#tips and tutorial

hi! there’s a lot of places to look and a lot of options in general but my process is a giant frankenstein experiment where i hack together a bunch of things from different sources. Google is a great place to start but sometimes you might just see something on your timeline/dash that looks really nice. I recommend having a place to save your favorite looks for later referencing since Tumblr can get really cluttered. 

here i wanted to pick something ive never put on leo before so i looked up 1500s mens fashion. There are a lot of options but I honed in on this piece of the laughing cavalier. I already gave Takumi green though so I gave this outfit more orange just to offset it. I decided not to give him a ruff. 

You can start off with envisioning what you want to draw. it’s helpful to just google things like the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, and so on to get a feel for the changes in clothing. And this is just for European fashion! You can apply the same research to other regional shifts in fashion, like Japan after establishing contact with the west. 

For this picture I decided to try out a different style. I looked up traditional indonesian wedding attire. I specifically looked at women’s styles because although men wear nice clothes too, I really wanted the intense chest details. With women, they generally wear different colors for the skirt/pants but I decided to give Leo all black to tone it down a little. (I didn’t want to go overboard). I used a little inspiration from Miss Indonesia entries as well.

For designs with armor or if I want a lot of metal (which is a lot of fire emblem designs) I don’t even have to look at clothes, I can look at architecture or furniture. Examples taken from European churches in the baroque style. 

My Nohrian family designs basically took elements from things like this and modified for the theme I wanted (stars). I toned down some of the colors here too (for Xander’s mural plates instead of a full blown mural I kept it white and blue) 

Fire Emblem itself is a great place for inspo, if you’ve noticed I kept most of the character’s original design in terms of shape/placement, I just modified the colors/decorations. 

Finally, some modern inspirations. You can google things like Paris Fashion Week (insert year) and find many famous designers like Versace or Zuhair Murad. Consider that a lot of countries/cities have fashion weeks so you can try your luck with different styles around the world. 

In my post about inspiration for backgrounds I suggest looking at music videos for lighting inspiration, you can watch music videos for fashion as well (I watch a lot of Kpop music videos)

And as always there are other series that you can look at that might have designs that you like. Examples are series like Granblue Fantasy, Onmyoji, Touken Ranbu, Idolmaster, etc. 

hi anon! here are the two brushes i use the most

1. marker tool. I use this a lot for blocking in colors, it sort of blends but not a lot, the shape is square so its not something I use for lining/detailing but its fun for sketching and setting base colors. I also like it for backgrounds because it can do blocks (house silhouettes) really easily.

2. Brush tool. I use this for neater lines, I also do details with this one because it does not blend. 

I can do whole pictures with mostly marker or mostly brush so it really depends on what I feel works best? 

Side note, I have posted my brush settings before, in my tips and tutorial tag, if there are any other questions you have regarding my art it would be cool if you check that out first. Feel free to send an ask if your question hasn’t been asked before though!

Hi!! Thank you for liking my art!!

Unfortunately I don’t have color theory or a proper procedure to back me up when it comes to coloring but I’ll try to explain the best I can.

The two main questions I ask myself when I want to color are:

What sort of mood do I want this picture to have?

What colors do I feel like using today?

The mood is one of the easiest ways to decide on colors, because some colors are very good at portraying basic moods. A cold feeling can be shown with blues, warmth expressed through oranges. But remember that these colors don’t always have to be used for a singular mood, it’s merely a starting point.

the image on the left is mostly oranges and yellows but it’s not supposed to feel warm because our subject is left in the dark. On the other hand, the image on the right purposefully uses blues and purples as an easy way to keep a cold pale feeling.

So then it boils down to what colors you’d like to use today, and from there you can proportion out what the values of each color should be, for example, do you want to use blue and pink? Will pink be the main color or will it be blue?

Left: Teals are the base, red is the accent. Right: Reds are the base, blue is an accent.

Mixing cool and warm colors! In this image below I have dark browns and dark blues that comprise of the dark shadows. At the same time I also have teal as the highlights as well as pinks and purples. 

The base color is what I selected at the start and my other colors are revolved around it. Notice how each warm color has a cool color with the same brightness/saturation that matches it. You can achieve this by just spinning the color wheel. I also like to have very small quantities of bright colors just to add a whimsical touch. 

Both images have the same highlight tone, but the feeling is different because of the colors I chose. My intermediate color (that I put in between my brightest and darkest color) is almost always purple or brown. But in the left picture I used a very dark yellow as the darkest shade, in the right, I used a dark blue.

Basically, You don’t have to limit yourself to shading with the same tones, mix it up a little!!

If you want to challenge yourself, something I used to do but not really anymore is choose a base color, pick two colors that are similar to your base color (pink is close to purple and yellow), and a 4th color from across the color wheel (blue is almost exactly across the color wheel). The role of each color can vastly change based on where you want to put them. This is a poor example but these two images have the same base color, what I switched up were the other colors. Since I use a painting style, I rely on the eyedrop after I blend colors together, that way they can work better.

Hey anon! My URL is from an astronomy book on meteor showers! Geminids are meteor showers that occur every December, but I guess I am only one meteor so i dropped the S. 

It’s been a while since I first started digital art so I can’t exactly remember where I started but here are some general tips for you:

Think about what fits your needs in a digital art program. You might read a lot of posts comparing different programs and it can be hard to pick one, so you could try them all or start with something that seems manageable. When I started I used MSPaint and sketchfu a lot! I then moved to to strictly use Photoshop but I have shaky hands so Paint Tool SAI’s stabilizers saved my life. Photoshop might be better for you if you like the use of effect filters (I miss those sometimes). 

Don’t feel too pressured to learn everything at once! Looking up some tips and tutorials online is great but it can be super overwhelming!! I used to suffer a lot when I was learning photoshop because people would drop things like “just layer mask this to create this effect” and I would have no idea what that was.

Some things that might be good to learn when you start is how to do some digital art specific things, learn how to use layers even if you end up not using much, get used to looking at your art zoomed in and zoomed out. Make copies of layers you like so if you make a mistake you can go back. Learn copy and pasting methods, and just mess around a lot with effects (if the program has any) even if it looks like a corny instagram picture. 

Don’t worry about using your traditional art as a starting point. If you feel you sketch better traditionally you can take a picture/scan it and open it on your drawing program to practice lining it or coloring it. Soon you will find you don’t always need your trad art anymore and you can go full digital.

Lastly, start with things you like drawing! Right now you are just learning how digital art works so you shouldn’t feel pressured to start on anatomy/background studies. Do you like drawing your dog? Draw your dog!! Do you want to draw your favorite anime character since high school? Draw them! Do you only feel like drawing eyes all over the page? That’s totally cool too! You will be able to learn without getting super frustrated if you’re working on something you like drawing. 

That’s all I have for now! If you have some specific questions or need more explanation feel free to send more asks! 

i kept a bunch of progress shots for this picture, except its missing some layers i deleted that were sort of there as guidelines for the tentacle things