Little while now, I've been learning some artsy stuff beyond writing. And today, I tried something a little different with colour. Since this place is up I may as well post it here anyway. A quick sketch and I made for a friend and I tried out my new stuff with colour. Son't mind the unclean lines, I've started growing a fondness for sketchy messy stuff. Anywho, there you go. Comment or whatever you feel up to.

I like it <3

I'll get there. One foot at a time right? Bits and pieces.

You're progressing rather quickly.

Little bit of a knack I have it seems. Funny enough, I haven't gotten much time to practice much. The gap between when I sent ya that last piece and now, I didn't make anything. But I watch, all the time. Watch and replay things in my head over and over, build a feel for it just alone like that, and when I'm ready, I go off and try something.

Same way I learned how to ride a bike, swim, and drive standard. Watch it, study it, take another step forward when I think I can. Here's hoping I keep going from here!

I usually flip my image over when shading. You can try that :3

I know I like to flip it around when I make the initial sketch, like I used to do with paper, but I never thought to do it when messing around with colour. Might help at some point.

What kind of brushes do you use?

I use the standard hard brush that comes with GIMP for just about everything, and I like to use the airbrush for shadows and light.

So then how do you do the lighting?  I'm curious cuz I can't figure out how to make things look.. not cartoony.

I'll see if I can sum things up nicely. As I go along, I break everything down into segments. Yesterday, and I can tell you this makes a big difference, I learned to split up your colours by shade before you actually do any light reflections and shadows.

For example, if you take a look at the orange on what I've got here, it's actually three shades. A dark shade, a medium shade, and a shade that's almost white. Your base always starts out as the darkest colour first, and then you go along, and add the medium colour to lighter areas, and finally, the lightest to the brightest areas. I imagine that overtime as I practice with this, I can learn to better emulate transitions in light value by blending these three colours together.

So, that's the first layer I work on colour wise. Second is the final lines that I want to keep or further show off.

The third layer is light reflections, and all I use is the airbrush and white. Or, alternately lighter colours that would slowly build up to white. Drop a blob down, erase it nice and easy until you're happy with it.

And last is shadows. Again, I use the airbrush, and go over darker spots nice and slow.

One other important thing for whatever this particular style is, the layer I make after the linework for the colours to everything is always set to multiply. You can see your linework through your colours and it gives everything a good base to work off of.

My old method worked like this to some extent. A dark base colour, set to multiply, then the basic flat colours, set to multiply, and then the shading and done with the air brush on a normal layer. What I talked about earlier is something new I learned that I've blended with what I already know.

Ugh, this is why I should stick to real painting.  So much easier to blend.

Real painting works just fine too. Although there's a hell of a lot of flexability to the settings you can do with programs like gimp and so on to make things flow easier. I'm learning two things at the same time as I work here. How to use the program itself, and refining my painting/drawing.

But it's a lot like painting really. You take your colour pallette first, before you just toss yourself in and start painting, get your stuff and all the colours you want set up, and then off ya go. Paint as you go along, take the eyedropper, pick another colour, and off you go.

I mean, I've been using photoshop and the likes for a little bit, but I can't seem to get it the best I can do is basically my avatar or the banner I made for the first offsite.

Like painting, or drawing, or writing, or anything that you do really, these programs in themselves take time to learn. They are a different field entirely, a whole other subject to work on, study, and learn. You were, or you would be kidding yourself if you think you can just pick these up with no experience and just go, and hope to come out with a masterpiece.

There are so many little tricks to them that can completely change what your composition is or what it looks like. This stuff takes just as much time to learn as any other field, because in itself it is an entire field. Layers, brush types, brush settings, colour modes, flow, opacity, all these things and many more contribute to what your product will be. And if you don't know all those little tricks and shortcuts, then most of the time, what you make will have a very flat look to it.

It can be discouraging, but keep it up. Look at how other people work, watch and study them, and when you're ready to try, off you go.