Workshopping An Issue Nobody Is Having (making Gradient Maps Look Nicer)

Dear downydig,

Any secret knowledge on how to do fluid and dynamic poses? (Btw, I love ur art!! So comfy and cozy!!!)

Sincerely, Paper-Starz

Hello hello! I have some advice! I did a thing on lines of action and the benefits of tracing in learning models a LONG time ago… the advice still holds up! Use shapes like ‘s’ curves, ‘c’ curves, and even sharper ‘U’s to give a fun fluid motion! Limbs and spine are the main help here, but the head sometimes comes into play ✌️

I have a little more to add, however! One of these pictures is my oc and the other is a king fu panda character but it’s still useful! When creating a pose, you can also use silhouette! Bonus points if the shape of the silhouette is different than the shapes that compose the character (in a way that matches the personality of course!)

any shading tips?

AH I LOVE SHADING AND RENDERING let me see what i can dig up from my brain for you

i say....... single colour blend mode layer is a good starting point for shading but i'd also manually pick colours to make the shadow more dynamic, if that makes sense..

left has a yellow-y hard light layer as its only shading, and right has the hard light layer alongside some colours i added myself

also, i like to mess with the saturation and hue when i add the extra colours.. it adds depth (life??) to the shadows that you wouldnt get with a flat colour

IN ADDITION TO THIS desaturating your colours makes them look lighter, and hightening the saturation makes them seem darker! i play with this a lot it's fun

not shown here is also using completely different colours than the one you're shading, like green/teal for blue, or red for purple! this is especially helpful when shading grays and whites

basically get funky with your colours and try shit until you find a formula that works for you!!!! this is just what i do and im a self-taught nerd so

Quick editing tip: Passing time

Hey all, here’s a quick tip about showing the passage of short amounts of time in a scene. I see a lot of beats like this:

She hesitated

He paused

A few seconds later

There was a long silence

He waited for her to answer

She didn’t respond

Instead of telling us there’s a brief moment of silence or pause in your scene, try showing us by creating the feeling that time has passed through action, description, or inner monologue. Here are a few examples.

Before:

“Are you coming or not?”

He waited for her to answer, but she didn’t respond.

“Clare? Did you hear me?”

“Huh?”

After:

“Are you coming or not?”

Clare scrolled through her phone, her face illuminating with a eerie blue glow.

“Clare? Did you hear me?”

“Huh?”

Before:

Jared lingered at the suspect’s front gate. If this guy didn’t answer Jared’s questions, he was screwed.

“Hey you!” a voice shouted. “Get off my property!”

Jared hesitated. Finally, he turned to face the man. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

After:

Jared lingered at the suspect’s front gate. If this guy didn’t answer Jared’s questions, he was screwed.

“Hey you!” a voice shouted. “Get off my property!”

Jared patted his holster. He had a gun, but he certainly didn’t want to use it. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the man. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Not only does creating a pause instead of describing a pause allow your reader to feel the moment more vividly, it gives you a chance to explain what exactly that pause is about. People hesitate, pause, don’t respond, etc. for all kinds of reasons. Give us as much insight as you can into your weird quiet moment.

Of course, you don’t need to do this every single time. Sometimes it’s fine to say “he paused” or “the room was quiet for a moment”—it could be the best choice for that scene. But look back through your draft and see if you’ve used those “telling” descriptions more often than you needed to. If so, try to create the feeling of a pause—perhaps one that gives the reader a bit more information—using these techniques.

Hope this helps!

How do you legs

Curves vs. straights baby !

I try to always think of the flow of the legs in relation to the overall posture, so getting those curves and straights into play is really handy.

I've added an extra colored line here (the green one) that I tend to do with poses that are leaning heavily, so the line of action becomes more clear and less broken up by the hip. This works best for standing poses (and is obviously not anatomically correct, it's just my preferred way of drawing bodies).

In sitting poses, the straights help to emphasize contact with the ground.

how do you hair .... how do uou draw hair i love how you draw hair

to be completely honest with you I don’t really have a lot of ground rules for how I draw hair—not ones I’m consciously aware of, anyway? Usually I just do whatever feels right depending on the character HOW EVER I do have a few patterns especially when drawing wavy hair or straight hair which curls at the end?

examples of this include

a common rule that I find myself following with all of these is that balance between round and sharp edges, and really big dramatic curls at the ends of the hair.

Lazy diagram I made in 2 minutes demonstrating this

for curly hair (like the giant fucking manes that Gaea and Aster have), I kinda just draw twisty lines until I like the shape, and then go in and add loose curls and layers and stuff.

I still keep that sharp edge at the top of the head though. Really though, only the characters with super long, Heavy hair have that dramatic sharp point. the characters with shorter or fluffier hair generally still have the same swooping motion paired with sharp corners however they lose the dramatic hairline lol

I think that’s all! Funnily enough, I’ve never really thought about my process before this question? So I kind of had to walk through my own steps and figure out what I do. Honestly, every time is a little different just because all my characters are their own people and all have their own style, if that makes sense? For example, Iris, Aeolus, Freyja and Psyche aren’t shown here because they have completely different rules for their hair lol. (Iris’ hair is literal clouds, Aeolus has locs while none of my other characters do, which I will be fixing that soon btw because I love drawing locs, Freyja’s hair is fire and Psyche’s is fog)

so yeah lol I just get prophetic visions from my characters about how to draw their hair and I just listen

ayo i found 2 pages with head angles of humans and animals, could be useful to anyone reading this

hoomans

animals

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

STOP DOING THIS IN INJURY FICS!!

Bleeding:

Blood is warm. if blood is cold, you’re really fucking feverish or the person is dead. it’s only sticky after it coagulates.

It smells! like iron, obv, but very metallic. heavy blood loss has a really potent smell, someone will notice.

Unless in a state of shock or fight-flight mode, a character will know they’re bleeding. stop with the ‘i didn’t even feel it’ yeah you did. drowsiness, confusion, pale complexion, nausea, clumsiness, and memory loss are symptoms to include.

blood flow ebbs. sometimes it’s really gushin’, other times it’s a trickle. could be the same wound at different points.

it’s slow. use this to your advantage! more sad writer times hehehe.

Stab wounds:

I have been mildly impaled with rebar on an occasion, so let me explain from experience. being stabbed is bizarre af. your body is soft. you can squish it, feel it jiggle when you move. whatever just stabbed you? not jiggly. it feels stiff and numb after the pain fades. often, stab wounds lead to nerve damage. hands, arms, feet, neck, all have more motor nerve clusters than the torso. fingers may go numb or useless if a tendon is nicked.

also, bleeding takes FOREVER to stop, as mentioned above.

if the wound has an exit wound, like a bullet clean through or a spear through the whole limb, DONT REMOVE THE OBJECT. character will die. leave it, bandage around it. could be a good opportunity for some touchy touchy :)

whump writers - good opportunity for caretaker angst and fluff w/ trying to manhandle whumpee into a good position to access both sites

Concussion:

despite the amnesia and confusion, people ain’t that articulate. even if they’re mumbling about how much they love (person) - if that’s ur trope - or a secret, it’s gonna make no sense. garbled nonsense, no full sentences, just a coupla words here and there.

if the concussion is mild, they’re gonna feel fine. until….bam! out like a light. kinda funny to witness, but also a good time for some caretaking fluff.

Fever:

you die at 110F. no 'oh no his fever is 120F!! ahhh!“ no his fever is 0F because he’s fucking dead. you lose consciousness around 103, sometimes less if it’s a child. brain damage occurs at over 104.

ACTUAL SYMPTOMS:

sluggishness

seizures (severe)

inability to speak clearly

feeling chilly/shivering

nausea

pain

delirium

symptoms increase as fever rises. slow build that secret sickness! feverish people can be irritable, maybe a bit of sass followed by some hurt/comfort. never hurt anybody.

ALSO about fevers - they absolutely can cause hallucinations. Sometimes these alter memory and future memory processing. they're scary shit guys.

fevers are a big deal! bad shit can happen! milk that till its dry (chill out) and get some good hurt/comfort whumpee shit.

keep writing u sadistic nerds xox love you

ALSO I FORGOT LEMME ADD ON:

YOU DIE AT 85F

sorry I forgot. at that point for a sustained period of time you're too cold to survive.

pt 2

also please stop traumadumping in the notes/tags, that's not the point of this post. it's really upsetting to see on my feed, so i'm muting the notifs for this post. if you have a question about this post, dm me, but i don't want a constant influx of traumatic stories. xox

I want to start drawing landscape. Do you have any tips?

Took me a while to answer this (sorry anon)! Drawing landscapes for me are mostly just a matter of doing a few 'art studies' and a bit of imitating life. Here's a brief rundown of my process. I find that I learn best when I see a picture or a reference that really tickles my fancy, like these ones! First image for it's colors, and the second for it's composition.

And then I pull up the dreaded white canvas on start on a rough idea or just start dribbling out the basics: composition, a bit of color, general shapes, etc. If you have a hard time doing general landscapes, don't worry! Imagine breaking it down like this: You layer on some general colors and shapes; don't be afraid to make mistakes, you can always go back to it! Be loose and organic with it at first, we're not striving for detail yet, and just let that brush move freely. And once you got the shapes down, you can go back and forth in the canvas to start detailing. I find that it's best if you really look into how some things are "made". Like for example, how that patch of grass in your reference is made: 'is it layered? does it have some shiny bits in it that I wanna highlight? are the blades of grass sharp enough to individually detail or more clumped up together to just put in a sorta grassy blob?'. Also, don't be afraid to experiment a bit. Try putting some highlights around the edges to make it pop out more, or try putting small changes in the color you're working with; something that's close but still different, so that it compliments each other! Then it's just a matter of going forward with it; see what you like and what you wanna keep and imitate, see what you want to change or maybe just leave out on. Keep on detailing and going until you're happy with it!

This is a really brief rundown and explanation of a process that can be entire unique to each and everyone of us, and takes a bit of time and practice to pull off. But I believe in you! We all start from somewhere, sometime down the line; and that can start right now if you want it to! Goodluck to any artists out there who wanna try out landscapes. It's a fun and comforting process of organic and loose art that breathes in a lot of life in some people, especially me. Twitter | Prints | Ko-Fi | Patreon

your art is so cool- oh my golly, do you have any drawing tips? and colouring tips? ❤🙏 (happy pride month btw)

I wrote a lot for this one X]] it's under the cut

First I'd just flat something out. I really just eyeball most color schemes, so I'm super sorry I don't have the most tips on that X[ The flats on this piece are mostly analogous. They're colors next to each other on the wheel, dark blue and cyan are next to each other, so they look all pretty together. Usually I like using complementary though, opposites, cus contrast is soooo pretty. I actually change it to that right after flats X]

than I either use a few multiply or screen or overlay layers on top! as a treat! or just like... eyeball some more colors. I like using colors from other places on the piece, so it looks cohesive. This is where I'll usually merge all my layers down to a single layer [including sketch, flats, shading, and background],,, I don't recommend it but this is just part of my process now X]

Next thing I do is just like,,, eyeball where I want More? He looked a bit boring being only blue, so I wanted to add more color; I chose red because the background is that lovely cherry pink, taking colors from other parts of the piece yippie! This is also just eyeballed too though...I just pick what I think looks pretty, sorry X[

than I just start rendering? I kinda just turn my brain off when I do I really don't know how to explain how I render, and looking at examples of the bullshit I deal with you probably don't want to render like me either HAHA [drew even more references X))]

and than it's done!!! yippie! I put it under a layer of chromatic aberation too cus I enjoy the affect X]] not shown here this is just the finished like. render render. w/out the extra bits. And happy pride month! completly forgor woof HGHG