All of the tutorials, references, artwork, etc. featured here were not created by me. This is just an area for people to find anything related to helping others improve their art skills.
Please do not hesitate to submit or notify me of resources and tutorials for anything relating to art you can imagine will help people in their improvement of art. Since art is such a subjective and vague term, this can mean anything from writing to cosplay to cooking to even home construction.
Citizen is simpler and more beautiful~ but just in case anyone needs this.
DUDE BUT THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL PEOPLE
in medieval times you ONLY addressed a king/queen with “Your Majesty”, NEVER “Your Highness”. To address a king/queen with “Your Highness” was considered an insult.
I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>
BRUSHES
Pencil
I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes.
Ink Pen
Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles.
Round Brush
The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without.
Flat Brush
A brush tool set to flat bristle (try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.
Watercolor
Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects.
Cloud
Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.
TEXTURE OVERLAY
To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!
Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!
Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.
Hope that helps!
-L
Since making this post 500 years ago, I’ve gotten periodic questions about the Flat Bristle brush setting that is default on my version of SAI, but sometimes absent in others.
After much ado, I’ve rummaged around in my program folders and found an image in SAI’s elemap folder called Flat Bristle.bmp that you should be able to just grab and use! I edited this link into my original post as well, but it’s gotten so many reblogs I don’t know how helpful that will end up being…
In any case, I’ve also taken the liberty of zipping all of my blotmap, brushtex, elemap, and papertex folders and hosting the file on my site just in case whatever borked version of SAI people are encountering are missing all this basic stuff. There’s not a lot in there, but the settings in the original post don’t make any sense if you don’t have them!
IMPORTANT EDIT: In the event that dragging and dropping these files don’t do the trick, this site has pretty extensive instructions on installing SAI brush files.
reblogging to share the resource but I do want to point out that the code amounts to “pinterest no pinning”. like dora the explorer’s swiper the fox… but if swiper were a middle-aged stay-at-home-mom with a smartphone. technology is truly amazing
Pinterest is a plague when trying to reverse image search
There may be easier ways of building braids than what I do, but this is just my process for drawing them, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ll start with a line for whatever direction I want the braid to go in, if I don’t do a line and I have any kind of motion to the hair, boy do I mess it up lol
Next I’ll do wide half triangles, the line being my center, the right side or the left side always dropped lower than the other. If both sides meet in the center at the same level it’s not going to look very braid-like or have the illusion of being tangled with itself.
Afterwards you can remove the middle line if you want to take it further and connect each one with an alternating pattern like this one, giving it more of a braided look in the center.
Once the center is solid, you can add all the details you want in any style you like, curving inwards towards the center. I tend to like the more stained glass-ish appearance for hair so I’ll do very choppy, squared off lines to detail.
This works for whatever position you want to put the braid into using the wide triangles to build it up. It works for tightly woven or loose and messy braids depending on how wide/long you make the original half triangles.
In the conclusion for now, some things I’d really recommend doing if you’re seriously considering making a webcomic (or really a comic in general). Some of these don’t really apply to strips or gag-a-day type of comics, but I’m not talking about those here.
1. Write down ideas\sketch stuff, LEGIBLY. “I’m gonna remember it later” NEVER works. And if you scribble it somewhere on a piece of paper, you’d better scan it or retype in one doc later, because tiny notes always get lost among other doodles in my skethbooks.
(i know it’s hard to keep everything clean and organized, but this mess is just not productive)
If your project is a collaboration, save your conversations. If you’re working alone, make a blog for your ramblings. You have no clue what tears of relief I cry when I open that blog and rememeber I don’t have to painstakingly look through my heaps of sketchbooks and folders for a tiny idea I’m not even sure I wrote down a few months ago.
2. Inspiration folders, or even better, inspo blog with tags also help with collecting and remembering ideas. Color schemes, landscapes, style inspirations, atmospheric stuff, maybe some photo references, all those neat things.
3. Basic tier: character design sheets. Top tier: common poses, expressions. God tier: outfits they wear throughout the comic. Holy cow tier: turnaround sheets for all those outfits.
(I’d die trying to find good pages for references without these)
4. If you haven’t finished detailing the plot, don’t even think about moving on to drawing the comic. You’re gonna regret it when you come up with a really cool plot element that can’t be incorporated anymore because you’ve already drawn all the parts you could’ve tweaked.
5. Don’t just define the plot, make a script. Writing down the lines and the brief description of the actions serves me fine:
(notice that I approximately divided the pages & the text that’d go to each panel on a page)
6. Hard mode: make thumbnails for all the pages, if possible. At least whenever a new chapter starts.
7. If your story involves some convoluted chronology shenanigans, you’d better write down the events of your timeline in the chronological order.
8. Backgrounds. You can’t avoid them, bro. Like half of the comics are backgrounds, especially if your story involves a lot of adventuring and looking around. I know it hurts, but you’ll have to become friends with them. Read some tutorials, practice on photos, go out and sketch some streets, use 3d programs (like Google Sketch) to understand the perspective, use sites like houseplans to visualize your buildings
better, I don’t know. Just be prepared for their imminent evil.
9. If you’re drawing digitally, pick a brush size for the lines and stick with it. You don’t want your lines and detail levels to look all wonky and inconsistent in different panels. And I don’t mean the cool stylistic varying lines, I mean this:
Also, things on the background should have thinner and/or lighter lines to avoid distraction. Usually less details too, unless you’re making a busy background with a simple foreground to help it pop out. Or wanna draw the attention to an object on the bg.
10. Readable fonts. Even if you chose to ignore people with poor sight or dyslexia, the majority of your readers aren’t gonna be excited about struggling to decypher this:
Also, as much as I love my black speech bubbles, colorful text on black still kinda hurts the eyes. I wouldn’t recommend doing that for all the characters. Black speech bubbles are usually used for creepy, inhuman voices. And yes, having a colorful outline in this case helps.
11. Probably newsflash, but did you know that panels have their place, order and functions? They do! My favourite thing ever is how I used panels when I was like 12:
(comics ain’t rocket science, but this one is)
The composition of the panels and word balloons always serve for a better reading experience. They guide your eyes over the page, so that you never feel lost or confused. The images in the comic equal frames in a movie, so it’s pretty damn important in what order you look at things and how quickly you can understand what’s going on!
(Eric Shanower & Scottie Young’s Wizard of Oz)
12. One update a week is fine for testing waters. Don’t overestimate yourself, especially if you have a pretty busy life outside it. A stable comic that updates slowly, but regularly is better than an unpredictable erratic one. You can always pick up the pace later, if you feel confident enough.
13. Try to always have a buffer - a couple of pages in reserve. If you’re making the pages much faster than you’re updating, this shouldn’t be a problem. But if those paces are equally the same, it’s goddamn HARD. But on the other hand, if something happens and you skip an update, those come in handy.
If you’re looking at this list and thinking “wow that’s a LOT of work”, you’re totally right. And it’s okay to be intimidated at first! But that’s why it’s important to start with something small. Once you get the formula down, these things will be natural to you.
Anonymous whispered:Would you ever do a simple tutorial of how you draw horses? I want to make centaur OCs but lord horses are difficult creatures to doodle 😭
Mmmm there are so many guides that cover what I do, and I really
don’t do anything more than those. Still use the whole blocks and sticks and
form building and whatnot. And a buttload of references. Anything I could say different would kinda step beyond the stage of simplicity?
To offer something though I would like, suggest tweaking the use of circles when
it comes to drawing horses. Or anything, really. Circles are great and highly accessible for fast, general
drawing, but few natural things are perfectly round. Look at a horse from the
front or back - it’s square and flat and meaty and saggy too, depending on your
angle.
So like, I dunno, if you wanna step it up a notch, try
changing your use of building-circles into something like this
And especially practice being able to see these shapes in
dimension
And then piece them together. The triangle will really help guide the line up. Highly recommend.
Honestly I just follow the same gist of Hubedihubbe’s quick
tut (please check it out, very good points made, much cleaner, actually labelled) so I kind of feel like I’m parroting here but.. I break down the rest in
lines and diamonds.
As a personal preference, I like marking in the shoulder
blade to elbow and the hip to knee, as they create pretty important shapes towards
horse recognition. If something keeps looking off, check your leg length. A super rough way to get a close idea of what you need can be found in using most of the shoulder block for a landmark? It’s not perfect maths, it’s a rough tell. The hind legs are then worked out via the red line, setting the hocks above the intersection across the knees
And uh, it goes on from there. You gotta look at pictures, do
the study, and learn the meats. No real other way around that part.
There’s a horse bod.
But the reason of learning how to see those shapes in
dimension is so that you can push your poses further! Try piecing it together with your front-view knowledge. And
look at references, always!
Shoulders are pretty narrow compared to the belly and hindquarters, unless you start looking into the draft breeds - then both ends more or less square up together. But moving on, more leggies are slapped on that thing
And fleshed out with all that meat knowledge :P (I know I haven’t gone into heads but this was about centaurs anyway. This guy just felt like he needed one)
And when it comes to practice
and learning, don’t be afraid to simply draw
these shapes directly over an image. It will help familiarise you with how
these base forms interact with one another, how far they can squash and stretch
and look at a whole variety of angles. It’s just practice!
Doing that helps to gain a
solid concept of the subject, so that when you do set out on your own you can
find that convincing territory.
So hey, this has been a very long and terrible not-tutorial. More like insight or something, and would only be helpful if you’re somewhat familiar with horses and already got the fundamentals of drawing down pat, since I skipped over a lot.
Haven’t drawn a horse before though? I recommend you the Shrimp method
Anonymous whispered:I'm honestly crying because I just now realized my anatomy is such shit and I don't know how to keep it cartoony but accurate at the same time… Any tips?
everyone should start w a basic grasp of anatomy before delving into stylized cartoony stuff, but its actually not nearly as hard as it looks/sounds. figure drawing from reference pictures is a lot easier than making up cartoonish styles in ur head, because the learning curve is so sharp.
just start drawing people you see- watch youtube videos that show candid crowds, pause it for a bit and give yourself like 1-5 minutes to quickly draw the pose and figure, and then let it go and move on to the next pose. make em vary in size from whole page to half page to ¼ page, knock out like 10 in one session, and after a few sessions i guarantee youll notice a difference. focus first on the angle & twist of the torso, and then on the pose of the arms & legs, and THEN on fleshing it out/lightly shading. its really easy to pick up, and once youre comfortable with it, you can try simplifying your linework a ton and exaggerating shit to get cartoon-y looks you enjoy that actually look 1000x better because the human eye/brain can make way more sense of them.
if you cant read my handwriting: no reference “cartoon-y” -> life drawing from reference -> simplify (less lines, fewer details) -> simplify into shapes, exaggerate proportions -> (when to stop simplifying is up to you!)
I’ll give you a weird secret. After you put the glowing object on a dark background, surround the white parts with a halo of highly saturated color. Observe:
It doesn’t have to be that blatant- smaller outlines of color, blended properly with the background, can make an equally effective glow-y look :)
