To The Lions WIP

Bit of a birthday gift thing I did for my broham Lee. I was too lazy to make a full blown WIP of this going through adding the gradient and texture layers so here's a before and after of the original drawing I did in Sai. Normally I draw stuff in some light blue as a sketch then create a new layer and do the final inks in black over it but considering teal was a part of the color scheme anyways I just left it as it was. It didn't come out 100% how I wanted. More like... 60% but I'm still pretty happy with it. It's idiotically hard to imitate a high contrast, over exposed picture of an anthropomorphic cougar, I'm planning on taking commissions for these if people ask for them but I'll probably charge about $40 for them since the original drawing itself is kind of hard to figure out how to do. We'll see...

Blast[Beat] From The Past

I'm starting to realize that this blog is going to get very cluttered very fast, I think I'll just keep this down to posting stuff I really like or something.

Anyways, this was a fun piece to do, took me back to the good ol' days of doing art for myspace bands. This is a shirt design for a project I'm starting with my friend Kihu. My boyfriend and and another friend, Lee, are a part too, though they're more for live performances or something... I really don't know how they fit in actually. There are two other merch designs I did though I'm feeling lazy and I don't really want to link to both so I'll just link you to the better of the two. Click here to see it.

Really I don't think all those links were necessary, huh. Well, I'm off to bed I don't know what this will be posted as, this thing never posts the times right but it's 4:09am and I have no idea why the hell I'm still awake.

Iconoclast: Backtracking A Bit

So Tao reminded me that I should probably post some of my work on here. I would like to have an alternative showcase other than FA and this gives me more freedom to run my mouth longer on what's behind the art.

Anyways, I started doing some new icons in a new style I've been working on developing, it's heavily based on Tao and even more so Decaf's thick lines though to give myself a bit of credit I have been wanting to develop heavier line art anyways. I've always been a fan of textures and I don't know why I never though of using them in my works in a multiply layer over everything before now but I guess I'll give Tao the credit there, I joke around with him a lot but both he and Decaf are major inspirations to me so have at it Tao, I'm sure your ego will enjoy that one.

Here we have 2 out of at the moment 4 of my newer style icons. First one for Tao and the second for our friend Okie. I didn't feel like cluttering my blog with art you can find on my FA, but I figured I'd post these since they're the two I like the best. I'm especially pleased with how Okie's turned out considering I'd never drawn a dalmatian or dreds.

Also we've got what is so far my favorite badge I've been commissioned for yet. Or hell, art in general. The texture, coloring and everything in this left me blown away, I'm really happy with this because despite the many flaws I always pick out in my work, it serves as evidence to me that regardless of my failures, I'm still improving. Note the Impending Doom-ness of it haha, I'm surprised at how much I made that look like their logo. Badge for my deathcore bro Xan.

Man I sure wish there was some kind of lj-cut-esque html for this site, I tend to have too much to say and I'd like to let my work take up more of this page than my mouth. Oh well.

WIP: DIDY Banner

Click on picture to view full size.

Figured I'd share the wip of the banner for on here. It's a bit

cleaned up since I used my brushes and I erased outside

the line art.

I don't have the original sketch I did the line art over to show

but oh well, I did that in Paint Tool Sai since my lines in

photoshop are absolute garbage. After doing the line art in

Sai I opened it in photoshop and set the blending mode to

multiply then opened new layers underneath. Using my

watercolor brushes I layered some color under

the lines then erased the stray color outside the lines.

Next I inverted the background and made a new layer under

the coloring. Using a soft edged brush I added some

desaturated blue and used the smudge tool to blend it in to

the background at a gradient.

Finally in a layer over everything else I pasted the texture

and set the blend mode to multiply then added one final

layer and using the same soft edged brush as the blue in

the background, brushed some shadow around the edges.

OH and the text. I didn't feel the need to add this to the wip

but it's just 3 layers of Trajan Pro set under the texture layer

with a shape (rectangle with the edges erased to points)

in between DIYD and the Graphic Design part. That's it.

L2 POTATOSHOP: BRUSHES/ADJUSTMENTS

Why not do something that makes absolutely no sense. I think I'll empower you to make brushes without my help because no one likes relying on people for their art when they could be doing it themselves right?

So anyways get a scan of whatever it is you wanna make a brush out of and open it in photoshop. before you start anything make sure you check the size of the image and be sure both the height and width ARE NO MORE THAN 2500PX. Photoshop will tell you to screw off and not let you save your brush preset if you don't have it that size or less because 2500px by 2500px is the largest brush size you can have (older versions of photoshop are smaller than that but we're not living in the stone age, I'm sure you have at least CS3).

Anyways.

Levels

Once you're sure you've got the right size image go to Image>Adjustments and go to Levels. First off you'll want to move the little arrow to the far right inward a little bit. This is for the highlights. I usually drag it to about 130ish. This will cut out any shadows in the paper that'd ruin your brush. Now go over to the slider thing (I don't even know what those are called) on the far left, and set it how you see fit, depending on your brush it may need more or less. Typically if my scan is already dark I don't set it more than in the 20-30 range. If it's fairly light and needs darkened up a but I move it up to the 50-60 range. The shadows are something you kind of have to judge for yourself based on your scan. There really isn't need to screw with the midtones but if you want to go for it.

Desaturate

Might I add you may want to desaturate (control (command for mac users) +shift+U if you didn't know) just to take any color out. You don't have to since your brush won't be made with any color but I just like to have my scans in greyscale so I have a better idea of what the brush will look like.

Curves

Next up you might want to check the curves in your image. All the stuff I'm going to tell you to check is in Image > Adjustments so just remember that, I don't feel like typing that 3 more times after this. Go to Curves. The bottom left corner is your shadows, the top right is highlights. Sometimes I don't even bother with this but it can help if you need to mess with your shadows and highlights. Clicking on the line will add a point on it you can drag around on the grid, adding one in the shadows towards the bottom left of the grid and dragging downward will darken your shadows, usually for highlights I add the point a bit more than between the middle and top of the line and drag slightly upward and towards the middle. You'll just have to do it by eye since your scan is more than likely going to be completely different than mine.

Contrast

Whatever adjustments you want to make to your image's contrast can be found in Brightness/Contrast. I never mess with brightness when preparing a brush but contrast can sometimes take a bit of adjustment. I never add more than around 35. Fix it as you see fit with your image.

Shadows/Highlights

This obviously is where you can edit your image's shadows and highlights a bit. The way you adjust these can affect how soft or hard the edges of your brush will be I've noticed, especially when you're messing with the highlights. I usually drag Shadows to around 15% and Highlights around 40%, again this is something that you can just adjust to how you see fit, don't use my numbers if they don't work for you, I'm just showing you the tools I use to prep my brushes.

Exposure

WATCH HOW YOU ADJUST THIS STUFF. Like in a camera if you over expose your image it's going to get washed out and look terrible/unusable. Adjusting the exposure a TINY BIT is usually all you need to do. The only thing I ever touch in here is Exposure and Gamma Correction, I don't even bother with Offset. I never go more than +0.90 in exposure, usually even less than that to keep from washing my images out, and no more than around 0.80 in Gamma Correction. Judge it by your eyes. I'm just leading the horse to the water, to hell with making it drink.

Making the brush and brush set

Once you're satisfied with all the adjustments on your brush, go to Edit>Define Brush Preset. Name your brush and you're done. There's no need to use the magic wand tool, eraser or select color range because anything that's white becomes transparent and all those adjustments should make the difference between your medium and the support (aka between your paint and paper or whatever you used) enough to give you a nice, clean brush.

So after you've made some brushes there's the off chance you'll want to be as awesome as me and make a set to share with people, but you don't know how to make the .ABR file to do so. Shut up and let me tell you how to do it jeez. Go to Edit>Preset Manager and Control (command)+Click all the brushes you want to be in the set. If they're all the newest ones clicking on the most recent and Shift+clicking on the first one will work just fine. Once you've got all your brushes selected, click on Save Brush Set, name it whatever you want and save it. That's all there is to it. And these tools aren't confined to making nice brushes, they can be great for editing and cleaning up pictures or scans of drawings too so try to make use of them and get your money (or more likely crack's) worth out of photoshop.

Now then, put all those steps together and multiply by 25, add 1 GB of RAM and one PISSY photoshop and you've got the next 2 hours of my day. Packs 3 and 4 will be up as soon as I get through all that. Enjoy.

FONTS: Simple=The Best

I've seen a lot of crazy fonts and all that. Base 02/05, Uptown, Destruccion radda radda, you get my point. Sure the distressed bashed up fonts can look good but I think a lot of amateur artists can overlook how well the standard everyday fonts can work. The stuff I use the most is Arial, usually set bold, Times with a ton of spacing between letters, Avenir and Helvetica. Usually spaced and all caps. After all it IS cruise control for cool. 3/4 of those I use on my brush pack demos and you can see how well they work even though they're common fonts. I guess this is just a bit of advice that sometimes the most effective fonts are the most basic ones. Try messing with the basics like I said, Times, Arial, Helvetica, Avenir, Veranda all look good and when in doubt CAPS LOCK IT.

With this bit of advice I'm going to bed, It's way too late/early for this to be healthy for me.

Pilot Post

Let's get this shit going. It's about time I make some kind of blog so I can post resources for people. I can't stand how people go out and take a picture of an oil stain in the middle of the road then charge you $20 to use their texture with enough strings attached to hang yourself with frustration. I'll be sharing my own textures and brushes I've made and maybe some stock photography if I ever get around to it. Maybe even link you to some new music to check out from my favorite music blogspot, xdcmx on here. All for free. Because I'm just that awesome.

TO BEGIN WITH, Here's a SICK free texture site I just found, Zen Textures. Royalty free so you know, go crazy.