stu thread

[rtil]

maybe try skipping the clean line part and do some color wash in the back of your sketches, and do a more 'organic' approach. you don't seem to enjoy doing lineart or 'filling in' of colors like a coloring book. and that method doesn't work for some people, anyway. you might just be approaching it from the wrong angle.

[naturally]

fdasgasdgasg

[rtil]

make a layer behind the sketch and do some big splashes of color. figure out what the background is gonna be like, the temperature of the colors and the light source, maybe make a 2nd layer for your character color . then transparency lock the line layer, add some color to it to match your bg colors, then merge the lines with the paint and start adding definition where necessary. don't worry about making everything "clean", just worry about making it look good. i think it would better suit your tastes. there's a guy who paints like this on dA, and i kind of paint like this, too. i find that i get better results and more interesting compositions by not sweating the small stuff. here's one of alchemaniac's progressions:

obviously he goes into some extreme detail, but you can see how he carves out certain shapes just by painting organically. and eventually just paints over his original sketch and doesn't even bother to do clean linework or anything. by step 4 it's almost completely gone.

[naturally]

i'm pretty surprised i had never even heard of alchemaniac until today. the amount of step-by-steps he has on his dA is pretty cool. he seems to use a lot of different approaches but the kiki example seems to be the most organic considering he doesn't seem to be relying on his lines like he does in a lot of the other ones. do you have any advice for brush settings for painting? i try to mess with opacity, persistence and etc when i can but i seem to suck at getting a good balance.

i appreciate the example and the advice, i'll try to put it to good use.

[rtil]

i like to use only opacity pressure sensitive brushes , using the selection or eraser tool to carve out hard edges if i need to. i also have some blocky brushes for hard edges, or 'slice' brushes for things like hair. but i think opacity brushes are best for doing blending. if you're always using 'linework' brushes you're never getting much variety of color since you're always painting completely over another color.

[naturally]

not exactly how i pictured it but it's a start

i'm aware it's still pretty flat and there are things i still could've continued to work on but the jacket took me way longer than it should've anyway and i'm satisfied enough

[naturally]

double post yey



so i'm 100% positive there's an easier way to do the stars than the way i'm doing it and probably a way to make it look a lot better too but i'm really not sure how to get a good effect like that in sai. any advice would be appreciated.

[rtil]

i could easily answer that question if you had said photoshop. but i barely know anything about sai brushes. if it has any featuers like scatter and brush distance then you could make a very simple and effective star brush.

[naturally]

i can actually just save it as a psd file (sai's cool like that) and open it up in photoshop too because i want to learn how to use both effectively anyway

afaik it doesn't really have any scatter-like brush options but i could be wrong

[rtil]

just take the hard round brush in photoshop, mess with spacing , scattering and size jitter, maybe color jitter as well between foreground and background and set fg to white and bg to a blue and you'll get some differently varied star shapes and intensities, then i might go over it again with a blur brush so some stars look further away than others, overall though it won't take longer than 5 minutes you can get a very nice starscape

[naturally]

for some reason i couldn't find spacing options under the brush settings which is weird but i was able to kind of get the kind of effect you were talking about. mostly just played around with it so it's still nothing perfect.



i still want to be able to make the middle shine so it actually looks something like this if i can. i don't really expect it to be anything close but i was looking at your adrift painting and really liked how it turned out but couldn't really figure out how to replicate the effect at all.

[naturally]

done

[rtil]

i have a lot of 'space-y' brushes. for things like nebulas and stuff i use cloud brushes mostly.

spacing is at the bottom here on the 'brush tip shape' tab. the % is how far apart from eachother every brush application is. so 200% would leave a single width brush size gap apart from eachother. for stars you can set it pretty high.


be careful in some areas things start to blend into eachother because it's so light. places like her hair and face, and her fingers. you can play with lighting and outlines to help separate them so you dont' lose details

[naturally]

thanks for the info. that's actually funny because i knew i had seen the spacing option before but i thought i was looking through all the options that were there so i was confused. the only one i didn't try clicking was brush tip shape because it didn't have the box i guess.

[naturally]

sketch i posted on irc.

[spoilerimg]http://www.thebackalleys.com/dump/files/2093/0851zW_nuiharime.jpg[/spoilerimg]

so many double posts

[rtil]

i think before you start coloring you should work some more on finishing the linework. the angle you've chosen is really difficult, too. you'll need to use color to imply depth

[naturally]

yeah i have no idea why i chose to try such a difficult angle because its just made me avoid working on it so i doodled these today




one punch man is a pretty good manga

[naturally]

more scribbles for the scribble thread

[Stu4U]

i spy line rider

[naturally]

tried animating pixels. the left/right ones aren't too great.