They Should Invent A Kind Of Venting Where I Can Be Really Vague Without People Asking Questions And

surprise!!!

this is like seeing an amazon drone in your backyard but half of its components are missing and your cat has peed on it twice. girl go home you are wasted

HOW TO USE THE "MAKE ART GOOD" BUTTON TO MAKE YOUR ART GOOD

HEY, YOU! Yeah, you, amateur artist! Have you ever seen a digital artist with really good fucking colours and wondered "HOW DID THEY GET THOSE REALLY GOOD FUCKING COLOURS?!" Is it experience, talent, and an eye for colour? FUCK NO. I'm here to tell you what the pros don't want you to know, which is that right within your very art program (assuming you're using Clip Studio Paint) is a single button that will MAKE YOUR ART GOOD*

* or like, marginally better than it was before most of the time

Let me show you how I took this BORING, UNGOOD Slime Rancher painting I did as a final project for my traditional art course from BORING...

TO RAD AS FUCK

IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES

THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE BUTTON.

You'll have to put everything on the same layer (I recommend putting it in a folder, duplicating the folder, and then collapsing all the duplicate layers together so your original work is still untouched), but after that, you can open the Gradient Map menu and go hog fucking wild.

This is what you're gonna see:

Basically, what gradient maps do is they map the darkest colour in your piece to the darkest colour in a gradient, and the lightest to the lightest, and then VOILA. All of your colours have been changed to the colours of the gradient. Neat!

You can use this to do things like automatically change skin tones or hair colours, or in our case, colour the whole painting!

You can download sets off the asset store and load them into your program by selecting the wrench icon and picking "Add gradient set."

All you need to do is load a gradient in the tool and voila...

...okay actually that looks like shit. (The gradient I'm using is #11 from the Yunywave set on the asset store! Go download it! It's a good set!)

So, our solution here is going to be different depending on the goal, the gradient, and whether it's a colour piece you're trying to zhuzh up or a B&W piece like this.

For this one, I duplicated the original layer and set the second one to Overlay at 100% opacity, then applied the gradient map to it.

INCREDIBLE! PERFECT!

Here are some other examples of how I've used gradient maps...

See, Overlay is a really good blending mode to use for this kind of thing, especially if you painted it with "normal" colours and just want to give it a little kick! But you should experiment with other modes, too. For a pastel piece, try Screen. For a subtle change, try Soft Light. For a moody or dark piece, try Multiply.

And you can also add even more details over the gradient layer to add that extra punch to it! In the example painting, I wasn't happy with the foreground tree's highlight being so dark, so I painted over it with an orange colour picked from the background, duplicated it, recoloured it to a dull yellow, and set the layer to 60% Glow Dodge.

Digital art gives us so many tools to make SICK FUCKING ART with, and gradient maps are like, the most powerful tools of all! USE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM AND GO MAKE COOL STUFF!

as some of you who pay more attention may know, i have made quite a lot of dragons. so many. and now, i have FINALLY come up with a good name for their world. so now i can loredump without it being confused for the dragon fact blogs (love those guys btw)

any coming posts about my personal silly dragons will be tagged "#dragons of keppel" and/or "#keppel lore"

not sure if all art of them will be, but some will.

the next time i make any dragon character and a D&D nerd starts trying to correct MY lore about MY DRAGONS based on a tabletop roleplaying game's story i am going to shove a mythological compilation of dragons throughout history up their ass and then stab them with a big sword. same goes for people who tell me my dragons arent actually dragons because they have slightly different numbers of limbs. burn in dragon hell.

hey, don’t cry. one half flour one half yogurt knead into dough and fry for easy flatbread and dip in balsamic vinegar, okay?

who is this guy lmao

Piss moon

@realmittence I have a commission. Please PLEASE PLEASE MOONMOON X TULIP PLEASE

notice how there are only the lights on the ceiling. the ring of lights.

the night scenes are ALWAYS drawn this way. I don't know how they messed it up this bad. It's an incredible part of the atmosphere and worldbuilding and giving even what could be called an illusion of a night sky breaks that. It makes the world feel so much more generic. Also coming off of episode 9 of season 2 the animation is frighteningly stiff. I'm only in it for the soundtrack at this point. just read it on webtoon if you want to get into the series, please.

tower of god season 2 is the most glaringly terrible adaptation ive seen in a while for one reason. have you taken a look at the night scenes? do you see them in the background? the MOON and STARS???

i guess Rachel didn't need to climb anywhere past floor 20 after all because you can see the stars RIGHT THERE. in fact they're also on floor 3 in the scenes with Khun. It might seem like a minor detail in other stories but that's her whole motivation for the inciting incident of the series.

i don't particularly care about the other things people have been ragging on, but they're valid criticisms too. I'm just unreasonably irritated about this detail because it is central to the entire story. It would have taken LESS effort to not put the moon and stars in the background. Do better.

simple little ref sheet guide with some tips relevant for any amount of detail! With Art Fight season around the corner they're some good things to keep in mind :)

other miscellaneous tips

if your character has detailed markings that need to be accurate (like tattoos), place the reference for it on a rectangular transparent section so it can be selected easily for copy/paste!

if your reference is for art purposes, try to keep it relevant to art! lore can help, but a lot of backstory text can make it difficult to tell what's important when drawing them

important things to include as written details are heights, weights / body types, pointing out any intentionally unusual proportions, and other things that may be interpreted as an art style (or that your reference may not accurately convey)!

if you can't draw something the way you want others to draw it, you can just insert other photos / screencaps for others to reference!

always have a SFW version. not one with censor blocks over the bits, I mean one that doesn't have the bits out at all. put some underwear on that beast. it's common courtesy.

ADD ALT TEXT. write a description of your character! bullet point lists of succinct traits are clearest for artists to work with when commissioned. having both a written and visual reference makes it possible to verify things