#weibun tutorials

Hello!

I mainly use Photoshop unfortunately. I have been using it for exactly 20 years and at this point I do not have the willpower to learn another program. I'm happy to report that I've never personally paid for it, since Adobe sucks. When I'm travelling, or watching tv on the couch, I will use Procreate on the iPad.

On Procreate, I really like the default brushes "HB Pencil" and "Gensinki Ink".

In Photoshop, I mainly draw with a shitty monoline brush that I made by sampling a 1 px dot as the "brush tip shape". I usually use it at 2-4 pixels depending on resolution and make sure the size is not affected by pen pressure so the thickness is always consistent. This lets me draw with a really light touch which helps with speed and not hurting my wrist.

Photoshop scales the pixel dot up in a weird way that gives it slightly uneven edges so I scale it way up to fill in colors.

Occasionally you will see me draw with a heavy chisel brush. This one I made by sampling a rectangle as the brush tip shape and decreasing the space. Its a very simple brush that I love for blocking in shapes for design work.

You can download these two Photoshop Brushes here

how do you pick colors for your art? it's genuinely so incredible!!

Hello again, and tysm! Historically I've always hated picking colors. As a concept artist, my instinct is to always start with the unlit, base version of an object's color since this is the most helpful thing for a 3D artist. But for illustration, this is very boring.

I started picking my signature ugly neon colors out of laziness. When I fill in a piece, I always use a bright color to "mask" out the parts I plan to add color to because the edges were easier to see. When I started this account, I wanted to try making my pieces more illustrative (I am a chronic sketcher) so I thought, "well maybe I'll just leave the ugly colors and try to build around that". This was how I started playing with bold colors that I used to hate.

Picking colors for illustration is very vibes-based. I like to make all my individual "pieces" (hair, shirt, skin, etc) out of "Solid Color Layers" in photoshop:

This lets me preview the colors in real time in the color picker while seeing what it looks like on the piece. I drag the color picker around until I go, "that feels about right", or, "it's been 15 minutes and I need to make a decision now".

Picking colors for design work is much more structured, but a lot of the same principles still apply when I am fine-tuning an illustration. To summarize: my main focus is to direct where I want the viewer to look by controlling contrast.

The eye is naturally drawn to points of high contrast and there are three tools in color that you can use: value contrast, hue contrast, and saturation contrast. I made a bad diagram in paint to explain. Left is high contrast and right is low contrast. Value is the "brightness" of a color, usually represented by % of black. The middle row is showing hue contrast. Colors on the opposite end of the color wheel will have more contrast than colors next to each other. Bottom row is saturation, which tends to be the most subtle way to add or remove contrast.

When doing illustrations for fun, I like to create an eyesore, with lots of contrast everywhere.