#to practice coloring and stuff i guess

[potatodotpng]

[clottedscream]

“it’s just a warmup sketch,” i say to myself. “i’m just gonna warm up on shading and coloring. i’m just warming up on anatomy.” my spine crackles from sitting in shrimp stance for 2 hours. “just to warm up.”

[starrysharks]

don't get me wrong i will try to answer all questions about my art but i kinda don't really like explaining every tiny little aspect of my style piece by piece............ i'm not trying to gatekeep or anything but i personally don't think there *is* anything to gatekeep 😭 my artstyle isn't really a formula or anything, it's just the way i draw. you can study it and ask questions about it if you want but the deep intricacies of how i draw legs or whatever doesn't really seem helpful in my eyes

[a-r00m-with-a-m00se]

Anxiety and kisses

[roses-artblog]

Sssh, Kalavinka, they all came back from their very own existential crisis character arc in which they learned valuable lessons and changed for the... better?

My first art Of 2024.

It's a meme art.

I'm so proud of myself 🥹

For those who don't know this is the og tweet calling for this:

[drawnecromancy]

Astarion & Veldren

[quirinah]

how do you get your colors to look so nice and your lineart so red and vibrant? i love it

omg anon thank you!! 😭 im going 2 be honest I am Not Great with color theory... but i like having my sketch pages look cohesive to me...

BUCKLE UP this is going to need a readmore bc i like talking.

I always sketch in neon colors it's a habit i picked up from an old teacher but I'll think of a color usually on a whim and draw with that. and then if i want to draw something else ill pick another color that i think goes well with the page. usually most of my color schemes r analogous (colors right next to each other on the wheel)

yanked this from recent dunmesh post; i kept most of my colors within the pink/red/orange range.

i wouldn't recommend doing everything in monochrome or analogous palettes though because it's sort of a guilty crutch of mine XD.

sometimes when im coloring ill change the layer mode of the sketch. color burn gets you either very very bright or very very deep colors depending on the color of the flats underneath. multiply and linear burn do the same thing but they're a lot tamer and generally always return darker colors. im sure there's some technical bits behind this though. ill either color my lineart afterward to compliment the color of the flats, leave it as is, or mess with layer modes if i feel like it. my favorite trick is color burn + linear burn + some combination of two lineart layers and just fiddling until i get a nice burn effect.

mithrun was done with crimson red on color burn.

coloring... like 999% of this is relative color which is like. kind of the idea that colors look different when placed next to each other. if you eyeball it a bit it's pretty noticeable.

what i used to do a bit ago was i would fill in the area i wanted to color with one big mask of color, make a new layer that has a clipping mask down to the flat layer of color, and then draw my actual flat colors. the color of the mask helped me pick my flat colors bc if I picked a color i think stood out too much next to the mask i could kind of just adjust it until it looked a little more cohesive.

old ish drawing next 2 a canon reference. i ignore local color a lot...mea culpa....but my overall color palette here was a light pink, so the shirt here is actually a desaturated pink? or violet i believe. if you shift sort of that purple color far enough into the gray area of your color wheel it can take on a blueish or even greenish hue. it being next to a lot of warm pinks/fuschias helps.

a neat thing that kind of helps is that if you desaturate or saturate certain colors they can kind of take on a certain hue? not sure if this makes sense. sort of how orange here turns tealish blue the grayer it gets. so if im drawing something that's predominantly orange and i have a blue color i can just take an orange color and desaturate it until i get a color that sort of looks like blue. and that way it kind of looks more harmonious? at least to me XD

shading. i don't apply serious lighting to a lot of my drawings, but a helpful bit is that the shadows tend to be the opposite of whatever color the lighting is? i try to think first about the "mood" or the main color i want to go for in the drawing and then i pick a shadow color opposite of that. so for here, i wanted the lighting to be a coolish magenta so the shadows r lime green. if there's anything off i fiddle around until i get something i like. the shadows on the skin here were too green initially so i shifted them a little more orange.

there's a "band" of color going on between the transition of the shadows to the light. generally this could be for a lot of reasons and i tend to use it differently (core shadow? overexposure? etc etc). but this is a color post so ill try not to go too off track.

but generally digital doesn't "mix" colors the same way traditional colors do if you use RGB (cmyk is a bit better with this but is kind of a pain to get used to), so to make blending a little less muddy, i sometimes add an intermediate color to smooth things out a little. for example, mixing digitally blue n yellow tends to get you gray, but generally, blue + yellow makes green, so if im making a blue->yellow transition ill slap some green color in the middle so it flows a little better.

I do a lot more cel shading nowadays. if you've been on here for a while earlier this year i have another style of coloring but it's not really accurate to how shadows really work so i wouldn't recommend looking at it. it's mostly to add zest and texture to the underlying flat colors.

coloring your lineart does a TON to helping your colors look vibrant, though its like the garnish on a dish to me (same with shadows). i think it's good to try and play with your flat colors and try to make sure those look in order first before adding flourishes. usually ill leave it a dark, saturated color that again matches my overall palette but sometimes i go in and color them by alpha locking my lineart layer and picking a color that matches the flat colors underneath? not sure how to explain it properly.

i used a darkish purple for shuro's ponytail to match the dull red of the flat colors (more relative color! trying to simulate a black/brown while keeping the pink palette there) but a lighter crimson for laios's blond. the light was this super intense like blush pink so i thought it might be cool to add this neon salmon red in the areas of that light to really give off that vibe of a very bright intense rim light.

sometimes you could also tweak with gradient maps or color balance, which adjusts hue based on how light or dark a color is. these r fun to mess with as a final touch but i need to watch using them because they can become crutches real fast XD but those are also just tools to help you. in the end just developing a good sense of how color works and how you want to use it is the best place to start.

LONGASS ramble but yeah. tldr just kind of train ur eye for color and look at what you like best. which is unhelpful and a little sucky but it really is just observation and practice and maybe some personal zest.

happy drawing!

[aviatrixx]

Trying to take making digital art more seriously, but so far all I’ve accomplished is “draw Yamcha a bunch of times” lmao

[Image ID: Eight digital drawings of Yamcha from Dragon Ball with different facial expressions.]

[eyrieofsynapses]

gentle reminder to air-dry your fleece clothing and wash it in cold water if you want it to stay nice and soft <3

(fleece is made out of synthetic fibers that will quite literally deform/melt in the heat of a dryer! and no you can't really see it but it's one of the things that makes it pill and get rough and scratchy.

"no dryer" also goes for most items of clothing with graphics. tbh I don't know the exact reason behind that one, I think it depends on how it was printed on, but both my and friends' experience has proven dryers will fuck graphics up, and manufacturers will tell you the same)

[space-spoon]

I was just adding random magazine clippings hoping it looks good in the end, it was really fun and I'm happy about how it turned out!!!

[kil9]

ive done almost 300 drawings this year if i drew every day for the rest of the year id be able to have average one drawing per day...

[thatfunkylittlejesterdude]

It's wimblin' time.

Why the fuck did I decide Hank would be the best character to test paint markers on I've never used them for full pieces like this I've only ever used gold paint markers for backgrounds and accents hhhhhh-

You should totally reblog this that would be so cool guys

[blue-unifox]

I made myself refs for og Nightwings for... writing purposes mostly

For Erisa I've taken one of the original concepts for character designs. But for Oralech I had to come up with a completely new look... I think it came out pretty ok tho :D

I was inspired by the plague doctor uniform btw, plus some elements that are used in Pyre itself. Clothing in this game is unique, not gonna lie.

[eirian]

i had a good training day at work !!! my first full week (5 days) is next week during..spring break....and i work at six flags...lol....BUT im sure i'll do fine :) i have a new resolve that i didnt have last time i worked so im determined to actually stick with it this time. ive grown as a person and im ready to do a job

[loonylooly]

is anyone gonna talk about the illyrians cause idk i'm a bit put off by the constant talk of how brutal and savage and angry or whatever they are when sarah goes out of her way to describe them as brown people

i'm sorry sarah but poc are capable of being kind and loving AND being cool warriors

[riggedbones]

in general i think it’s good to let people draw whatever out of passion without like. steering them to the fundamentals immediately. but then sometimes i see someone do an entire animation where they have rendered every single frame but like it’s very clear that they do not have a grasp on animation fundamentals at all and im like. oh my god please please do a ball bounce or something before doing that. not because like… it’s bad? but because it’s clear that they put so much time into finishing it and like. ough. i could not imagine spending that much time finishing an animation unless i thought the pencil test looked pretty good. and like i guess if you aren’t that good yet and you want a finished thing go for it..? but i would use that energy. studying the medium. idk animation is just so time consuming and repetitive and every layer of polish multiplies that greatly. so getting the movement working before you finish is. important… also a lot of the time it feels like the artist hasn’t realized that animation is a skill in itself and not just. drawing squared.