#art tricks

What’s the best piece of art advice you’ve ever received? Let’s build a thread of wisdom for everyone to read. 💡

Believe it or not, these were value studies in grayscale, but I was technically working in color, just with kind of blind color palettes. So, while I was painting what you see above, I was seeing the picture below.

This method of painting is useful for when you want to kind of limit your color palette but find yourself picking too many colors. I color picked from the color palettes on the right of the studies and just focused on the values and gave myself a little surprise at the end.

I know this isn't anything new, but it took me ages to find out how you make your canvas desaturated while painting in colors while you're in Krita (I knew how to do it in Photoshop but it didn't work w/ Krita) so if you're interested-

Go to Image-> Properties-> Soft Proofing. You can change the Softproofing to be Grayscale and you can paint in grey without the eyedropper just picking up grey. The default shortcut is ctrl+y, and I don't know how to change keyboard shortcuts so that's all I've got, but I like having it to help me check my values really quickly.

To make it permanent, go to Settings->Configure Krita-> Color Management and change the Soft Proofing setting there (I got this from a David Revoy video on Youtube, he's got lots of good tips for Krita users).

I'm really bad at a limited color palette unless I'm drawing in black and white, and gradient maps can be a bit finicky if you don't know how to use them with layer filters and stuff, so this is a fun alternative that works in Normal mode. I know there are people here who prefer Krita (I love it so much) so I thought I'd share a little tip that makes my life easier when I'm drawing.

Chain drawing trick:

So I'm broke af rn and can't afford a new 8x5 mixed media book, so I've started to draw on the back of pages. I've found that when I use the acrylics on the backs of pages, the particular mixed media books I have are smooth on the backside, so it makes the acrylics pill more than they usually would.

WELL, it just so happens that I have some other 8x5s that have a few spare pages left, so I'm going to start gluing them on the backs of used pages so the rough side is facing out. Idk if any of y'all have this problem yourselves, but definitely give this a try if you do! 🐰💜✨️

You see so many absolutes with these tips; always do X but never do Y, this is how you accomplish Z. These are just people sharing what works for them, so not all of them will necessarily work for you - in fact, the majority probably won’t. But at the same time, some might not be working for you because you don’t understand the point behind them; if you can’t figure out why the rule exists, what practical purpose it has, then you can’t apply it productively in your project

Do you know the purpose of active and passive voice? Do you know how to identify them? If not, how are you meant to use it creatively in your writing?