I’ll give you a weird secret. After you put the glowing object on a dark background, surround the white parts with a halo of highly saturated color. Observe:
It doesn’t have to be that blatant- smaller outlines of color, blended properly with the background, can make an equally effective glow-y look 🙂
I got a lot of asks about this so I made a tutorial on how I was able to emulate the 80s aesthetic, please keep in mind I’m not an expert and what I put here is just what I personally did. I hope you guys like it and hope it helps
Here we observe how goggles work around the head! If you have any recommendations send ‘em in here or my personal! Keep practicing, have fun, and I’ll see you tomorrow!
Edit: this is just a tutorial I found online. My original post made this clear but it was low quality so I reposted it in higher quality so that I could put it in my art ref tag. I did not realize this post would pick up so many notes and I am not intending to take credit!
I made a walkthrough of my process for drawing faceted stones! Judging by the timestamps from the screenshots I took, drawing this one stone took an hour and three minutes, although I know I went and checked tumblr a couple times while I was working, so let’s just call it an hour.
Now MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
This walkthrough assumes you already know how to use layer masks, the clone stamp, and the lasso tool. There’s also one part where I didn’t label it, but I inverted the selection so I could keep my lines consistent. It’s in the third image.
Unfortunately I can’t really help with colour choice and the actual colouring of the pinwheel shape that makes up the back facets, but you can kind of see that I tended to colour with lines that cut across the facets and and kept the outer parts of the facets darker. It would probably be best to find a reference to work from!
This particular cut of stone is called the ‘brilliant’ cut.
There’s actually a lot of internal reflection business that goes on in a stone, but I elected to ingore all of it since at a distance you can’t really tell anyway.
now GO FORTH AND DAZZLE YOUR FRIENDS WITH YOUR SPARKLE
Sorry for the lack of WIPs on this pic. Here are jpg’s of all the steps (with not-so-very-clear notes).
All the work was done in GIMP.
Wait what? A grayscale shade layer??? What layer option do you use though, let alone change the color successfully?
This is a really effective way to color, actually. I do it all the time. When you make shade layer, make sure you’re ONLY shading SHADOWS and basic diffusion — NOT object/material color values (like, just because the socks should be a dark color, you’re going to completely ignore that in the shading layer.) There are two ways to mix the shading afterward. You can place the shading layer over the flats layer then set the shading to Multiply, OR put the flats over the shading and set the flats to “Color” blending. Then, you just paint some small variances in hue to whichever layer you’ve set blending mode to.
This is a great way to color because it eliminates the need to mix new colors as you pass from one flat to another. It gets less of a painterly look, but in this type of art you’re not going for that anyway. Excellent for comics.
r
SO THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT
This is very similar to how I go about coloring as well. 🙂
using this when i get home
Holy flippin’ crap I have to try this now.
This is sad to admit but I’m learning more technique from tumblr than I am from art school