cloud castle

yeah kinda, summer has been busy with travelling and other stuff but I'm slowly getting back to normal life :') might take me some time to get fully back on fr but i'm still checking the site few times a week.

thank you!!

MythicalViper has this amazing guide on skin making you should def check out! (and they're giving out free blueprints too!!)

I'll write down some stuff here that came to mind.

I use a lot of autoline brushes for stuff like plants and jewellery. In clip studio it's called border effect I think (I usually set mine at 1.5, but it depends on your line thickness). It's so much faster and easier way to do smaller detail. After I've drawn the shape out I just start adding color/shadows/light by clipping layers to it.

like I personally think it's literally not worth it to worry about lines and small detail too much, since it will get crunched anyway. I think that the composition, color and readability of the skin are the most important things!

it's also helpful to check during your progress how it looks at 350x350px and how much detail you are losing.

one thing is that I see new skinmakers do is having too dark shadows/lines or they have not been color tinted at all. It dulls the colors a lot when you slap a grey multiply layer on top of your work.

<- original shadow layer at 50% and original lines at 30% | tinted shadows and lines ->

here's a method for lines and shadows (which I didn't come up with myself, and I'm not sure if I'm even doing it correctly lmao, but maybe it's useful for someone):

Merge your skin layers together and place it under lines and shadows layers (make sure to take copies of the original layers)

2. Copy the skin layer on top of both shadow and lines layers and clip them. Make sure the shadow and lines layers are at 100% opacity.

3. Merge the shadow and lines layers with the clipped layer.

4. Change layer type to multiply and clip the layers to the skin.

5. It's usually not perfect as is so you will need to play with tonal corrections, add saturation, play with the opacity of the layer etc. Sometimes just I copy the lines layer multiple times so you can see it better. You should also pay extra attention to white/light areas of the skin, since multiply won't affect those areas and the shadows and lines will be too light. You need to do some manual correcting in those areas. You can just lock transparent pixels and go over them with a brush.

hi! I've been using picresize.com! I use procreate and clip studio paint and they are both so bad at resizing.