Inspiring Storytellers

1st excerpts of The Red Turtle animated feature film directed by Michael Dudok de Wit (Father and Daughter, The Monk and the Fish), coproduced by Studio Ghibli.

Photo

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:52:44 -0400

andatsea: Gardens and wishbones.

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:08:24 -0400

andatsea:

Gardens and wishbones.

hollywood-voodoo: rattlecat: hollywood-voodoo: I wish I was one of those people who could just...

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:04:26 -0400

hollywood-voodoo:

rattlecat:

hollywood-voodoo:

I wish I was one of those people who could just draw a million things daily. Like, how do people do that??
I draw a small sketch and I’m done for the rest of the week and I wanna sleep for 10,000 years. It’s so rare I go on a drawing binge.
HOW DO YOU NERDS DO IT??

You start small. Daily. You doodle daily. Literally ‘doodle daily’.
Not ‘make a masterpiece daily’ or even ‘finish a sketch a day’ daily. Just literally train your brain to want a stylus in your hand for 5-10 minutes a day. Doodle lines, doodle eyes, doodle bullshit poop emojis or watch speedpaints and trace over the screenshots or doodle tongues or teeth or full bodies or whatever. Anything that is literally a painless doodle.
It takes about two weeks for you to start feeling the effects of it, but it works. And the more you keep at it, the faster it is to lunge into it.
I also name every canvas I draw on the current date, that way I am constantly looking at whether or not I really AM drawing every day. After a while, you start ‘affording’ yourself days, because you find yourself wanting to doodle more and more daily, so you wind up doing 5 sketches one day and pretty much affording a week of art block because you did all that in one day.
This was the first New Years resolution I made in 2013 and stuck to because I was sick of the whole ‘drawing one doodle every 2-3 months’ and I wanted to do something with my art. It is still to this day the best thing I ever took the time out of my year to do. I don’t draw daily now, but when I get back into the drawing gig, I can binge on it like crazy for 2 weeks before going on another rest. Trust me. It is SUPER WORTH IT.
This is my current 2015 year, and these are only the raw files of finished pieces I’ve done, or pieces I never plan on working on again. I have a separate folder for WIPs, and the folders I listed above are exclusively for pieces I made a final copy of to post online/give to a client/sell/print/whatever. I tend to keep a month’s worth of WIPs in the WIP folder solely to give me motivation to try and finish as many as I can, and also to keep my momentum up when I feel like I’m not doing enough.
Nothing makes me happier knowing I can actually fill out one of those fucking ‘A picture a month’ memes that goes around every year now. It is so worth it.
Start small. Start today. Start NOW.

Okay I’m a little too concerned with all this. I need just put in my two cents here, as I’m the op and all.
Drawing daily is great, and I’ve also actually been organising my digital art in folders by year since 2010. It’s a great method to really motivate ones’ self to produce a little more art. I’m not knocking this persons’ helpful tips or their encouraging addition to my post but…
The above method is not the only answer. This routine can actually be harmful for some individuals; especially those who can’t put in the time or effort on a regular basis. Especially those who are sensitive to “failure” and setting rigid goals.
Art is a fluid, organic, and personal experience for every individual. Sometimes it can be unhealthy and damaging to put yourself into a routine where you expect set results. It’s okay to be tired, it’s okay to take regular breaks– Especially if you’re prone to rsi or carpal tunnel. Exercises to stretch and strengthen your wrists can only do so much.
Drawing and honing in on your artistic skills is rewarding but also exhausting. Not just physically. If you need to take a break for your physical and/or emotional wellbeing, take one. Taking a break sometimes helps. I often see a jump in improvement if I sit back and let myself analyse my art and how I approach it for a few days. I have a wonderful friend who refers to this as the “cocooning stage”. Y’know. Like the thing with butterflies.
My original post was just a silly little whine about how as much as I love art, I find it tiring at times– especially considering this was personal, I was factoring in a lot of my mental and physical disabilities as well.
So, if you’re a hobbyist artist especially (because unhealthy methods are sadly pushed onto industry artists), don’t expect solid results for such a perpetually shifting, organic pursuit and…

the-little-douche-bag: zanderjdc: jaeon009: I tried Dude...

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:02:59 -0400

the-little-douche-bag:

zanderjdc:

jaeon009:

I tried

Dude fuck off

HAA!!!

Photo

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 19:34:43 -0400

Photo

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 19:33:56 -0400

wrandonbu: Two Fuzzballs

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 16:58:11 -0400

wrandonbu:

Two Fuzzballs

justinoaksford: Notes for an Anon who asks, “ Hey Justin,...

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 16:56:24 -0400

justinoaksford:

Notes for an Anon who asks,

“ Hey Justin, thanks for your reply earlier. Just wanted to expand on my previous ask - do you have any tips for achieving colour harmony across an entire painting? I often feel like the objects in my paintings look disjointed, like I haven’t chosen the ‘right’ brown for trees or the ‘right’ green for grass when I use opaque brushes, this isn’t so much of an issue when I’m painting a single object or character but when painting an entire scene I find it very difficult to tie everything together. “

btw, this is COMPLETELY UNACADEMIC- I mean, parts may be “academic” but this is not meant to be a textbook. Terms are used VERY CASUALLY and the information is not at all comprehensive. This is an extremely brief superficial look at the term “Color Harmony”.

If you want ACTUAL color education, either take Sam Nielsen’s Schoolism class, or get James Gurney’s Color and Light book, or do both!!!!!

That said, I hope it helps some folks!

tsuaii: Short explanation of my process for Autumn!a — Lines by...

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 16:54:28 -0400

tsuaii:

Short explanation of my process for Autumn!

a — Lines by Raichiyo33
b — Ambient Occlusion (shadows)
c — Flat Colors
d — Ambient Occlusion on top of Flat Colors
e — Key Light (direct sunlight)
f — Reflective Light (from ground)
g — Atmospheric Light (from sky)
h — Light Sources all combined
i — Additional effects and fixes (light bloom, dusty lens, loose hair, specular highlights)

I plan on doing a few tutorials and sharing some detailed process work in January, all of which will be available to my Patreon supporters in advance!

annmarcellino: Tumblr sized these images down and refuses to...

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:07:47 -0400

annmarcellino:

Tumblr sized these images down and refuses to give a decent preview, please click on the image and “view image” to see a larger version, full vertical paintings are on the right and below the top most preview.
Return of the Heart and Return of the Spirit for Spirit of the Wind - A Studio Ghibli Tribute Show.
If you are interested in seeing the show check out the event page on facebook. There will be two show exclusive giclee prints hanging in the gallery as well as some small regular prints for sale!

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 22:03:44 -0400

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. 👍

Howl’s Moving Castle

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 21:56:32 -0400

Howl’s Moving Castle

drawingden: cloud by sheer-madness

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 16:04:56 -0400

drawingden:

cloud by sheer-madness

Illustration by Hayao Miyazaki

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 08:03:35 -0400

Illustration by Hayao Miyazaki