new art blog at yuunomi

But this time I made a new art blog because I think this one is too cluttered. Please unfollow this blog and follow me at ctsu.tumblr.com!

But this time I made a new art blog because I think this one is too cluttered. Please unfollow this blog and follow me at ctsu.tumblr.com!

Okay, fair warning: I just picked up this thing like a few hours ago, my hands are rattling, my muses are excited and I’m so glad I went to Krenz aka cushart’s little seminar where he spoke extensively (in a language I haven’t practiced in a long time. aka not english) about the importance of “grounding” a character in order to make them realistic and believable. 

The seminar was great because I actually… didn’t understand any of the perspective tutorial that I’ve read off the internet before this? The seminar was basically like a missing link for me, so I hope that I can share that in this long post. 

So be prepared for long post!

Based on the seminar, he said the biggest issue with character posture and design he has seen many people do is that it’s based on assumptions and conjectures. Most of us absorb posture, dynamism and foreshortening by looking at other people’s works and imitating/recreating them (myself also being a big offender in this). Basically, he’s saying that there should be a structured approach for you to get into posing a character in your art /while/ allowing you to blend the character into a background seamlessly. He used a chunk of Mandarin jargon that I’m unfortunately unfamiliar with, nor am I familiar with the phrases in english, so take my phrasing with a word of salt: 

1) Find/make/use a 16-square box. 

Boring, I know.

2) Stretch it to your liking to determine the most important plane your character will be interacting with. 

I used this plane because it’s an extreme example of how the grid can be used. Here’s an example of a sketch I did earlier with the 16-square grid being utilised as a normal 45 degree floor plan:

Anyway, back to my blank example, the angle of the 16-square will be mainly determined by your camera angle! The one I did is for a wall. The grid is mainly there to help you project the shapes of the object you want to draw! To help illustrate things, here’s an example of a L-shaped sofa or whatever leaning against the “wall” of perspective grid:

The lecturer basically said that it’s the easiest to draw the character/pose/object out in a side-view first, so that you can identify the position of each of the prominent points when you translate it into the 3D/grid plane. His explanation was borderline mathlike and was going into the area of geometry, which I’m not very good at. But basically, it’s about finding out how much “space” each part of your drawn object can take up, much like drawing geometrical shapes in maths class!

3) Draw a side-view of the pose you want.

Top left you can see I scribbled out the side-view of a horrible excuse of a pose. The most important things you have to find out is the angles and planes of note from the pose. Mr. Krenz mentioned equating the notable planes as an unfolded surfaces of a cardboard box; you can tilt at certain points, but it has identifiable angles, which is important for you to determine the angles of your torso, legs, etc and helps solidify your perspective angles when you draw em. 

For the pose I drew, the points of note are: the head is leaned towards the “wall”, and the hand goes straight down; but notice how the back is curved and the butt is not close to the wall. This is important. 

You’ll also notice that I drew a horrible excuse of a box projected out of the four squares in the 16-square grid. This is the important part! There’s actually some maths shenanigans as to the proportion of the box and how it relates to your anatomy, but I think the safest way to go is to assume a box projected out of 4 squares is equivalent to a torso. so that box = the size of one torso. that means everything from above the hip in the pose should fit into the box.

Remember how I harped on the position of the butt and hands and the angles? This one is for the next step:

4) Draw in basic spheres and shapes. Ignore anatomy for now. 

If you see each part of the body as shapes (spheres, squares, rectangles), it’s easier to plot them out in relation to the angle of the perspective grid. Over here, you can see that the shapes are drawn in correspondence with the perspectives. I won’t cover much on this part, mostly because there’s already a hundred other perspective-box-shaped-how-to-translate-to-human tutorials out there that explains it a great deal better than I do. The vital point to take out of this part is that you must plot according to the position of each key point– the back curve, the hand angle, etc onto the geometric shapes when drawn. The box should help you out in this I hope.

5) Finally! Fleshing it out!

Yep. This is also where anatomy fixing happens, if you see the need.

Notice how the angle of the lad’s mantle, vambraces, shin guards, etc corresponds to the geometric shapes scribbled out earlier. This step becomes immensely easier with practice, but basically the gist is that the geometry lines help you determine the direction of the clothes and stuff you have to flesh out.

6) Not necessary, but put in shadows and shading to help solidify the scene.

I thinned out the scribbles here and dabbed on a dark color to immediately portray that the kid’s hiding in the shadow of some doorway. See, immediately there’s a background! And he does look like he’s sitting there and no immediate worries of how the anatomy or angles of things out of place, because the 16-square has already determined it for you beforehand.

Conclusion!?

I think the important part is that personally, this is easier for me to get into instead of looking purely at theories of horizon lines, vanishing points, etc because honestly, it is very difficult to see those if you’re drawing character-oriented pieces.  While this technique is not foolproof and is actually more complicated (read: there’s actual math shenanigans in it that i didn’t get into), I think this is a good starting point for artists of any level to start training their eye to see in order to make characters better blend into the backgrounds.

A long ass beginner level tutorial for all of you comic folks who want to start using sketchup for your backgrounds but don’t know how to get started.

Jake Wyatt- deviantart tumblr

“Welcome To Summers”

“Soliloquy”

Suggested Reading/Books: Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics” (entirely done in comic format) Exercises/Practices/Tutorials:

Lettering

Speech Bubbles Mistakes

Paint Bucket Resource

Storyboarding and Camera angles

What is DPI?

uuu thank u anon!! i hope this can explain it :^o

i use overlay all the time to make colours more vibrant and to make areas warmer or cooler. good for colourful ambient light (like glowy magic stuff).

multiply is really good for establishing a light source very quickly!! play around with the hue to get shadows with cool colours. for more detailed work you can use two or three tones on a multiply layer for more dimension.

screen is something i only recently started using regularly! it’s really great if you have a very bright light source. you can also use screen and paint on the edges of a backlit character to make the lighting more intense. a good thing to know about screen layers is that the darker the colour you use, the less it lightens; using black on a screen layer leaves no effect on the colours underneath (the opposite is true for multiply layers!).

Ryky on Deviantart made this extremely helpful tutorial.

You can download the program Ryky used free here http://medibangpaint.com/en/

drawingden:

*UPDATED VERSION SUMMER 2015*

Digital Painting and Drawing

Autodesk SketchBook Copic Edition - This is the limited edition of SketchBook Pro with 72 Copic colours to choose from

Krita - Krita offers CMYK support, HDR painting, perspective grids, dockers, filters, painting assistants, and many other great features

GIMP - GIMP is a well known free alternative to Photoshop with similar features 

Mischief Free Version - With six essential brushes, a basic palette of colors and an infinite vector canvas, Mischief-Free is perfect for hashing out ideas, life drawing, and endless doodles

MyPaint - MyPaint is a fast and easy open-source graphics application for digital painters, and comes with 39 different brushes

Verve Painter - Verve is a small painting application that uses fluid dynamics and brushes to push the paint around, though it is still in development.

Inkscape - Inkscape is an open-source professional quality vector graphics software with sophisticated drawing tools with capabilities comparable to Adobe Illustrator.

FireAlpaca - A similar program to Paint Tool Sai that offers features such as a snap feature which creates a variety of perspective overlays.

MediBang Paint - A free lightweight painting program for Windows, Mac Os and Android with cloud saving to allow users to easily switch between platforms.

SpeedyPainter - Basic painting program with a simple layout and features such as perspective grids and reference view mode

3D Modelling  

Google Sketchup - Drawing-based tool for architects, designers, builders, makers and engineers who design for the physical world. SketchUp Make is a free version and SketchUp Pro is a paid version with additional functionality.

Sculptris - A free, introductory digital sculpting tool, a great stepping stone for digital sculptors, created by the makers of Zbrush.

Blender - A powerful application with full-fledged professional tools, Blender has a wide community and resources to help you learn.

SculptGL - This handy modelling program works online in your browser and is compatible with wacom tablets

Animation

Synfig - Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork.

EmoFuri - EmoFuri is a new animation software that helps artists easily animate photoshop illustrations in a 2D-3D style.It uses PSD files of character illustrations to animate them. 

Pencil2D - Pencil2D is an open-source animation/drawing software that lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation using both bitmap and vector graphics.

Live2D - This increasingly popular 2D-3D animation software is similar to Emofuri with sample models available to experiment with, and is also available in english.

Pixel Art

Piskel - An online pixel art app that lets you animate pixel art with a live preview of your work.

Piq - While it doesn’t have the best looking layout, this online tool has lots of interesting features including a colour-drift tool that’s great for making colour palettes.

Etc

Thisissand - An online fun and unique playground for creating colourful sandscapes, also comes in an app version

Flame Painter - A free demo of the full program, it allows you to try out the flame generator and change different brush settings and paint your own flame paintings

Silk - An online interactive generative art program that creates bright silk-like patterns, with options to change colours and rotational symmetry.

Bomomo - This interesting program has a group of dots that move around the screen in the pattern you choose, then paint the canvas according to when you click the screen.

Just gonna post this here so everyone can see just in case they’re interested also. And don’t worry, I don’t mind people asking me how I do stuff haha. 

So someone asked me how I do those dotted gradient background like the image below so here goes~

First you make a new layer below your image

then you click the gradient tool. Make sure your foreground and background color is set to the default black and white. Then use it on the layer below your image.

Now go to Filter»Pixelate»Color halftone and click it. A window should pop-up after.

Welp there’s your window! Now change all the variables to 45

It should now look something like this! If you want the dots to have a different color then make a new layer above the dots and set the layer mode to “screen”

On that layer which is now on the “screen” blend mode fill it with any color you like using the paint bucket tool.