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!
typically these should be in every photoediting/drawing program like photoshop too if u guys are unsure c:
I’ve had a general idea what these things did but wasn’t completely sure what their specific functions were. I decided to sit down and figure it out, and I have thrown together a short reference guide for anyone who is confused about them. I know there are multiple translations of SAI floating around, so if some of these terms don’t sound familiar, just know that I’m talking about the three settings that appear under the texture in the brush tool settings (note that this won’t apply to any tool types except for brushesand watercolor brushes).
I don’t claim to be an expert so if you find I’ve made a mistake, let me know so I can update it, thanks! :3
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BLENDING (Color Blending)
This controls how readily the brush will inherit any colors you are painting over with it. For example, a 0% blending setting will pick up no existing colors, treating it as if you were painting on a transparent layer. A 100% blending setting will ONLY pick up existing colors (provided there are any). So at 100%, the color you’re using won’t even show up, unless you move to a transparent area. Blending is not affected by transparent pixels, so if you’re drawing on a blank layer it will have no effect.
So you can see from this example that the color I’m using gets harder to paint as the blending increases and more of the existing green is absorbed, until at 100% it is just completely turning green.
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DILUTION (Opacity Mix)
This controls how readily the brush will draw on a blank (transparent) part of the layer. A 0% Dilution will result in the brush painting very easily onto a blank surface, while a brush with 100% dilution will literally not paint on blank parts of the layer at all. Dilution is ONLY affected by transparent pixels. So it won’t do anything if the whole layer is already filled in (even with white). Dilution can be thought of as the inverse of the Blending setting in some ways.
So in this example, you can see that as dilution approaches 100%, the color I’m painting with basically becomes invisible. In fact, if you were to switch to binary color mode and look at this layer, there would literally be nothing there anymore!
Keep this in mind – if you ever can’t paint for some reason, check your dilution setting, it might have gotten accidentally bumped to 100!
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PERSISTENCE
This one goes hand-in-hand with blending. Basically, it controls how easily a brush shifts color as you are blending from one color to another. Rather, how long it “persists” if you will. Like blending, Persistence is only really relevant when painting over existing color so it’s mostly unaffected by transparent pixels. Basically, the higher the persistence, the longer it will take for the color to shift as you make a stroke, and subsequently, from which color to which other color it is shifting is dependent on the blending setting.
So for this example I’ve done the same test with three different levels of blending. I turned off all pressure sensitivity (actually I just used my mouse) to emphasize the effects in a controlled environment:
If blending is at 0%, persistence fails to have any real effect. With pressure on, there is only the difference of having to push harder, but the results will be the same as far as I can tell.
At a happy medium of 50%, persistence increase causes the orange that the brush is picking up to last longer as it goes into the green, until it never shifts to blue at all.
At 100% blending, there was never any blue in the first place, because as we already know, full blending causes you to only pick up existing color. So the persistence setting changes only how fast the orange changes to green.
Persistence is dependent upon the blending settings, so having them somewhere in the middle will probably produce the most optimal results.
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CONCLUSION
Ultimately how you use these is up to you, and is largely dependent on what kind of brush you’re making and what it will be used for. And most of these settings are meant to be used together in unison, so play around with them a lot!
If you are confused, or not sure what settings you want or what settings you should be using, a safe bet is to put them all at about 50% – that will produce fairly average results that are easy to work with, and it’s easy to remember in case you want to experiment but don’t want to forget your settings in case you decide to switch back.
thank you! here are some super quick things people may not know going in:
smart objects
masks
clipping masks
layer masks
adjustment layers
liquify, general fliters
blending effects
for layers
for brushes
grids, guides
history/save states/snapshots
importing brushes
workspaces
dark magic
quick exporting
what a contact sheet is
batching, scripts.
this will all be in PhotoshopCC. This is the more technical side of Photoshop instead of the fun drawing side, because let’s face it you’ll already learn that in time. This is stuff to make drawing digitally or editing or whatever easier, faster, and less trouble. These are shortcuts and smart things basically.
smart objects!
touching up? use smart objects!! please!! When you size them down they still maintain the data of the original, so you can scale and re-arrange without data lost (you can’t draw on this layer as a smart object though!). do this please. to undo this look for “rasterize layer”
this also means filters are clipped onto the layer but aren’t actually changing the layer. You can then turn them off, delete them, ect. without any repercussions. Smart objects will be more data but they are safe bets.
you won’t see this for drawing and painting but when you’re editing your drawings for maybe a poster or compiling them this is super useful!
I’ll be showing how to make simple HUD (heads-up display) circles (aka futuristic circle things) in After Effects (and without using keyframes) like these:
This tutorial is designed for people with little experience with After Effects, so theres a lot of extra explanations
Click “Keep reading” below to view the tutorial because looonngg post
yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
reblog to save a life
This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every
time I see it come around.
We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to
a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of,
but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of
using it.
Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:
How do you populate your backgrounds?
Well, here’s the answer:
If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to
that environment.
The examples above are great because they show how to use the
software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of
their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their
environment.
How do you fix this?
Well, here’s the simplest solution:
This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and
comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and
it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that
polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background
and an environment.
Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine),
people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like
there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they
currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.
Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as
any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.
Great comments and tutorials!
I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!
Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!
Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)
The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this – Manga Studio, Design Doll – but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.
By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!
Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.
We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!
Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!
reblogging to save a life
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look at this amazing addition! This is fantastic!
ive used both, 3ds max and sketchup, tbh i preffer using sketchup because compared to 3ds max its really easier to use, the problem in my case with 3ds max is the over (useful) profepertie options, (mainly because of the 3d rendering) so its easier to get lost on those big menus.
Here’s a list of your main options when it comes to hosting your webcomic. Remember, you can always experiment with different options to see which works out best for you.
In most cases, Tapastic is your best bet. It’s the most popular webcomic host right now as far as I can tell and the site is being actively maintained and updated. You can also make a little money through ad revenue. However, sexually explicit content isn’t allowed (though non-explicit mature content is).
If you post your comic here, I strongly recommend updating by creating new episodes rather than editing new pages into existing ones. Because of the way the site works, you’ll end up with far more readers with the former method.
This used to be the host just a couple of years ago, but these days not so much. A decent place to cross-post, but I generally wouldn’t recommend it as a primary host because you’re likely to get fewer readers. For anyone who’s established themselves only on Smackjeeves, I recommend giving Tapastic a go. Explicit content is also not allowed here, but you’re probably less likely to get caught.
Not strictly a webcomic host, but you can host webcomics here. There is a webcomic theme you can use to make it easier to read through your comic. If it’s a full length webcomic, it’s usually best to give it its own tumblr account rather than only posting pages to your usual tumblr. It makes it easier for new readers to navigate and allows people to follow just the comic if that’s what they want. You can always reblog the pages to your usual tumblr as well.
Tumblr can be a fantastic host, but it’s a bit trickier than most. If you create a great comic on another host and do nothing to promote it, chances are it’ll be very popular. If you do this on tumblr, it may well go completely unnoticed.
However, it does have some strong points. Adult content is allowed, so tumblr is usually the best place for anything explicit. Tumblr is also a great place for comics with individual pages that stand alone, as is the case for many autobiographical comics, and people here tend to love diverse content. It’s not at all a bad place to give a go, but if you don’t seem to be getting much attention I’d suggest trying something a bit more straightforward like Tapastic before concluding people just aren’t interested.
Consider how people will be seeing your comic as it comes across their dash. Make sure the text in your comic pages is big enough for people to read on their dash (images will be displayed 540px wide). Avoid updating more than once a day so that people don’t see pages out of order and get confused. Also remember that because of reblogs, things can’t really be taken back once they’ve been posted.
This is another host people still use a bit, but it’s not nearly as well known as the others so you will probably get significantly fewer readers here than you would elsewhere. However, their rules do say that adult content is allowed (though not pornography?), so it may be one to consider for things other hosts won’t permit.
These guys are very fancy and host some great comics! However, they’re not an open hosting option like the rest – you have to submit a pitch during a period when they’re accepting them and they’re quite selective in who they pick.
Your own website
This has the advantage of making you look like a cool person who has their own website. It also gives you more control over how your comic is displayed and potentially allows you to earn ad revenue, but it will mean a lot more work.
You’ll need to do much more advertising because people can’t find your comic in the same ways they can through webcomic hosts. You’ll also have to work harder to keep your audience because anyone not using RSS feeds will have to bookmark your site and remember to come back. This can lead to you losing your audience more easily during hiatuses.
Maintaining social media accounts such as on tumblr, twitter, or facebook to post update notifications, promote your comic, and keep in touch with your audience may reduce some of these problems.
WordPress has webcomic themes that allow you to put together your comic on your own site. Makes creating a site easier, but there are still the same challenges around building and maintaining an audience.
Thanks for this! I actually use ComicFury as a mirror for Ninety-Nine Righteous Men and while I’m not very active in the CF community, I am definitely happy to answer questions about generally using the host and putting up a comic, if anyone is thinking about using it. Two things of note: CF allows you to point a custom domain free of charge (as does tumblr and Comic Genesis) and while the default CF themes are kinda hokey in my opinion, CF can do a lot IF you’re good at HTML/CSS (there’s even a forum to help you out.)
Another popular host is Comic Genesis (formerly Keenspace) – a lot of webcomics have been hosted there over the years and it’s long running so I wouldn’t worry about it, say, shutting down. The only limitations on content that they impose are, in their words: “any material in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited […]
material that is (by law) obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws” (as contact address is listed as South Dakota, it’s safe to assume “obscene” refers to U.S. obscenity laws as opposed to, say, China. Otherwise I doubt All Roses Have Thorns would still be there.)
As for promoting your comic, especially if you’re self-hosting, there are a number of webcomic listings to check out:
Inspiration Haven 