strangearte

[strangearte]

what’s the brush you use for your text box’s on your comic? Or is it a template? And if you make them yourself could you show how?

I draw them myself with the polyline selection tool and a calligraphy brush on a layer with an outline! This:

[strangearte]

The Creator's Guide to Comics Devices is OPEN!!! comicsdevices.com

An online library of visual-narrative devices that are used in the medium of comics and other sequential art.

Happy Halloween! I'm really excited to be finally launching* what is maybe one of my most ambitious, largest work yet. This online library is the next phase of a research project that began in May 2020, when I first mused on how comics as a field doesn't have a resource that catalogues devices used in the medium. Like, theatre has devices, so does literature, and film! So why shouldn't comics? I always had an interest in comics studies and analysis. I love reading, making and thinking comics. However most of my knowledge was intuitive - I learned comics from osmosis and experience. This is true for many of my peers. Speaking about comics as a creator is hard, because we don't have a robust system of language. When we had to speak, many of us tend to reach for the language developed for film by film practitioners. If there is language specific to comics, it's either scattered in multiple blogs or hidden away in academic journals. The Comics Devices library is meant to aggregate everything and everybody into a single hub! After exploring some multiple resources, alongside some original, independent research, here is the first edition! * The Comics Devices project is still a work-in-progress! It's not final, nor will it ever be. This is why I am seeking contributors to help build this library. Translations, comics examples, etc. There is a lot of work to do! If you are interested, reply to this post or submit an expression of interest on this page.  Have fun everyone!! (Now time for me to melt x_x)

[strangearte]

Evergreen PSA: Victoria Douglas is doing magnificent work creating digital assets and resources for cartoonists at HALFTONE HOSPITAL. These things are all pay-what-you-will, which is an incredible gift to the community.

What sorts of things, you ask?

A printable 11x17 poster of all possible formal divisions of a nine panel grid. That's 322 layouts!

A digital sizing reference guide to make sure your pages are being drawn at the right resolution before you find out they're too small the week of the deadline!

Loads of great brushes for Photoshop, ClipStudio, and Procreate, including these Micron pens!

We could go on, but will stop for now because you should just go download some stuff. (And, of course, chuck in some $$ if you can afford to!)

[strangearte]

[strangearte]

Ugh, can't find it but I saw a post one of these days (where? Tumblr? Bsky? Reddit? Who the hells knows) that was just:

"me trying to get goblin proportions right" and a gif of a guy struggling.

It wasn't this gif per se but the sentiment is there:

Deadass felt that, lol.

Artist rant and sketches under the cut

Oak is a tall gob at 110cm, but I still think I drew them too tall in a lot of my early artworks. Part of this is that in many of those I was drawing them alongside Gal and I used references with random amab models. The thing is, most rl amab models are NOT 155cm tall 😂, so as a result of making Gal much taller than our canon in my art (which is not so glaring since most peole don't know they're a short king due to being an amab drow), I also ended up drawing Oak too tall bc I was drawing them in relation to him (and their height is more glaring as too tall for a goblin).

And as the post I can't find said, it's just generally difficult to get goblin proportions right, and I think especially if one's not into the hourglass shaped body type and wants them more masc proportioned, but the character is still quite thin with only a bit of musculature and you want less absurdly huge heads. 😂 Usually that results in tall goblin art, which is not super uncommon out there either.

Anyway. My most recent Oak pieces, and especially some nsfw ones, had much better proportions, which made me want to redraw old ones. I probably won't redraw any of the couple pieces, actually, but I decided to do so for the outfit chart because I have a lot of fun with that and I can add more outfits and yadda yadda.

That said, here's my redraw of their proportions. 🥰 Just playing around.

[strangearte]

Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art-- especially older traditional art-- had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.

This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)

If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!

Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...

Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!

You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!

Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!

[strangearte]

Any recomendations for educational literature for artists? Specificly on topic of drawing/stylizing human anatomy 👀

If I'm honest I don't feel like I *do* stylise much (I think I'm blind to it), so its something I'm always trying to work on! However, when I was at uni I loved 'Force, Dynamic Life Drawing', loads of tips on fluidity etc which can be applied to non-life drawing. I've also recently started (and then got overwhelmed and dropped but intend to pick back up...) the disney lectures, 'drawn to life'! Absolute wealth of knowledge in there. Here's all the arty academic books I have saved, I haven't read them all, but I figured I might as well share while im sharing those two. I think also...copy or closely observe what you like, especially from industry pros. I recently copied a load of vintage comics and cartoons and I learned Loads!! Tbh theres nothing really wrong with copying regular artists you admire, though. When I was younger I used to copy makani, coey, loish... They weren't pros (then, afaik) but they were still miles better than I was, so I learned a lot regardless.

[strangearte]

Okay I JUST realized I never posted these on here—- BUT BASICALLY, about a year and a half ago I started doing these experimental black hairstyle posts that were threads long on Twitter, to give artists a source of inspo for their black ocs whose hair they wanted to try something new with! There’s more to black hair than just the selected styles portrayed in media, and I thought it would be fun to show people how much texture, shape, fades, length, and style can be combined when drawing black hair—-cause it’s a kind of manipulation our hair can do irl! The OG posts were lost with the hacking of my original Twitter account (@/bagels_donuts) but I’ve since reuploaded the whole thread to my new Twitter (@/ItsDonutsFR)! I hope artists on tumblr find these useful, sorry it took me so long to post them here😭🙏🏾 I’ll upload them all in parts!

Part 1: Long masc hairstyles + playing with fades

[strangearte]

I have a very strange link to share that a friend sent me. No, not a "'friend', eh? *wink wink nudge nudge*". A friend who's very into artbooks and archiving sent me this.

There is an unbelievable wealth of art books and educational material that is inexplicably hosted on e-hentai.

A cursory look on my part shows that almost all of this is either translated into english or has been localized. There are animation books by Tezuka. There are just artbooks you can't get anymore. This one, I am told, inspired bloodborne.

Lots of knowledge for you archived before archive.org. I hope you find it useful.

It's still a hentai site. Browse at your own risk. You might see illustrated nudity! How terrible!!!

[strangearte]

I made a ton of jewelry chain brushes!

Up on my Ko-fi

If there’s any designs you’d like to see added just let me know and I’ll think about making them too! (Still working on adding the variant of ‘filled in’ already to save time on coloring

[strangearte]

here's scans of the sears catalogue from 1930-2017 btw, its so good.

[strangearte]

You have a great eye for painting with values.. please share your resources with me 😫

yeag here you go

head lighting ref tool

simple 3d shapes

obviously they wont get you the whole way there but they are handy practice and reference

[strangearte]

You draw the most ADORABLE kids and babies. Do you have tips for drawing little ones so that they actually look like little ones and not weird renaissance devils?

I apologise in advance if this is the equivalent of "just do it" but my best advice is really to wrap your head around skull structure and how it affects what faces look like!

Of course you can just pinpoint some basic things that make a character look younger (bigger eyes, softer/rounder jaws, smaller noses, etc) but - at least to me - that understanding is more solid if you think of what's happening under the skin, kinda like:

And same for the rest of the body! Babies and children tend to have more "chibi" like proportions but stylisation can definitely go very wrong there 😅

[strangearte]

As promised — all freebies are now available as one big download, including backgrounds and assets!

Daggers, stars, blood, textures, and everything else. I counted everything while sorting, and there are 231 brushes for Clip Studio, and a few more for Photoshop, Procreate, and Krita. Yippee!

Thanks for your support! 🥰

[strangearte]

Hi!! I absolutely love the feel/vibe of your drawings. I was wondering how you make them look so textured?? I’ve tried a couple of textured overlays on csp and was wondering if you just overlayed a texture or if it was something else! It might be a silly question I’m somewhat new to digital art but thank you in advance:)

Howdy! I add a texture overlay that I got from this CSP brush set (I think it's supposed to be the brush texture but I just drag it onto the screen lmao). And I guess some of the texture just naturally comes from how I do flat colours and lines, I tend to go for crunchier brushes and strokes

[strangearte]

Had a rough conversation with my dad a few weeks ago where he was spewing a lot of well-meaning but ableist and hurtful bullshit. My mom held me afterwards and told me this, and I've wanted to paint this since. Entrench it. And in case anyone else needs to hear it.

You are enough.

[strangearte]

hey these are some tips for some of the little details in drawing fat folks that some people might not know!

everyone has fat on their bodies so its a worthwhile skill to have, but most art tutorials leave it out. heres some other good tips from artists!!