I don’t know if this can be useful to anyone. It’s not perfect by any means but perspective is a lot based on the artist own sensibility, I merely offer a starting point.
How to make easy pixelart with aseprite
Some Photoshop Tips
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.
I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’:
Was getting some of my images ready to be made into prints today so I thought I’d make a guide for anyone else interested in making prints of their work :D
Heyyy, @mastermeg commissioned me for a little tutorial on how I personally draw tears!
I don’t believe there is any right and wrong way to go about it, just have fun and do it how you like! This is just my own personal method, is all! I hope ya’ll enjoy it.
Woke up at 2am and couldn’t fall back asleep so I made a tutorial on the Photoshop techniques I use most frequently. Starting with the sketch:
- adjustment layers: specifically the hue/saturation slider in this case, allows you to color correct quickly
- lasso tool: for sharp edges!
- alpha lock: useful for painting within a pre-defined area (especially useful when painting characters)
- x (hotkey) : toggle between foreground + background colors- let’s you easily blend between 2 colors
- ctrl/cmd click : quickly change current active layer. Especially useful if you’re burdened with too many layers (or just very disorganized)
- clipping mask: similar to alpha lock, but can add details without changing/ painting directly on the previous layer. I often use them to test out + apply gradients.
- layer styles: I didn’t use any in this image, but the possibilities for layer styles endless, from simply adding a quick outline (useful for die cut demarcations when making stickers!) to creating more seemingly complex appearances. Here’s a gif of Nick Carver using layer styles (a combo of drop shadows + inner shadows) to quickly make the illusion of snow with simple strokes.
!! ART TUTORIAL 2 !!
This is my 2nd art tutorial, i’ve only ever done one of these before, and it went amazingly well on tumblr you guys all seemed to love it and I get so many asks for another one!
I hope you like this one just as much, it’s been almost a year and thought my style rarely evolves, my techniques and quality has!
I hope you all get something from this! Feel free to message me if you have any questions!
Hello, friends! I gave a seminar on Adobe Flash last night, and figured I’d also put the slides online for anyone who was interested in learning the program! Because of file size/bandwidth limitations, I can’t upload any of the example FLA’s, but you could easily find alternatives on YouTube. The dog pictures also made more sense in context. Well, kind of Tumblr hecked up the last few images in this post, so here’s an Imgur album of all of the slides at full resolution
i didn’t mean to make this so long but i wanted to both analyze my own style and give other people a look into it! I hope someone can find some use for it!
friday night tutorial time
this post is massive but i tried to cover both the conceptual and technical side, hopefully it’s somewhat coherent
continued under cut
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?
Good luck to everyone on their drawings!
Hey friends! Meg here for a really, long, wordy TUTOR TUESDAY! This week we take a look at drawing characters that are interacting. If you need help with anatomy here are a few tutorials: legs, arms/legs, necks, and here is a previous tutorial on poses. If you have any tutorial suggestions send ‘em in here or my personal. Now go forth and I’ll see you next week!
Hey friends!
Sorry for the late TUTOR TUESDAY, but here it is! Today is on clothing folds and was a recommendation from @kitemist, thanks! If you have any recommendations you’d like to see send ‘em in here or my personal! Hopefully I can expand on clothes more soon! Keep practicing, have fun, and I’ll see you next week!
Kind of a weirdly specific question to ask, but do you have any advice for drawing leather biker-style jackets? I notice you draw them in a lot of your stuff and they always turn out great. I have a male OC that wears one and I can always get the top part/collar right but something about the bottom and the way it's supposed to sort of interact with/hang off of the torso while unzipped is really weird to draw and I always end up making it like hug the skin in weird ways. Adore your art btw!!
Hi! Sorry late reply. I love costuming and I wanted to answer this properly.
I A D O R E leather jackets/biker jackets. And a lot of my understanding of jackets comes from knowing how real leather works vs fake leather/pleather/vinyl. Leather is generally very heavy. So its not going to fold or lay the same way a regular jacket or even vinyl will lay.
So first stop REFERENCE! If you own a leather jacket or a biker jacket try that thing on and look at it in the mirror. Then look at what its doing to your clothes/undergarments.
If you don’t own a leather jacket (like a lot of people lol. I own a fake one from forever 21) google or pinterest! Pinterest is both a blessing and a curse. Its a curse for unsourcing artists BUT is a REALLY good way to put together visual research quickly. I just used google for this so here’s some pics I thought were useful
So a thing to remember is typically people wear light clothes under leather jackets. Real leather like I said is very thick with an intent to protect as well as look just dang cool. Ewan is an avid bike rider so he’s usually wearing it for bike purposes. Wearing a big sweater or a flouncy shirt under a leather jacket is just going to be uncomfortable.
Leather and fake leather typically hang straight down unless they’ve got a belt at the bottom to cinch in.
So going off of your question about how it would hang it basically would hang straight down and a little away falling off of the chest muscles. Depending on whether the jacket is a very form fitting jacket or if its k inda loose to begin with will add to that as well.
So you’ve got your reference here’s a very minimal tutorial. There’s a lot about fabric and costume drawing theory I’m skipping over.
But typically for any sort of costume. Understanding the form underneath is important. You can fudge it later once you’ve got enough practice at it but its more believeable to just lay in a sketch or a light drawing of the figure on its own. You don’t have to go crazy into detail just remember where the bigger or muscles that are interacting are.
And then on another layer or if you’re using the same sketch layer draw in that jacket.
Points to remember is where is the fabric being stressed/stretched. Where is interacting with the form. Remember that bottom hems typically move out and up if the arms are outstretched. Even if its zipped the rest of the jacket will still move even if its minimally. An open jacket is fun to play with with action so don’t be afraid to fake it a little. Don’t go to town on the wrinkles because Leather is a heavy fabric and while it will remember wrinkles in elbows typically it just sorta hangs there. There’s always folds on the sleeves or where the body bends. Don’t forget the details so if it has a zipper remember that zippers have two parts. Buttons and seams are going to make it a more believable leather jacket.
Example if you’re drawing jeans as opposed to suit pants jeans have reinforced seams because they’re originally intended for heavy duty work where as a suit is typically worn in an office so the seams are cleaner and often hidden. Leather jackets fit into the first group like jeans and since the fabric is so heavy seams are pretty obvious and prominent. Buttons are typically big because they have to penetrate through the heaviness of the jacket. Even fake leather jackets have big buttons/zippers/seams to replicate the look of an authentic leather jacket.
I think that’s the short and skinny of it without getting into a 14 week class on fabric lol. Hope that helps!!
A compilation of stuff I know about drawing Asian faces and Asian culture! I feel like many “How-To-Draw” tutorials often default to European faces and are not really helpful when drawing people of other races. So I thought I’d put this together in case anyone is interested! Feel free to share this guide and shoot me questions if you have any! I’m by no means an expert, I just know a few things from drawing experience and from my own cultural background.
i am in love with the 80s anime aesthetic you used for that amethyst drawing!! what programm do you usually use for drawing and how did you create that fuzzy effect?
hank you, im really glad you like it! I usually use SAI to draw and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (yes its absolutely ancient i knooow) to add certain effects i cant quite recreate in SAI
to get that fuzzy effect, i have the entire image on one layer and duplicate it, changing the opacity of the copy to around 30-40%
then i hide the copy for a bit, and select the background. there, i apply the “diffuse” filter found right here:
the “lighten only” mode, creates a base to get that “scanned pencil lines” look which helps to make it look more like a screencap of an older anime.
(i found that this works best with clear lines and cell shading)
then, still on the background layer, i get a gaussian blur filter going, found over here:
a radius of 1-2 pixels blurs the whole deal out a little to make it look like its a good ol low quality screencap
then i go back to the other layer and, using the same gaussian blur filter but a radius of 15-20 pixels, get that foggy feel going!
this step is the most important as it creates that dreamy, foggy feeling which helps to make it look like ye olde animes
lastly, i clean up some highlights that might’ve gotten washed away by all the blurring, and we’re done!
of course you can always do more things like add a texture to make it a little grainy, or resize the canvas to fit the average dimensions for most old animes, or do something difficult and technical with the colors which i know nothing about, but i feel like this process is a pretty alright method to satisfy those ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ cravings!
(quick before/after)
i hope this helps, im sorry this turned out so long…..feel free to ask me to clarify if anything isnt clear!