[ Download Link ]

[ Download Link ]

As promised, it’s finally here! Thank you to all of my patrons for not only the support that made this possible, but for giving me the confidence to work on a big project like this.

Rather than providing any drawing instruction, what this writeup aims to do is help you learn to unpack the decisions being made in a given composition, and articulate what elements in a piece are responsible for its impact. Being able to isolate these qualities in your own art and art that inspires you opens up avenues for improvement regardless of medium, style, or technical skill. This is the first of hopefully many PWYW art ‘tutorials’ from me. 

I hope you all enjoy! 

It’s that time of the month: new Clip Studio brushes!

Scallop Ribbon Brush

Pearl Ribbon Brush

Cross Ribbon Brush

Moons Ribbon Brush

Here’s all the past drops in case you missed them:

Netting and Lines Brush Drop | Lip & Hair Gloss Brush Pack | Glitter & Sparkles Brush Pack | Destiny Brush Pack | Valentine’s Frame Set | Candy Coated Brush Drop | Bloody Throne Pack | Magic & Daggers Set | Tarot Pack Brushes (October Update) | Elfy Card Set | Big Ol’ Card Asset Drop | All Those Brushes

put up a little pack of Clipstudio flower brushes I made on ko-fi at request! I share them via my discord community server as well but for the Wider Public: click!

Blue’s Feathers and Wings Compendium: Standard Wing Shapes

Wings Part 1 [Standard ]| Wings Part 2 [Atypical] | Feather Markings | Tail Feathers [Part 1] | Tail Feathers [Part2]

I have expanded the traditional 4 types; Highspeed, Elliptical, Low Aspect and High Aspect ratio, because they were very narrow and vague categories for the most part, adding High Energy, Thermal Soaring, Night Glider, and Passerine wings. I feel that these extra types make it easier to understand and visualize the differences and similarities between wing shapes.

I’ve renamed Low Aspect to Powered Soaring, and High Aspect to Dynamic Soaring for the purposes of the fact that names made it hard to understand purpose and were easily confusable. 

A lot of these wing types are also affected by tailfeather shape and size, and that will change their agility and energy expenditure as the tail also generates lift.

Disclaimer: This is in no way intended to be an academic dissertation or proposal, do not treat it as such. It is purely for art and writing references for others, to aid description and inspiration.

I’ve been dying to ask for a while: How do you choose colors for shading?? Every piece you post leaves me absolutely awestruck! Do you experiment with layer filters (multiply, darken, etc.) or do you eyeball your palette?

There are a lot of very comprehensive videos and tutorials online about almost any art thing that'll be more helpful than me otl. So i'd suggest looking those up for like actual direction and learning proper color theory so you know how to problem solve for whatever you're drawing. I don't really render complicated because I don't like most super rendered styles. Shading color depend a lot on bg/environment too which I also don't draw a lot of lol. So I just wanna put out there that there's a LOT to say on this subject.

Anyway my smooth brain reply is "make a layer, set to multiply, use a purple, lower opacity". It's what I usually do if I'm just slapping shading on a drawing of a character floating in solid color bg purgatory.

On more elaborate drawings I'll consider which colors are reflecting off eachother and how I'm using warm vs cool and the saturation of the local colors and what needs to stand out. But for simple stuff "a purple on multiply" will cover most bases without making the drawing look gross and dull. A step above that is messing with the kind of purple youre using, like temperature and saturation. And then if I wanna try out random weird shit I'll make a gradient map correction layer, pick a palette, and mess with the layer settings to see what funky combos come up.

Hello! If it's not a bother, could you explain how do you do render? Because you're artworks look really cool. Thanks in advance.

I set all the general shapes and values first without getting into any details, and when everything is in place i start applying textures and zooming in to sharpen out this and that. I use one texture brush and it’s Brush Tool Splatter from one of Kyle’s packs for applying a bit “dirtier” base easy and fast, and the rest is painted with a square brush, but making it smaller the more detailed I want to go.

I try to work by, let’s say, applying layers, rendering certain amount of details on the whole picture with every pass, and depending on how detailed I want it (or parts of it) to be I keep going through it over and over again.

The rest is zooming in and looking at references.

I used an item for that example cos I had comparison pictures at hand, but same goes for character art, just more lol.

And thank You!