Art

I made a thing! I was thinking about this for a few days - because I realized that when I was young, I was also frustrated about being given the same advice over and over - without really knowing what it meant!!

Here’s 5 techniques which I have done before which have helped me grow as an artist, which are good for 5-minute warmups or just straight up challenges for your sketchbook! 

Obviously, these are not the ONLY techniques - they’re just the ones I find most fun! And maybe they’re not the most ‘correct’ ones out there, but it’s better than another comic about practicing more, right? 

Just in case you forget this exists.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

ALRIGHT, so, I know a lot of people have trouble making eyes match. Yesterday I found out a way to make it significantly easier! Here’s a small guide.

Well, first of all, you have your face. mark where the eyes should be on it.

Then mark the corners of the eyes and go over the middle again, to make the next step easier

Alright, I know it sounds a bit crazy, but draw this shape, trying to make it as symmetrical as you can.

Draw the eyes using that shape as a guide and TA-DA! They match! For different eye shapes you tweak the angle of the two guide lines.

And it also helps with angles where the size and shape of the eye is distorted, you just put it in perspective.

If you’re an artist who likes to work really close, (like me), do yourself a favor and put up two views. You can do this by clicking View–> New on your toolbar.

Plus, you can do this in Clip Studio Paint…

As well as Manga Studio EX 4…

Annnnddddd Adobe Illustrator…

What better day to end the year then with a basic guide to colouring- This is for beginners or intermediate artists. Colouring is a big part to an art piece, whether you decide to use colours or not, that’s up to you, but for the most part, having some knowledge on appliance of colour will really help you out!

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ARTISTS WITH AN INSPIRING KNOWLEDGE OF COLOUR APPLICATION! Please take the time to have a look at other artists work so that you ca research and get inspired!

Gullacass: Uses brights, dulls and pastels to create brilliant guro, pop and macabre pieces| DA + TUMBLR

TinyCalcium: Old friend of mine who explores brights and mustard colours and places them as a foundation for their work | TUMBLR

BeastPop: Talented with opposing and Triwheel colours. Outstanding cell-shading, and knows how to flexibly bend colour form to their will in popart. | DA

H0stel: Fantastic composition of light direction and applies colour to bodies based on ambient occlusion. | TUMBLR

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COLOUR SLANG: I use some strange slang to express colour types and shades as well as groups. Although they may not be canonically correct, I will use these terms to describe colour palates to the best of my ability! Analogous: Colours that are near or adjacent to each other on the colour wheel, EG: Red and Orange

Oppositional/complimentary: Colours that are opposed or opposite from each other on the colour wheel, EG: Cherry and Green

Triadic: Colours that form a triangle on the Colour wheel, EG: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These three colours when mixed together will make black.

Arrowtype/Quadcolour: Four colours, that generally form an arrow shape on the colour wheel.

Tetradic: Colours that form a rectangle or square in the colour wheel

Neons: The very brightest you can get a colour, be careful where you use them as they can look ugly together at the most. Try to use neons when you are adding bright glowing objects to your piece. Neons are great for highlights.

Brights: Slightly washed Neons. Appropriate if you have characters that are colourful.

Washed: Very washed brights with a hint of grey. These are also useful for colourful characters.

Pastels: Colour with white in them to make them seem light.

Baby Pastel: Pastel with even more white in them, good for subtle highlights.

Darks: Colour with black added to them. Used mostly for lineart.

Mustards: Colours with dark grey added to them

Earthen: Colours with brown added to them

Warm and Cool colours: Warm colours are colours that range fromMagenta to Yellow. Cool ones range from Lime to Fuchsia.

Straight tones: A greyscale palate. or a straight scale of one colour from black to it’s neon form.

Warm and cool tones: Warm tones are a greyscale mixed with warm colours and cool tones are greyscale mixed with cool colours.

Skintones: Warm washed or pastel colours generally used to colour in skin, but they don’t have to be warm at all! ( I will not show you a palate for this however)

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WHAT TO AVOID WHEN COLOURING: beginner artists, tend to go ahead and start by colouring their line art with neon and mustard colours. Neons are not necessarily good for base colours unless the character has a glow.

I often see lazy attempts to shade, often a beginner artist with use an airbrush and use black and white to shade and highlight their piece. This is not very effective, and I’m sorry to say… It’s kind of gross as well. Try to avoid being lazy. If you have a piece that has bold black lines, avoid using soft shading and airbrushing at this point of time.

Black and white isn’t always the best option when colouring in your piece, but it also depends on the style you are trying to convey. If you plan on only using straight tones to colour in a piece, black and white is good.

A GOOD BASIC WAY TO COLOUR For this basic tutorial I will show you a nice way to colour in a piece with bold lines. I will be using Minty’s Classic character as an example.

Begin with using brights that have been washed down a little and washed skin tones if your character is human based. Avoid using neons or mustards if you are able. If there is white on the character, such as the white on an eyeball or the teeth, consider using baby pastels. For Minty’s eyeballs I have used a baby pastel blue. I have chosen to use a darker and more washed version for her Irises.

With you foundation colours placed down, use a washed warm colour for the skin tone, such as a salmon. If the character’s hair or fur is warm coloured, use a pink or red orange to shade that as well. Use the cell shading technique. This may mean you will have to erase some of your shading so be sure to do this on another layer. For your baby pastels, you can use a regular pastel to shade it. For Minty’s eyes I have used pastel blue and lowered the opacity by a little.

For Highlights, I have chosen to use baby pastel yellow. I wanted the piece to be warm.

Applying a light airbrush over the top of the piece makes it feel a little softer. I have also applied the airbrush over the initial borders to create colour bleed, giving a very subtle reflective approach.

Colouring your line art layer, particularly if you have bold lines, can really make a piece look more interesting! I like to leave the overall outline black. You can gradient and bleed colour in your line art as well

Light tracing is a technique lots of artist’s use, where they run a sharp line of highlight next to line art to divide borders.

This looks a lot nicer than the black and white shading, doesn’t it!? __________________________________________

This is a very very simple guide to applying colour to your piece! If This helped, please reblog and share this guide around!