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185 posts
Cherubdreams - I Love Maractus - Tumblr Blog
Gravity Falls + Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
I’m taking a class about fantasy literature, and Propp’s theories came up in our discussion. Propp came up with a list of 31 plot elements contained within Russian fairy tales. I got excited when I noticed many of the elements can be found in Gravity Falls, so I made a bunch of screenshot redraws to share with you. (And practice coloring. And give you more Stan twins feels.)
how to draw sharp teeth and have them make sense: a tutorial
so you want to draw a character with sharp teeth? that’s cool! you have a lot of options. like most things, how you draw fearsome teeth can be improved by looking at nature and i’m gonna show you how.
Read More
Adam Turnbull from Guerilla Games (Horizon: Zero Dawn, among others) has started a very useful hub of resources for animators.
Webcomic tips
In the conclusion for now, some things I’d really recommend doing if you’re seriously considering making a webcomic (or really a comic in general). Some of these don’t really apply to strips or gag-a-day type of comics, but I’m not talking about those here.
1. Write down ideas\sketch stuff, LEGIBLY. “I’m gonna remember it later” NEVER works. And if you scribble it somewhere on a piece of paper, you’d better scan it or retype in one doc later, because tiny notes always get lost among other doodles in my skethbooks.
(i know it’s hard to keep everything clean and organized, but this mess is just not productive)
If your project is a collaboration, save your conversations. If you’re working alone, make a blog for your ramblings. You have no clue what tears of relief I cry when I open that blog and rememeber I don’t have to painstakingly look through my heaps of sketchbooks and folders for a tiny idea I’m not even sure I wrote down a few months ago.
2. Inspiration folders, or even better, inspo blog with tags also help with collecting and remembering ideas. Color schemes, landscapes, style inspirations, atmospheric stuff, maybe some photo references, all those neat things.
3. Basic tier: character design sheets. Top tier: common poses, expressions. God tier: outfits they wear throughout the comic. Holy cow tier: turnaround sheets for all those outfits.
(I’d die trying to find good pages for references without these)
4. If you haven’t finished detailing the plot, don’t even think about moving on to drawing the comic. You’re gonna regret it when you come up with a really cool plot element that can’t be incorporated anymore because you’ve already drawn all the parts you could’ve tweaked.
5. Don’t just define the plot, make a script. Writing down the lines and the brief description of the actions serves me fine:
(notice that I approximately divided the pages & the text that’d go to each panel on a page)
6. Hard mode: make thumbnails for all the pages, if possible. At least whenever a new chapter starts.
7. If your story involves some convoluted chronology shenanigans, you’d better write down the events of your timeline in the chronological order.
8. Backgrounds. You can’t avoid them, bro. Like half of the comics are backgrounds, especially if your story involves a lot of adventuring and looking around. I know it hurts, but you’ll have to become friends with them. Read some tutorials, practice on photos, go out and sketch some streets, use 3d programs (like Google Sketch) to understand the perspective, use sites like houseplans to visualize your buildings better, I don’t know. Just be prepared for their imminent evil.
9. If you’re drawing digitally, pick a brush size for the lines and stick with it. You don’t want your lines and detail levels to look all wonky and inconsistent in different panels. And I don’t mean the cool stylistic varying lines, I mean this:
Also, things on the background should have thinner and/or lighter lines to avoid distraction. Usually less details too, unless you’re making a busy background with a simple foreground to help it pop out. Or wanna draw the attention to an object on the bg.
10. Readable fonts. Even if you chose to ignore people with poor sight or dyslexia, the majority of your readers aren’t gonna be excited about struggling to decypher this:
Also, as much as I love my black speech bubbles, colorful text on black still kinda hurts the eyes. I wouldn’t recommend doing that for all the characters. Black speech bubbles are usually used for creepy, inhuman voices. And yes, having a colorful outline in this case helps.
11. Probably newsflash, but did you know that panels have their place, order and functions? They do! My favourite thing ever is how I used panels when I was like 12:
(comics ain’t rocket science, but this one is)
The composition of the panels and word balloons always serve for a better reading experience. They guide your eyes over the page, so that you never feel lost or confused. The images in the comic equal frames in a movie, so it’s pretty damn important in what order you look at things and how quickly you can understand what’s going on!
(Eric Shanower & Scottie Young’s Wizard of Oz)
12. One update a week is fine for testing waters. Don’t overestimate yourself, especially if you have a pretty busy life outside it. A stable comic that updates slowly, but regularly is better than an unpredictable erratic one. You can always pick up the pace later, if you feel confident enough.
13. Try to always have a buffer - a couple of pages in reserve. If you’re making the pages much faster than you’re updating, this shouldn’t be a problem. But if those paces are equally the same, it’s goddamn HARD. But on the other hand, if something happens and you skip an update, those come in handy.
If you’re looking at this list and thinking “wow that’s a LOT of work”, you’re totally right. And it’s okay to be intimidated at first! But that’s why it’s important to start with something small. Once you get the formula down, these things will be natural to you.
Have a chart I developed for visualizing the disposition of your character! This is partly inspired by a chart I saw of Aristotle’s Golden Mean, which is a system he had for developing good character, but of course, this is more about gauging a character’s traits than bringing them into any kind of balance.
For a printable PDF version of the chart please follow this link.
“Sigils, Ciphers and Scripts: History and Graphic Function of Magick Symbols” by M. B. Jackson (2013) - selected plates.
This book is highly recommended - it packs a very large amount of accurate information into its 64 pages.
“The world is language” - Terence McKenna.
At each level of experience there are various languages, codes and symbols that describe that level. The first step to improving your own state and that of others is to understand how these languages work. The next step is to start writing your own narratives, stories and texts in your language of choice.
Chatroom Edit Photoshop Template v2.0
All right everyone, I’m back with an updated version of my chatroom template, as I’ve made quite a few changes to it. (I’ve also edited quite a few more chatrooms now, so I have a lot of features added that make doing so easier).
(Link to the old template – also includes a GIMP template)
Things that have changed:
Included a V layer group
MC nametag
Alternate profile pictures
Spacing guides updated
Choice overlay
Header/Footer included
New fonts used – included in .zip
Speech bubble backgrounds now included in each character’s layer group
What’s in the .zip:
The four fonts you’ll need to make everything display properly – thanks very much to @tubbsen for finding three of the main fonts! The last is the handwritten one, which I extracted myself.
The Photoshop template
An example Photoshop file with a quick animation (the second .gif above)
Readme
Other Useful Things:
My #MM Chat Edits tag for emojis, speech bubbles, and other chatroom edit-related things.
@mysticmessengeraudio, the blog I co-admin where we post translated audio from the game (including emoji voice clips)
My tutorial on animating the chatrooms
The Template:
Photoshop Template (on Dropbox)
One More Thing:
Note that you don’t actually have to have Photoshop to use this template. It will also open on GIMP, a free photo-editing program. It was made with Photoshop and thus works better on there, but is just as editable on GIMP.
Additional Notes:
Please, please credit me if you use this, as it took a lot of time to make!
(I also like being tagged in them to see what you guys edit ^^)
If you’re wondering where the example chatroom edits come from – the first and last one are from my Everlasting Party (Time Loop AU) fanfic. The second is a short .gif included in the .zip file. The third one is a mockup V chat including a heart point for him. I also included the header/footer + choice bubble options so you can see those as well. There’s a video version of it here.
How I pratice drawing things, now in a tutorial form. The shrimp photo I used is here Show me your shrimps if you do this uvu PS: lots of engrish because foreign
So it occurred to me that ‘grawlix’ is sort of an obscure and specialized word, but what I didn’t know until I was googling around just now is that it was actually invented by cartoonist Mort Walker in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, in which he categorizes (and invents terminology for) all kinds of visual cues and shorthand commonly used in comics
In other news, this is now right up there with The Meaning of Liff as ‘books of made up words I desperately need to own”
+40 Pixel Art Tutorials
A growing collection of animated Pixel Art Tutorials by Pedro Medeiros (@saint11) of Studio Miniboss (they previously worked on TowerFall and are currently working on Celeste and Skytorn)
All +40 Pixel Art Tutorials can be found on blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart (10 Pixel Art Tutorials are posted below)
Color palette tutorial time!
This is by no means the Only Way To Pick Colors–it’s just a relatively-simple method I use sometimes. I’ve found it works pretty well, almost regardless of what colors you pick–as long as you can keep them organized by those light/dark warm/cool categories, and make sure one category takes up a significantly higher proportion of page space, it usually turns out pretty good!
HEY ARTISTS!
Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:
OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–
There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)
How to do “extra” facial expressions!
Drawing basic facial expressions is not the hardest. Most people can draw a sad face, a happy face, angry etc., but making more multidimensional expressions is more of a challenge. I have gotten a lot of compliments on how I draw facial expressions, (specifically “angsty ones”) telling me that they are very dramatic and well… expressive! And there are actually only a few things I think about when I draw faces that take them to the next level, so I thought i’d illustrate them all here!
SUPER IMPORTANT TIP BEFORE WE START: Look at your own face when you draw faces. Even making the face when you are drawing (you don’t even have to look at it), will give you some sense of how the face muscles pull and where things fold and stretch, because you can feel it. You are the best reference when it comes to facial expressions!
Angles
Draw the head in an angle that matches the expressions you want to make. It is not a requirement, but is going to add to the effect.
Symmetry vs asymmetry
A face is rarely symmetric. Unless the face the character is making is 100 % relaxed or even dissociating, the eyebrows, mouth and facial muscles will have different placements of their respective side. This image shows the dramatic impact asymmetry has on a face:
That’s the difference between a smile and a smirk!
The first one’s like “oh yeah?” and the second is like “oH YEAH??”
The “balloon squishing principle”
This is something I did subconsciously, and I didn’t know about until I made this tutorial. And this principle goes hand in hand with an asymmetric face. Basically, if you squish one part of the face, you need to even out the empty space by “inflating” the other part of the face so that it doesn’t appear shrunken. The picture hopefully explains it:
Teeth
Don’t forget to add the gum when the mouth is open to its full potential!
Squinting and folding
Adding folds around the eyes when a character is squinting makes a HUGE difference. It makes a smile more genuine and a growl more intimidating. Adding folds to the face in general makes your characters more lifelike and ‘visually relatable’. Like, they look human, and less plastic or fake.
and so on..
Pupils and irises
The placement of the iris and pupil in relation to the eyelids is very important! The less of the white you see, the more relaxed the character is.
And then of course eyebrows and eyes go hand in hand!
Gestures, spitting, sweating…
Adding more elements than just a face is key to making the character actually look like they are feeling what you want them to feel. Just the tiniest sweat drop adds to their anxiety, spitting adds frustration to their rage, slouching shoulders, waving hands, a double chin, extreme angles, the list goes on! Add whatever and see what kind of impact it makes! Does it do the trick? Great! Add it!
Over exaggeration!!
Remember that you can almost always exaggerate more. Don’t be afraid to do draw “too much” because you’re just experimenting. See what works and what doesn’t. What do you like to exaggerate?
Now that you know some theory, it’s time to practice!
Practicing!!
The 25 Essential Expressions (a classic! I’ve done it multiple times)
And the one I do when I’m bored:
Fill a page with circles and fill them in with different expressions. Try and exaggerate as much as you can!
This is mostly for experimenting. They are quicker to draw than complete faces, but the same rules should apply!
And that’s about it!
I don’t know if I covered everything in this tutorial, since some things might be obvious for me, and this post perhaps only scratches the surface. So feel free to send me a message if you want an explanation about something more in depth! Thank you for reading! And now DRAW!!! ✨🎨