ICON TUTORIAL... THING

I figured I'd just show you a quick progression of an icon commission so you can see how I make them. Just so you know I do all my stuff (or at least this icon, just to cover my tracks if my line art in Photoshop stops sucking and I go back to that later after I post this) in Paint Tool Sai.

STEP ONE: SKETCH.

I actually don't have a picture of this since after I draw the inks/line art, I delete the sketch layer but basically just imagine a crappy version of the ink layer in a lighter color and that's about it.

STEP TWO: INKS.

Self explanatory, just the clean line art drawn over the sketch.

STEP THREE: COLORS.

I'M PRETTY SURE YOU DON'T NEED AN EXPLANATION FOR THIS ONE.

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STEP FOUR: BACKGROUND.

Typically I use a flat single color for my backgrounds but once in a while I'll switch it up and add other colors or shades just to make it a bit less boring

STEP FIVE: TEXTURE.

Since I started adding texture to my stuff I just can't work without it now, when I add texture then make the layer with it hidden the work just looks so bland. Then again I usually only add texture (at least at a high opacity) to stuff I don't do a ridiculous amount of shading on. If you haven't noticed yet, up until now I create the new layers for color and background under each other, just to make sure things stay clean. Texture I always make the top-most layer and set the blend mode on multiply. If the image I use for the texture has an area that's too dark and messes with the overall appearance of the work, I set my eraser on a very low opacity, with soft edges and a fairly large size and try to lighten it up without removing too much and making the spot where I erased stand out. Here you can see where I had to erase around the white on the face in a few spots. It was mostly just around the area of the mouth just above the lower jaw but I erased a bit more to spread out and create more of a gradient so it didn't look so obvious I had to erase the texture there.

STEP SIX: GRADIENT... THING.

Just to add a little depth or whatever to my icons... hmm that kinds sounds like bs. JUST TO MAKE IT LOOK COOLER, I darken around the edges of my icons. depending on the icon I either use black or a dark shade of the background color. This is usually with the Air Brush tool, set with a soft edge, low opacity and large size. This icon is 300x300 px and the Air Brush was set to 80 px just to give a general idea of how big a "large size" is

And there you have it, that's how I do my icons and actually how I do a lot of my art. You can pretty much see that in any of my other WIP posts of cheaper commissions or stuff that doesn't have shading/a lot of shading.

NEVER BACK DOWN [WIP]

I've been pretty unmotivated lately but I finally got around to doing a commission I've been owing my bro Jase. I'll just post a few WIP shots of this because I'm lazy as usual. Funny thing about this is while I was drawing some mofo husky repping Throwdown and brass knuckles ready to beat some I was all chill listening to The Starting Line and Saosin.

Just a bit of the colors in this. I like the painterly feel I've gradually been trying to develop in Sai. Still needs some work, but yeah. Just the fur colors under the hair and clothing layers.

The finished product in Paint Tool Sai before I opened it up in Photoshop to add my watermark and throw in the texture and the shading around the edges. I guess I could've done the texture and shading in Sai but ...actually I really don't know why I didn't.

The blood splatters you can find in one of my brush packs. I'm not really sure which packages they're from but they're in there. Also I was too lazy to download and use one of my own textures (for some reason I don't keep them saved on my computer) so I just ripped one from zentextures.com. I usually go with their stuff and if you haven't checked them out even though I've recommended them before you'd best do it. The textures on Zen are ridiculously good.

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I AM HOLLYWOOD!

Seeing how I've still got my last 2 commissions to finish and I'll probably only post one of them on here anyways, I figured I'd share the wallpaper I made for my Twitter (there's a link in the sidebar if you want to follow me) so you can see it without all the junk in front of it. It's full of Norma Jean, Underoath, Impending Doom, As I Lay Dying, Hands and most of all He Is Legend references. I think there's about 11 layers in this. 4 textures, 3 sections of newspaper stock, 2 of text, 1 of my actual handwriting and the background which the gradient is on. All the solid layers are set to multiply in blend mode. By solid I mean the big square stuff like the newspaper images and the textures, not text or the scribbles and handwriting. For the newspaper images I put them in, set to multiply and used the eraser with a soft edged brush around 15px and the opacity at 50% to softly blend them into the background so it'd look like the text was part of the image with no hard edges to make it look just sorta thrown on there.

The Underoath text which was an idea I took from the packaging from their Survive, Kaleidoscope album (the inside of the sleeve has the lyrics "Just what are you so afraid of?" printed backwards) is Helvetica and the massive EDGEWOLF is Aristotle Punk with the centers of the D and O erased out.

I really need to get back to my commissions now...

(stop being so damn lazy)

2LEGIT2QUIT: Husky Gets What Husky Wants WIP [Adult]

So I finally decided to work with some thin inks for once. I used to be a tragically huge Adam Wan fan (technically I still am, just not to such a tragic degree) and I HATED how he got such clean lines. I still can't do it in photoshop but I finally realized I was good enough in Sai to do a similar inking style. I also wanted to work with a more painterly style like Tao and Hush and I think for my first decent attempt at it, it turned out pretty good. A lot of the lines and shading in this I was just like "UGH, I WANT TO FINISH THIS I'M GONNA BE LAZY AND SLOPPY" but for the most part I tried to put as much effort as possible into it. 2LEGIT2QUIT. Definitely one of my best works so far.

I originally sketched this out on bristol with an H2 and HB pencil since traditionally even if I don't have CTRL+ALT+Z I tend to work better. I actually broke out Gray's Anatomy and some references from the internet of muscle and bone structure to make this as anatomically sound as possible since my usual full body works are TERRIBLE (hence my hesitance to take commissions for them). I also took a picture of myself to reference for Storm's pose since I had no idea how to draw him. I drew myself first then just kinda threw his head right there by the cock and said to myself "Well damn... how do I fit the rest of him in there and make it look right?". His pose was hard as HELL to get right, the legs especially gave me some trouble and I had to work a while to get the twist of his torso to look right but overall I think I managed to pull it off. I'm too lazy to upload any more pictures so I'll just start with the inks I did in Sai over the scan of the initial sketch.

The end result first pictured I'm really pleased with. I really wanted to expand on my inking and coloring styles/technique/skill/etc to try to give my stuff a bit more dimension. I'd like to say the angle of the bed was intentional to create an interesting composition but really it was just me realizing the original sketch put us at a crazy awkward angle that would never look right with the bed under us at 90 degrees. The posters I put up in there are 2 Impending Doom and a War Of Ages poster, all of which I own and have framed (along with 6 others) in my room. The poster for Impending Doom's "The Serpent Servant" I actually own signed but by the time I got to putting the posters in I was wayyyy to sick of working on this to bother forging all the signatures on.

I also realized that tomorrow is Ben (Storm) and I's 3 month anniversary so I ended up having a legit excuse for taking a break from commissions to make this. That wasn't my initial reason for doing it (which essentially was just for the hell of making him look like the bitch for once haha) but oh well.