specific jaw shape you were going for with ur character, then by all means do so!!! ) bring the line from the further corner of the eye, form the cheek, and bring it down (overlapping over the top jaw as we are wont to do) and bring it AROUND TOWN. You see here that it’s kinda boxy and I could probably curve that line some more to give a more slender look but w/e IT WORKS WITH MOST SHAPES

if you’re referring to something like the BND draw I posted recently, it’s pretty much a similar course of action, so let’s use this  asshole as an example because his mouth is obnoxiously wide when it’s open 

Start off with the upper jaw, again, it’s easier to piece these things together vs trying to shove all the shapes together at once (for me it is anyways) 

i’m doing this from profile view this time but you can see the overlapping lines still work!! I roughly places where the otherside of the upper corner of the lip would be on the side we don’t see and used that to help me get an idea of how far down the lower jaw is gonna go~! Don’t worry, it’s gonna look awkward most of the time  and it’s a perfect chance to go in and fix the length of the upper/lower jaw before you start adding in deets like the tongue and teeth! <:

there we go!!!! looks a lot less awkward LOL

you can also do something like this if ur feeling kinda toony (it’s really fun, simple yet effective!)

It can work for a lot of different styles, from realism to toony to my stupid doodles i do a lot when being a Serious Artist ™ is just 2 much for me :^)

fucking christ I am sobbing

Basically to sum it up: