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[octaspi]

Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border. i uses a mid-brown with a very soft brush on a layer set to overlay here (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍

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since people seem to think the timing is off in the new OP, i think i know what song it was originally set to…

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you have your faves:

and then you have your faves:

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WORM UNSTRINGED. THE ALLWORM

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Hey, hey, I have some more Cool Rocks and I think they’re neat and I want to show everybody!

Ok so first of all, check out THIS weird rock!  This cool rock is aragonite.  Its crystals grow in these super weird clusters, all radiating out from each other.

Look at those shapes!  Aragonite is The Best when it comes to bizarre crystal formations.  This rock wouldn’t look out of place in an alien landscape from some scifi movie.  I’m proud of how big and weird my specimen is.

How about a lovely blue rock?  Celestite has this gorgeous pale blue color, like if you froze the sky into ice.  You can see how it got its name; it’s truely celestial!  It’s easy to tell apart from quartz, because celestite is way, way heavier.

A cute little cluster of black diopside, in a sparkly silvery matrix.  I guess part of this photoshoot is happening outside today, since it’s especially sparkly in sunlight!  Maybe I’ll show off some more of my Best Viewed in Sunlight rocks.

A pink forest of spiky triangular huelandite crystals, surrounding a huge rectangular crystal of silky white stilbite!  Stilbite and huelandite both belong to the zeolite group of minerals, and zeolites love to grow together.  The fact that the stilbite is framed so perfectly makes this zeolite extra special - like the huelandite is as proud to show it off as I am!  Ahh, those gentle pastel colors.  They’re so nice as a pair!

Phantom quartz!  The coolest name ever for a Cool Rock!  Can you spot the phantom?

It’s not an opera ghost, it’s a smaller quartz crystal hiding inside the larger one!  Hidden beneath that dark layer of dust and calcite inclusions, our phantom and its dusty coating got trapped inside when the larger quartz crystal grew over top of everything.  It’s like a shadowy and mysterious miniature landscape, tiny enough to fit in my hands.

Some rocks form slowly over thousands of years.  This rock formed when a meteorite smashed into the planet and instantly melted those Boring Earth Rocks, flung them into the air, fused them together into bottle green space glass, and rained them across Europe.  This is moldavite!!!  (Yes, real moldavite, and holy crap was it Expensive.)  That unique texture is the result of its explosive formation, and it’s best viewed with a bright light shining through it.  Can you imagine the kind of intense forces it must have taken to create such a pretty and delicate thing?

Here’s a tiny rock of mine.  Right now it doesn’t look like much, but it’s actually one of the rocks I’ve always dreamed of adding to my collection.  Let me take it out and let the light hit it just right…

A sudden rainbow flash!  This little guy is fire agate!  Its brilliant rainbow of colors comes from a layer of shiny hematite hidden inside.  The colors are brightest when the rock is wet, so I often show this one off to people by… licking it.  My friends are judgmental.

Here’s an unusual rock:  hemimorphite!  This colorful stuff looks like it’d be soft and waxy to the touch, doesn’t it?  Like the melted drips from a scented candle with a name like “summer surf.”  But it’s really a hard layer of crystal that forms on zinc-rich rocks.  The color contrast between this bright blue hemimorphite and the orange rock it’s growing on is really cool!

Hey you!  Yes, you!  Do you love the sparkly, night-sky look of blue goldstone, but were disappointed when you found out it was manmade, perhaps because you have made some sort of Blood Oath never to collect manmade rocks?  OH MAN DO I HAVE GOOD NEWS.  Let me tell you all about specularite.  It’s a naturally occurring type of hematite that forms in tiny, mirror-bright crystals.  When polished up and given a coat of protective resin finish, it glitters with an even brighter, even more complex galaxy of stars.  Holding a piece of this stuff is amazing, it’s like having a window into the Milky Way.  This is my Prettiest Rock.

But THIS.  This is undoubtedly one of the coolest rocks I own.  (Everyone I know can attest, I never shut up about this rock.)  This huge chunk of green cubes is fluorite, and there’s something incredible about it that you can’t see under artificial lighting.  Let’s get some sunlight shining on this thing!

It’s a beautiful sunny day outside, and the rock in my hands is BLUE now!!  It’s not my camera, it’s not an optical illusion, and I haven’t edited the photo.  This rock actually changes color!

You’ve probably heard of fluorescence, where certain minerals glow or change color under a UV lamp.  This fluorite comes from Rogerley Mine in the UK, and displays the mine’s famous Daylight Fluorescence!  It’s so sensitive to UV radiation that even regular sunlight causes an instant, vibrant color change!  Now’s not the time to Wax Obsessive over the science, but there’s so much Cool Science behind fluorescent minerals.  Daylight fluorescence is also a very, very valuable trait, and this big guy blows my previous Most Expensive Rock out of the water.  I have no regrets.  This rock is beautiful.

Let’s end on a closeup of those cloudy blue cubes.  Nature did this!  It made this with minerals and sunlight and science!  We’re so lucky to live in a world full of rocks!!

(You can see more of my rocks over here!)

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Hi everybody, you probably remember me from those other four posts in which I got really excited about my rock collection!

The rocks in this post are especially special.  Recently, I got to attend my very first gem and mineral convention!!  I saw so many amazing Cool Rocks, and talked to so many other people who were excited about them!  These are all the new friends I came home with.

This little cluster of sparkly purple spheres is grape chalcedony!  This stuff is amazing, it’s hard to photograph just how brightly it glitters.  This type of chalcedony was only recently discovered, so right now it’s a very New and Exciting thing for everyone!  It’s so neat to have some in my collection!  Some people have asked me if I have any rocks that my Monkey Brain wants to eat…  And I’ll be honest, you guys.  My Monkey Brain thinks this rock is Dippin’ Dots.

Maybe you’ve heard of this one if you watch Steven Universe.  Crazy lace agate!  I could stare forever at those weird and wiggly patterns.  Take a look at them up close!

It really does look like lace!  This piece here also displays shadowing, where light passing between those paper thin layers of transparent and opaque agate casts shadows on each band and gives a cool effect of depth.

Here’s a rock that’s easy to recognize.  Cloudy blue and white larimar is named after the sea, and those soft and soothing colors and shapes definitely look like seafoam lapping against the rock around it.

A super shiny slice of rock full of copper ore!  I think there’s a little serpentine in it too, but those veins of native copper steal the show.

Something super cool about going to a gem and mineral convention was getting a chance to see weird and unusual rocks that I’ve always dreamed of having in my collection.  Like this one!  Fordite!!  I get so excited about fordite!!  It’s also called Detroit agate or motor agate, and it’s a manmade gemstone that forms as a thick buildup of paint on car production lines.  (I don’t think cars are even painted that way anymore, so this stuff is getting hard to find!)  It’s a piece of industrial waste, but instead of ending up in a landfill somewhere, it was recycled into something beautiful.

This little guy might possibly have the coolest name of any rock:  dragonskin ammolite.  It’s a piece of fossilized ammonite!  That rainbow of colors is super neon bright, and is caused by microscopic crystals of aragonite replacing the ammonite’s shell as it fossilized.

This little buddy’s corner is chipped, but I love him anyway.  Iceland spar!  This is optical calcite, a rock famous for the weird way in which it refracts light!  It’s a super pronounced effect that’s easy to photograph, so see for yourself!

Optical calcite seems to double everything you see through it.  The effect is called birefringence, and it makes this big crystal fascinating to play with and read through!

But all those rocks pale in comparison to the absolute Best Thing I got to take home from the rock show… a handful of fiery, flashy, raw precious opals!!  I had a lot of fun carefully sifting through hundreds of these little guys at the show’s opal booth, and picking out the very best and brightest!  (Of course, they were just sitting in a ziplock baggie for a few days until I could find them that nifty little case.  So hyped to finally have them on display!!)  Opals are Notoriously Difficult to photograph, but I’ll do my best.  Here they all are!

(My favorite is the dark one in the middle.  His name is Spot.)

I think the best part of the convention was going with a friend, though.  The best part of having Cool Rocks is sharing them with everybody!

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“Trick or Yeet!” I shout to the children when I open the door. “Yeet?” one says confusidly. I shrug. “Yeet it is.” I throw the child.

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Image prompt

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Picture this; #272

A newly appointed travelling companion.

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Writing Prompt 430

Image (gif) Prompt:

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Write something inspired by this image.

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i don’t know whose it is but it doesn’t feel like mine!

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10-30-18 || Monstober- Selkie

Prompt thirty was selkie, and I picked Julia Burnsides! She’s just beautiful and I love her and selkies are pretty and cool so–

[Start description: A colored drawing of Julia Burnsides from The Adventure Zone. Julia is a black woman with medium brown skin and several beauty marks, warm brown eyes, and voluminous, textured black hair that falls just past her shoulders. She is a selkie with a tan and dark greyish brown fur ‘coat’, which she is pulling from her shoulders. Her left shoulder and arm are exposed, and her arm is across her chest as she tugs it free. Her other hand is still a seal fin curled near her chest. She is smiling and looking softly at the viewer. The background is a dim green color with pale green and pale tan strips of light coming down at an angle to the right. End description]

Please don’t tag as kin/me/id/etc.

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You’re stranded on a deserted island. You explore the island and find a peculiar tree. But this isn’t just any tree. It is the tree of knowledge. Sitting below it is God in a Hawaiian shirt… sipping a glass of scotch. Turns out, you’ve found the Garden of Eden.

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do i need to say more

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Image prompt