March 2013

Some art process thing

duckyreads asked hydrae: Augh, I’m the worst at remembering when I’ve asked something properly vs when I’ve just contemplated asking it, so I apologize profusely if this is a repeat, but – would you consider doing a walkthrough / tutorial on any of your art pieces? I’m curious to see what your process looks like. I understand the cellphone-pics-to-Sai in theory, but seeing it somehow would be really cool (esp if you ink in raster, or lineart layers – & how you choose colours, & so on…)

I CAN CERTAINLY TRY!! But it’s really not anything special or interesting;;

So this is how I do art things!

I actually draw on any paper handy because I’m pretty much out of Bristol, which is what I generally like to use when I want to ink by hand, and I haven’t felt like shelling out the money to buy a new pack. So instead I’ve been drawing in this shoddy little moleskine sketchbook I’d gotten in a pack of three for some holiday or another. 

So when I go to start drawing, a cat shows up and lays down right on it.

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Once I get the cat to go away, I do some dumb sketches. They vary in size because it doesn’t really matter since I’m just going to end up inking over it digitally anyways.

This is what the sketches for Derek and Stiles looked like.

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(I finished sketching Derek way earlier, hence the lighting change;; Also Stiles was originally supposed to be with a living wolf but then I wanted to use the skull again, soooo. ALSO I DON’T KNOW IF YOU NOTICE but stiles was originally facing the same way as Derek, but I flipped the sketch later)

My sketches vary between kinda neat and hella messy. Oops. ANYWAYS.

I never feel like digging out my scanner (usually there is a cat on it. I HAVE THREE OF THEM, THEY ARE ON EVERYTHING), so I just take cell phone photos and email them to myself. I change the sizes & dpi in the Change Resolution tab in SAI, and then inkkkk.

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The blue parts in the Stiles one and the white lineart in both were done in different layers, but I’d merged them into one after I finished. Also, I generally don’t ink using black! I usually use a colour, so I can mess with it in Filter > Hue and Saturation. 

After that, I usually do the skin, but these had limited colouring, so have the lineart & skin of that Stiles & Lydia thing

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With skin I just mess around with the Water and Marker tools in SAI until I get what I want. There’s not really any method to it, at all;;;;;

Then I do the rest of the colouring!

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I already knew what colours I wanted to use because of the beasties I’d chosen for them (Moddey Dhoo has red eyes, the Leshy has blue blood and a red scarf).

I really don’t need the sketch layer anymore, but I keep a dark bg so I can see what’s going on. I usually bucket tool all the white, which inevitably bleeds under the lineart, and I’m planning to make them transparent anyways so I open them in Photoshop and drop a stroke.

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Layer, I mean. Not an actual stroke. That would be terrible.

SAI sadly doesn’t have a stroke tool (as far as I know???) and also no text tool, so pretty much everything after this is the most basic stuff in Photoshop (which is still a mystery to me, hence why I use SAI for EVERYTHING).

(Also I could just go in and erase all the bits of the white bg that bled through, but aesthetically I like the stroke more, so!)

I usually leave it there, but this time I selected the white bg and filled it in with the pink & blue for.. some reason. I don’t know, it was after 4am and I can’t be held responsible for my actions. But then after that it was just the text and trying to move the words around to try and get them to fit, which probably took me the longest and was the most frustrating thing ever and I’m not bothering to screenshot it augh.

And then I just removed the gray bg so it’s transparent and uh.

That’s it. That’s the story.

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT AT LEAST….???? 

Have another cat.

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