The Late Blooming Lizard's Domain

a sketchbook is not:

- your portfolio

- only containing finished drawings

- Something you must show to other artists

- only a expensive moleskin

a sketchbook is usually:

- for sketches and doodles

- for practising and brainstorming

- unfinished stuff or crudely drawn stuff

Like most pages in my current sketchbook have lots of blank space and unfinished stuff.

Like maybe 3-4 pages in my sketchbook look like this:

But like a major part of the pages often end up like these:

Welcome to the tutorial! Disclaimer: this is all but one way of doing tones and such. I use these methods primarily on Morning to Moon, and other comics and illos I do. These methods can be translated to other programs and even real tone, to an extent. But I mainly use Manga Studio to do this. Ok! The Lana Del Rey look-a-like above will be our model through most of this journey.

Also, please go into this with some rudimentary knowledge of what tones are and things like light source and shadow.

01. Here is some basic information on tones: the bigger the number of “lines” (L) the smaller the tone is. 85L looks grey and 27.5L looks like polka dots. The percentage constitutes the darkness of tone. Bigger tones are used a lot in comedic scenes in manga, applied in the background. Go look through a random manga. You’ll see it.

Also, dot tone is always best at 45 degree angles! You can mess around with angles with different tones (like line/noise tones) but dot tones work almost exclusively best at 45 degrees.

02. Do not mix tones of two different sizes like this! It looks terrible. It produces what is called “moiré”.

03. Or shrink tones in anything but multiples of 25 (ie 100, 125, 150). Tone here is shown at 33%. Ugh.

04. First technique is used with gradients. You can apply gradients the same way in MS that you can in Photoshop (just dragging it and letting go). Gradient tone looks really good on hair and clothing and reflective objects. Anything where there might be different tones of shadows, basically. Gradients look best at around 55-65L, where the texture of the tone is present.

05b. To highlight and contour gradients, a possible way is to take an eraser (or pen set on clear) and lightly brush away the tone in the direction the light is coming from. At the end of the gif you see a sort of soft brush applied. That’s a “tone deletion” or “tone use” brush in MS used to mimic scraping tone. They have two I like and they are literally called just that, tone deletion and tone use.

These kinds of brushes look suuuper good and work best with a high density setting and low scatter.

It works like an airbrush but looks like scraped tone and gives a softer edge to tone. I employ this a lot on skin.

06. Tone on skin, imho, looks best at the size of 80+, because the harshness of the tone tends to wash out the ink work. The tone applied above is 85% and I had to zoom in almost to 100% to see any of the individual dots. This tone will always compress to look like grey shading when shrunk to 100DPI. (See below for example.)

07. Let’s talk about different methods of applying tone to skin! You had the method of #6, wherein tone is applied all over to give the appearance of darker skin color. 

First, there are two different types of shadows, especially when it comes to toning: contour and cast shadows. Contour is meant to show depth and dimension of objects. Cast shadows are simply just shadows.

We have the method in the gif above, where tone is applied in the same fashion as the allover skin tone but “carved out”. A good usage for this is when applying tone for contour. At the end a tone brush is applied to scrape away tone and soften said contour.

07. My favorite method of applying cast shadows (shadows caused by hair, under the nose/chin etc) is to make a new tone layer via a marquee (this is the easiest way I’ve found to do it) and then ….

07b. Draw the shadows with a pen tool on the tone layer ….

07c. And floodfill inside the lines, to make shadows! This is a pretty quick, but effective way of getting clean tones. You could do a similar thing with a large brush, but you have to have a steady hand and a lot of time. I have neither, tbh.

08. There are also ways of “drawing” with tone. For example, a cloud. I make a marquee in the shape of your general cloud and fill it with a mid-value tone.

08b. By layering a tone of the same line amount BUT darker, I can produce a shadow on the cloud. (I scraped both of these with a tone brush for soft edges.)

08c. The same method is used here for fire! Block of tone with general fire shape erased, then tone applied in exponentially darker values to build up an illusion of form. In the middle I put some white tone on top to show where the fire burns brightest. (Yes, white tone exists! You can apply it in MS by clicking the white instead of black color. Yep.)

09d. I even use gradients this way. By laying down a dark to light gradient and using an eraser + tone brush to scrape it away, I created (pretty crudely) the illusion of water. Be creative! 

09. Gradients can also be applied from opposite directions to make contour. This works very very well on round objects, like bowls, doorknobs etc. It works really good for little details, where there’s not a lot of room to shade.

11. Tones don’t always come in dots! There’s lines, noise, etc. Different types of special effects. More specialized tone can be used in a variety of ways: I use lines to add blinds to windows and noise to add texture to grass, or to cloth. Like I said, be creative. Where you see the need for a certain repeating shape, there’s a possibility to do it with tone.

In Manga Studio it’s even possible to create your own tone from pictures, in shapes like plaid or houndstooth for clothes or repeating patterns of cats and pizza for the background of your soft grunge monster girl; whatever you want. (I can make a separate tutorial for this if anyone has a particular need. It’s almost the same thing as making a brush in Photoshop.)

I’ve seen a lot of really cool recolored FR items floating around, so I thought I’d pass along this trick since I think a lot of people use hue/saturation sliders to achieve this and there’s a better and less frustrating way!

This is also how I recolor painted adoptables and even sometimes my normal art. I often render my art straight to greyscale, then use selectively-applied gradient maps to color. You can also use a low opacity gradient map (maybe set to soft light or color mode) over a piece of artwork to unify the colors gently or help suggest lighting! Since discovering gradient maps I’ve used them in nearly every piece of digital art I’ve made in some way or another. They can even be used to fine-tune brightness and contrast!

DISCLAIMERS: This tutorial only applies to Photoshop–specifically CS5, although the steps should be similar to any other recent PS release. I have no idea if this is possible in other editing programs, sorry! T_T Also it’s possible someone’s already made this tutorial and if so, mea culpa, I couldn’t find it T_T I hope this is new information for some people, at least.

SO HERE IS HOW IT WORKS:

First, you need to create a new adjustment layer. This is better than just making a gradient map for the image (which is also an option) because you can selectively apply it. Here’s where you find the option.

A note: this works better on high-contrast items. You might want to bump the contrast of the item icon before working, but if you don’t mind fiddling a lot you don’t have to. Really dark items may need to be lightened some, and really light items may need to be darkened. The item I chose is a nice middle ground with good strong values throughout, so I didn’t do any prep work.

Make sure this box is checked if you’re working on multiple icons or if you have a white background. I check it anyway, just to be safe.

It applies your last used gradient, so you’ll probably get something bizarre like this. No worries! Find your adjustment box (same one you use for hue/saturation adjustment layers). It might be docked with another menu (like your brushes, as mine is), and you might need to turn it on this way. Then click on the gradient bar to pull up this:

Get acquainted with this dialog box, you will come to love it.

Basically, the far left dropper-box indicates what color the gradient map is making out of black. The far right indicates what color the gradient map is making out of white. Everything in between is all your shades of grey (or non-grey, since the item is in color), applied on an even scale.

It’s important to note that the scale goes from *black to white*, not from darkest to lightest in your image. It also applies to the *ENTIRE* image including any adjustment layers already applied! If you apply a really pale gradient map to an image and then layer another over it, you’ll need to push everything over to the right hand side of the scale, etc. This makes more sense the more you work with maps.

And here’s an example of how it looks in use! Because there’s no pure white here, the very furthest right hand color isn’t showing up in the image. But you can fix it!

You can move all your sliders! You can also move the dots between shades to adjust and fine-tune. Click anywhere on the scale to add more sliders. You can double click a slider or click the color box below in the Stops dialog to change it.

NOTE: Unfortunately because Adobe hates its users you can’t use an eyedropper in this dialog. If you want an exact color you need to write down the hex or RGB value. :(

This is largely an intuitive process: some understanding of color theory helps (highest saturation in the middle/top values; hue shifting, etc.;) and fiddling around will help the most! Some really cool iridescent effects can be achieved with judicious use of dramatic midtone hue shifting. As a general tip for FR items, you probably want the darkest shade to be pretty close to black, especially for the background, if you care about preserving the border/etc. If you don’t, go nuts.

But we don’t want to apply the whole image, that’s boring. Click directly on the layer mask in the layer dialog and use black to color out the background. If you have more than one element (petals, leaves, background, or whatever), you will need to do this for each element. If you only have two (item and background), you can apply color to the background this way:

Make your gradient map for the BG, and then Ctrl+click ON THE MASK ITSELF and drag it to the BG map layer. PS will prompt you to replace. Click yes, then use ctrl+I (or the menu) to invert that layer. Instant BG mask!

You can also see that it’s possible to create cool ombre effects and have total control over them by applying gradients to your masks, or even paint on stripes/whatever! You can also try changing the blend mode of your gradient maps for other cool effects (especially useful for “glazing” greyscale artwork). 

Also, once you’ve set your masks up once, you can just adjust the gradients again. Although you should probably set them up more carefully than my messy ones I used in the examples below, lol.

AND THAT IS ALL! If you have questions please feel free to reblog with them or send me asks, I use gradient maps daily and am happy to help!

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:

Hey anon! This is a pretty expansive question to prepare for a long reply. 

What is drawing so much every day like for you?

I’m going to disclaim here that this is about my personal practice and is my own opinion. Everyone is different and your mileage may vary.

Art is my job, so I treat it as such. It’s a fun job which I’d rather do more than anything else, but it’s still a job, and I need to work hard at it. So at minimum, I’m trying to do 9-5 (a normal full time work shift) every day, making an 8 hour work day. Weekends included. Realistically, this ends up being more like 10-12 hours so that I have time so sketch and doodle personal stuff as well. I do this because it’s what I love, and I’d rather do art than watch TV, play games, etc. Of that, maybe 10% of the art I do actually ends up being shown to anyone/posted online (other than in my online sketchbooks which I sometimes update).

This isn’t what everyone wants to do, and art can be rewarding on many different levels, whether you draw half an hour a month or a few hours a day around your day job. But that’s what it is for me.

When I was starting out, I split my time in half with doing studies and doing imaginative work. So in an 8 hour day, that’s about 4 hours on each, which suddenly seems a lot less daunting than drawing for 8 hours straight. Nowadays professional work takes up a lot more of my time, so I have less time to study/paint personal work, but that’s a pretty different topic so I won’t cover that here.

Studying

In order to improve at anything, you need to learn your fundamental principles and train yourself. Think of this like you’re an athlete - you spend maybe 10% of your time competing, but the other 90% of your time is spent training. If you only ever did the competing, you’d never get anywhere - you need to build those muscles first! When you’re starting out, I’d recommend spending about 50% of your art time studying and about 50% applying those studies in imaginative sketches.

Anthony Jones has a really great video about studying here which I highly recommend.

The great part about studies is that you don’t need to be “inspired” to do them. It’s all about the learning process. So even if you’re not in an “art mood”, studies can help get that out of your system and inspire you to make your own work, as well as helping you improve.

What do I study?

Life drawing and painting is pretty much acknowledged to be the best way to study drawing. Try to go to local life drawing classes, or failing that just draw your own face, hands, feet, etc, or anyone who will sit still for you. Or even if they won’t ; )

Here’s a self portrait from last year, and a life drawing and painting that took a couple of hours, along with some hands which I think were about 5 minutes each. If you have a good life drawing instructor they’ll help you improve and give advice. Try to vary your lighting, subject matter and the length of time you spend on pieces - we do everything from 2 minute gestural drawings to hours-long poses in our life drawing classes. Jana Schirmer is great inspiration for life paintings.

Your fundamentals are equally important. This means studying the concepts of anatomy, light, perspective, composition and form, among other things. I do a variety of stuff but most of it is basic practice and studies from books. 

I highly recommend studying from the following books for starting out:

Anatomy/Figure Drawing:

Michael Hampton’s Figure Drawing Design and Invention

Bridgman’s Guide to Drawing from Life

Vilpuu’s Drawing Manual

Loomis’ Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth

Perspective:

Scott Robertson’s How to Draw

Colour and Light:

James Gurney’s Colour and Light

Lastly, studies from master paintings and photographs.

The important thing with all your studies, but particularly those of other paintings and photographs, is that you are not copying but rather observing and learning from your subject matter. I like to focus on one or two things in a painting or photograph and analyse it - the colour palette, lighting, composition or material rendering, for example.

If you are going to do studies of paintings, do them from established masters. These (on the left) are from Winterhalter and Rubens. Studying from photographs (and film stills) can be helpful for mood, lighting and tone that you wouldn’t see in painting from life. You should avoid tracing (though do measure and check your study against the original), and colour picking (though again, you can colour pick to check your own colours against the original). In general, try to treat a photo or painting you are studying from as if you were studying from life.

How do I think of what to draw?

Now we come to the other 50% of the time.

My general advice is: draw what you want to draw, especially when you’re starting out. There’s no faster way to lose motivation than drawing things you have no interest in. You should try to push just a little outside of your comfort zone bit by bit. That’s where studies come in - realise that you’re bad at something, and study until you’re better, then apply your studies to your artwork.

I draw things because I want to bring a certain idea to life. This idea can be triggered by anything, from a moment in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign,  a shot in a film, a flash of colour in a bird flying by or an interesting piece of information in a book. Sometimes you won’t even really know where an idea came from. Inspiration comes from everything you observe or consume in your life, and this will shape what you want to draw.

The study process and the imaginative process are interlinked. I have a huge folder of images I find inspirational or appealing/helpful in some way, varying from fashion, other artworks, compositional film shots, anatomical poses, lighting, pictures of animals, master paintings etc. Try to gather things you like in one place, whether that be a Tumblr, a pinterest, or just a big ol’ folder on your hard drive. When I was younger, I’d print out things that I liked and stick them on my wall. I still do that, but I’ve run out of wall. 

You should be inspiring yourself by studying the things you like, and then apply them in your own drawings. Deconstruct why you like it, and how you can use it in your own work. Sketch a lot - you don’t have to finish everything you start! Try to take some pieces through to completion, but don’t be afraid to abandon something if it’s not working (do try to figure out WHY it’s not working, though).

In addition to studying, use reference. I like to think of using reference as a shortcut around studying that you can use in a pinch. Not sure how to render satin and you’ve got a client piece to get in tomorrow? Get a reference - then after you’ve finished the piece, do some studies of it then see if you can draw it from imagination.

Don’t neglect your health.

Being an artist is hard and can be punishing to both your physical and mental health. Please look after yourself. Here’s some things I think are important.

Try not to compare yourself to other artists in a derogatory way. Yes, take inspiration, but don’t beat yourself up because you’re not as good or don’t have that style. Everything comes in time.

Try to avoid jealousy and envy of other artists. Likewise, if you find yourself doing well, try not to be egotistical in comparing yourself to others. I find that just talking to artists helps with this - drop your favourite artists an ask or an email. Even if they don’t have time to reply, it’s usually a pleasant experience for both parties.

You need a bit of overconfidence to keep your motivation up, and a lot of self criticism to make sure you don’t stagnate. Try to keep both in equal measure.

90% of the time your art won’t be good enough to you. This is normal. Keep going.

The other 10% that you like, you probably won’t like in a few months time. So just keep making more!

Get critique. Take critique well (don’t take it personally). Critique will help you improve. Critique is also subjective, so take it with a grain of salt.

Keep yourself in good shape physically - make time to eat well, exercise, and sleep, as well as watching out for your posture in your chair and the health of your wrists. This is incredibly important.

Don’t let art have a negative impact on your mental health. Some of the points I’ve mentioned cover this already but also: make time to socialise and relax. Only do as much as you can. Have some other hobbies. Try being part of an art community - posting art online and receiving feedback can be both motivating and comforting.

When I was in college there was this ongoing competitive mindset from the teachers /students that: “If you’re not drawing all night / getting 1 - 2 hours of sleep, you’re going to fall behind.” If you’re an artist you’ve probably met this kind of thinking… I’ve heard it from so many pros / tutorials.

One of my professors said that line all the time. I loved this dude. he worked at Disney on many of my favorite movies, and my young self became absorbed in this mindset. About 3 years into my degree that professor had a stroke, and when he went to the doctor they said he actually previously had something like 10+ strokes without even knowing, brought on by stress, and that he needed to slow down. 

Since then I’ve heard tons of other accounts of sickness and divorce brought on from addiction to work.

A few years later I was listening to an Animation podcast interviewing Glen Keane. He brought up that there were other animators who would live and breathe their work, never going home, barely sleeping, etc. 

What shocked me was that Glen Keane said something like “I ignored this idea, and decided to go home every night to spend time with my family, because I could learn just as much from my life experiences with them.” 

Anyway I just wanted to take a second after hearing a statement like this again recently and let any young artists out there know that: