cari's art blog

mediocre | struggling | art tag : caridraws

[aeiraes-blog]

hi I'm not dead yet :"))

[aeiraes-blog]

me watching the suite life of zack and cody when i was a fetus: the kid who plays cody is really cute haha : )) me watching riverdale as an 18 year old: i lovE COLE MITCHELL SPROUSE SO MUCH I WOULD LET HIM STEP ON ME YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HHHhhhh look at dem pecks zomg hhsdhajduudhd notice me pls

[aeiraes-blog]

x: redraw your first ever Homestuck fanart me: k me looking at the old art: taena tf is this wtf I'm going to die jesus take the wheel me after making the new art: it's sloppy but I feel better

[aeiraes-blog]

I'm not dead, just... really busy... : //

[aeiraes-blog]

bought a brushpen a few days ago

(alternative title: I should stop over thinking things)

[aeiraes-blog]

this has been stuck in my head all day

[aeiraes-blog]

hi hello I’m not dead

have this thing I recorded while my animation class was having a dry run for a demo we need to do as our final project because I love procrastinating and wasting time :^ )

a few things:

this is fan art of an ig user I used to follow (my ig is dead pls don’t ask)

I just painted over it bec the dry was run was very boring

I started this April last year and it has been sitting in my w.i.p. folder ever since hahahaha 

it’s probably going to stay there until classes end and/or I get my own laptop 

the pen pressure on the laptop my family shares has issues 

drawing with a mouse is hard af

the amount of improvement has got me shook :”) 

[mohtz]

saturday / background practice piece

[sosuperawesome]

Qian Shi on Tumblr and Society6

• So Super Awesome is also on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest •

[aeiraes-blog]

This is so pretty !!

[aeiraes-blog]

me through the years I guess,,,

[dommifox-deactivated20181204]

A couple people asked me how I vary my leaves and trees and honestly, it’s super easy! I’ve never made a tutorial/guide before so I kept this mega simple but I hope someone out there might find it useful at least!

Also, anyone can download the brushes I use for all my art on my tumblr page (: I only use around 5 so go nuts haha

[lexxercise]

I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

BRUSHES

Pencil I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. Ink Pen Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Round Brush The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without. Flat Brush A brush tool set to flat bristle (try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.

Watercolor Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects. Cloud Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

TEXTURE OVERLAY

To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!

Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!

Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.

Hope that helps!

-L

[lexxercise]

Since making this post 500 years ago, I’ve gotten periodic questions about the Flat Bristle brush setting that is default on my version of SAI, but sometimes absent in others.

After much ado, I’ve rummaged around in my program folders and found an image in SAI’s elemap folder called Flat Bristle.bmp that you should be able to just grab and use! I edited this link into my original post as well, but it’s gotten so many reblogs I don’t know how helpful that will end up being…

In any case, I’ve also taken the liberty of zipping all of my blotmap, brushtex, elemap, and papertex folders and hosting the file on my site just in case whatever borked version of SAI people are encountering are missing all this basic stuff. There’s not a lot in there, but the settings in the original post don’t make any sense if you don’t have them!

You can download the zip file here.

Happy painting!

IMPORTANT EDIT: In the event that dragging and dropping these files don’t do the trick, this site has pretty extensive instructions on installing SAI brush files.

[aeiraes-blog]

!!!

[bunblevee-moved-blog]

i havent even finished watching the movie yet but w/e

[aeiraes-blog]

I love your art jfc it's so precious

[aeiraes-blog]

fan art of @sexysexyuniversities's feu and csb!!

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fish lady

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I've learned that sometimes we have to learn to keep our mouths shut and just deal with people's nonsense if we want to avoid any trouble.

[aeiraes-blog]

I MADE A GIF (with @ahmnicoleee’s help) OF @doddleoddle FROM HER WOULD YOU BE SO KIND MV