Before you begin

1. Always find inspiration. 

Don’t feel shy to tag others’ works as #insp; they’d be more than happy to see that! Whenever you feel lost and don’t know what to do, look through your fav’s blog, or your #insp tag. Trust me, it helps. Do note that inspiration =/= copying. Do not take someone’s style to make your graphics, instead learn from them and implant your own personality into it.

2. Getting the resources you need to do your stuff

All of us have surely looked at something and went “Hey, where did they get that ____?”. Saying “I’ve tried looking for it and I can’t find it, so can you please share it?” is not an excuse. OP managed to find it, so why not you? Try resource blogs, or as I personally prefer, deviantart. for textures/psd colorings/whatever. 

Zerochan, under the tag #official art, offer a lot of, well, official art. For HD anime, use kissanime or gogoanime. Mangacaps, try kissmanga or batoto. Remember, these are not the only websites -- the entire internet is your resource.

Oh, right. Try to find full body images! Don’t get images where the object is cut off at the side, or have the head but no legs. That way, you have more things you can do.

3. Use appropriate dimensions.

Tumblr’s width is 540px, and you have up to 3 images in a row, and 10 images max when you’re posting using Photos. When you have 2, use 268px width for both. When you have 3, have all of them at 177px width. Yes, all 177px, not one 178px in the middle. How do I know that? Because I tried and tested out the dimensions myself!

Doing the stuff 

4. Have a concept (style).

I know, I know, I hate that word too, but what I mean is a little different. When graphics have a concept, they work better and there’s a higher chance of it getting reblogged. In this case, examples of concepts include editing a specific character or OTP. Bonus points if you use a quote, or when your graphic tells a story. Using a consistent style is also considered a concept. 

For eg, for this edit Shironeki is my object, and I use the same coloring and font for every graphic. This creates a mood and people can easily see this and go “Oh wow, this person has a style!”

5. For God’s sake, stop making everything pastel!

Contrary to popular belief, pastel =/= guaranteed aesthetic. Not only does having too many bright colors make everything hard to make out, it just gives off the message that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. 

Don’t: 

Super light background and white text: Holy crap! I can hardly see the text and my eyes are on fire! 

Making the blacks as light as other colours and just having no contrast in general: Just. Don’t.

So, when is pastel OK to the eye?

1. When the thing you’re editing is food/scenery/things that will look good and appealing in pastel. 

2. When the photo has several colors, some light and others dark enough that there is still a certain degree of contrast visible (especially the outine of your object)

3. When your background color is dark enough to compliment your object/text, and vice versa. Pastel doesn’t mean “when everything blends and become one color”.

See what contrast can do? Try that out.

6. Stop misusing Text Justify. 

I know, Justifying your text seems like the “cool” and “in” thing to do, but if you don’t know how, don’t do it. With that said, I’m here to help, so here’s some tips! 

1. Don’t have only one word + a long width. Especially with all caps and a small font size. It’d end up looking like this:

Nobody’s gonna read that. Seriously. If you must have only one word, try narrowing the text area and making the font bigger/bold. 

Welp, still horrible. But at least better. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Don’t use super short words. Try to use words that have at least 5 letters if you’re using only one word. If the word is shorter than 5 letters, couple it with another word.

There. Much better. 

7. Know what fonts to use. 

Please, only use Comic Sans for memes. That’s all its ever good for. It’s a nightmare font. I will not hesitate to block people who use that font in an edit. 

Good system fonts include Bodoni, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century Gothic and tbh those are probably the few main I use. The rest I get from dafont / resource blogs, or from Googling if I want a font and they’re not there. Common Don’ts include using cursive, script fonts when your graphic’s all bright and fluffy or generally no fonts like Impact, Courier, Kristen ITC etc. 

8. If using textures, blend them well.

I’ve seen things that look like 

and its just wtf u doing bruh??????????? 

Textures with design and patterns work best as backgrounds, and when they’re either with a white/black or super dark/light bg color so you can copy one above your object set to one of the many lighten/darken options. This can also be used so they serve a clip mask function. For example, this film texture 

if I set it to Multiply and make Tsukiyama darker to blend... 

DAMN...

Making full use of Photoshop to touch up stuff

9. Content Aware

A pretty tricky tool, but does well when done right. You use this when you have a texture that’s too small for your canvas but looks like shit when you enlarge it. Say, this. 

Now, I just use the CA tool... 

Magic! Your texture has been extended! It’s much more efficient than Cloning.

10. Surface Blur.

Surface blur has to be one of the most beautiful thing in existence. If your stuff has alot of scan dots/lines, surface blur can help make things better if you use the right amount. This is Tsukiyama before: 

After:

God bless.

11. Blur.

Well, there’s Surface Blur, but that might not work when there’s too many dots and scanlines. When that happens, I use other blurs then set them to Soft Light/Overlay/Screen with adjustments. It makes the entire thing softer. 

Look, Tsukiyama totally passes as a woman now.

Posting on Tumblr

Last but not least, actually posting the thing on Tumblr.

12. Never be too safe

If your graphic looks weird during the posting stage, save it to your drafts first and check it out. Does it look okay? Is anything blur? Is the HTML text working? 

12. Use tags

Nowadays, almost every fandom has their own gfx tag and their own friggin’ blog. So explore, explore, explore! Make sure it’s within your first 5 tags so it shows up when someone searches for the tag.