White Teeth, Black LeatherBlack Soul, White FeathersYou And I Would Go Good Together

White teeth, black leather Black soul, white feathers You and I would go good together

Ride — Clans

akira fudo deserves all the love in this terrible awful world and im here to give it to him

Are you boy or girl?

Shut the fuck up

Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍

shading colour tips

hey yall its me the Art Mom™ to help you shade pretty

rule 1: DO NOT SHADE WITH BLACK. EVER. IT NEVER LOOKS GOOD. 

red- shade with a slightly darker shade of purple

orange- slightly darker and more saturated shade of red

yellow- i think like..a peach could work but make it a really light peach

green- shade with darker and less saturated shade of blue or teal

blue- shade with purple

purple- a shade thats darker than the purple you’re using and maybe a little pink (MAYBE blue)

pink- darker shade of red

white- a really light lavender or blue..or i guess any really light colour??

black- okay listen dont use pure black to colour anything unless you want to leave it with flat colours because you cant really shade black lol

grey- a slightly darker shade of purple or blue (less saturated)

brown- slightly darker and less saturated shade of purple or red

aaaaand thats all i got lol. let me know if there is anything i should add to this list!!

Nearly everyone who asked for a tutorial asked for a hair tutorial, so here it is!!

Again, I use Paint tool Sai for this.

STEP 1: Sketch out how you want your hair. (I got asked for a Peggy specific hair tutorial so this is Peg’s pony tail)

STEP 2: Block in your colours! For Peggy, she has a pink ombre, so block in the two colours and use a blur tool so there aren’t any hard lines.

STEP 3: This is optional, but I like to change the colour of the line art. You can do this by either adding a clipping group above the lineart layer, or choosing “preserve opacity” on the layer and you can colour right over it.

STEP 4: Merge all the layers into one and clean up the parts where you got lazy (This only applies to the artists that don’t follow the rules and cant colour in the lines - me basically)

STEP 5: Using my brush too, I go over the line art to soften it up, and block in shadows and start cleaning the edges up 

PEGGY STEP!!: Because I personally hate the way the blur tool looks with the ombre, I go over her hair with my marker tool because I think it gives it more dimension. 

^^ The settings I use for this step

STEP 6: Texture and stuff. How much detail you add is up to you. Peggy has loose curls, and I try to blend them in with her ombre. I usually don’t add this much detail, but this is more or less what I do.

MY FAVOURITE STEP: GO HAM add little fly aways and curls that wont stay down because no one’s hair stays still all the time. (Especially ethnic hair cause man let me tell you my hair doesn’t care what I want it to do it just does what makes it happy and I can respect that.) 

AND YOU’RE DONE

You can use these steps to draw lots of other hair types

I hope this helped at all? This only really works if you do digital paintings I think?? But you guys asked. This is how I hair.