My first Artfight attack! @sapphic-story's Kef Luudance, who is a knight if a knight were sworn to shitty higher education grifters. My blorbo from real life <3
Oh right. I’m doing artfight for the first time this year! I haven’t posted about my art in ages, but I’m a traditional artist and use mostly water colors and color pencils!
I’m on team comedy and I have 4 OCs up (all are dnd characters)
Let's celebrate your favorite characters through fanart and other visual forms of fan work (memes; cosplay; GIFs; etc)!
Post your pieces by posting or reblogging, and make sure you include the hashtag #monsterpromartchallenge so we can find your piece more easily! We'll check through the whole month of June!
We were going to share this a week or so after releasing "Monster Con" (oopsies). Since a year has passed, let's open it to any Monster Prom game!
It must be a piece depicting characters from any Monster Prom game.
We'll reblog our favorite pieces and send a prize to the artists. Since it tends to be the most requested thing: we'll go for the KS-exclusive playable character DLC pack for "Monster Camp".
We commit to sharing/rewarding at least one piece; but aiming for more 👀
If you're participating, please have DMs open so we can DM you the prize (ugh, honestly we're so out of this place that we wonder if DMs still work the same. Fingers crossed!)
Just in case we created a thread for the contest in our Discord server:
i know we joke about cis artists having the weirdest sense of anatomy, but also even when the anatomy is fine, no one seems to want to draw women doing normal things
this is exactly why i’m a huge fan of posemaniacs!
you get 3d model pose references with the option of having a male or female anatomy for each pose
they have a WIDE VARIETY of poses that you can search for using a TAG SYSTEM
(as you can see by the scroll bar in the second image there is Even More Tags)
you can select a pose you like for larger viewing and the convenience doesn’t stop!!!
you have full 360 viewing range of the pose plus zooming in and out
and what’s that? a TOOLBAR?? MENU?? THING??
Correct!
the eye button hold a very fun menu
negative space blacks out the background and fills the pose with a solid white silhouette
the “texture” refers to the skin situation of the model with the “color” and “grey” shown below
(i usually use color personally)
then there’s the option of different sized drawing grids(4 and 16 below)
idk wtf bounding box is about but it looks like this if it matters to you
“floor” toggles all shadows on the floor, “floor grid” you guessed it puts a like perspective guide grid on the floor that goes to forever, and “shadow” toggles ALL shading. there is NO lighting happening if you turn that off. NONE.
NEXT ITEM! that box thing with the line through it? flips the pose horizontally.
the little person symbol? lets you switch anatomies
camera icon? you can choose from a selection of preset camera angles PLUS an option for … idk what to call it but you can do this!
less flat right!! i’m sure there’s a word i just don’t know but this is maximum *that* so there is less *that* if you want it
the lightbulb gives you a menu like the camera one but it offers a selection of lighting styles with variable intensity
CHARMING!
and that’s not even everything this site provides!!!!!!! they have tutorials, instructional videos, lessons, all sorts of shit!!! (although they are vast majority if not all in japanese just a heads up)
AND ITS ALL FREE
DONT EVEN NEED TO SET UP AN ACCOUNT OR APPROVE OF COOKIES JUST GET IN DO YOUR THING GET OUT NO STRINGS ATTACHED
and if you don’t have ad blocker or are on mobile(like me) NOT TO WORRY
the ads are few and far between! ZERO video ads, NONE take over your screen or glitch you at all, they are of no concern i forget they’re there!
(this is not at all sponsored btw i’m just a genuine fan of this site and i’m happy to spread the good word unprompted)
If you like my latest mermay picture [cw for mild gore], lemme tell you how easy it was to do the coloring for it. I used 3 layers to make it from black and white to full color, using a correction layer called a Gradient Map. This will be for the program Clip Studio Paint, but there's equivalent functions across programs, you just gotta do some research about where your gradient map options are hiding
In CSP, you go to Layer > New Correction Layer > Gradient Map
and this is what a gradient map does when placed above a black and white drawing;
It's a process that sounds complicated but is actually super easy to learn and exploit; gradient maps take a specific value (black to white and all the greys in the middle) and assign it a color. By adjusting where those lil ^ arrows sit on the gradient, you change which value is assigned that color, thus changing what part of your drawing is that color.
all the gradient maps I used are community made presets I downloaded for free using the CSP community asset portal
now pair that with layer masks, and you can isolate where on the picture the gradient map is in effect. Below is the gradient map that's Just the red for the couch, a few character accents, and the tail;
above in the orange is the layer mask button as well as where it is displayed on your layer (in CSP) once you apply it. When you want to change your layer mask, you click that second square on your layer; with that selected, you now can control what part of that layer is being shown without actually changing whats on that layer.
With the layer mask selected, you can erase whats there, then go over it with a brush or a selection tool and add it back as if it was never erased at all. The positive parts (what is visible on the picture) are displayed in white, the negative parts (what's been erased) are displayed in black. Obviously you Have to make sure you're interacting with the layer mask and not the layer itself (the layer itself is selected in the screen cap above, that's why it has that in-program white outline) or you really will just erase shit you can only get back by hitting 'undo'.
then you can add more gradient maps above or below the first one, depending on what looks best;
this is the bottom most gradient map layer arranged in my folder of gradient maps, because I wanted this orange as the foundation of the pic, the rest building off it.
the last gradient map layer is smushed between the red and the orange, and this is how I got those blue shadows and tail accents.
there is a Single value assigned that blue, but the gradient aspect allows it to be more versatile, and the browns making up the majority of the gradient help it feel like an extension of the orange layer. It's important to make sure your gradients harmonize like that otherwise it becomes more obvious they are two separate gradients interacting rather than the illusion of a more complex, selective color palette. While you can get a lot of depth out of a single gradient map, when you layer them, you're able to easily add shading, quickly change the color of a specific part of the picture and overall just cheat your way to a very cohesive, intricately colored picture with WAY less effort and color picking on your part.
taking this;
and turning it into this;
with 3 layers 8'>
And everyone say thank you for @spooky-beanz for inspiring this tutorial!
(my script is in the alt text if ever the font is hard to read)
I’ve been getting a lot of asks wondering how I go about picking my colors for character designs, pages, backgrounds, etc, pretty much anything about color in general, and I figured in some attempt to try to answer them all at once, here’s my attempt at a color-centric art tutorial! I’m far from an expert on the subject, and I haven’t received any formal training on the matter, so this is entirely constructed of ideas I’ve gleaned from a bunch of snippets of different people’s advice over the years, studying other people’s art, and experimenting on my own to create something that works for me. Nonetheless, I feel passionate about the subject, and I hope this is able to help make color “click!” like a key in a hole for anyone who reads it. I had to discover my key-click moment on my own through trial and error, but i don’t believe in gatekeeping advice, so hopefully I can help you skip the trouble I went through lmfao.
None of this is meant to be like… a shaming or judgmental authoritative truth of “this is how it must always be done! anything outside of my vision is wrong and morally bad! Harrumph!!!” Especially since this is random shit I’ve figured out on my own with no formal training. It’s more just “if you are looking for something to ease your strain, perhaps this might help you give you what you need to have an easier time!” But most of the time I don’t even color my illustrations the way I do in this tutorial. Usually I try to balance & combine these principles with the “standard colors” that a scene is “supposed to be,” like if the ground is a concrete gray and the trees are green, I’ll keep them looking gray and green (depending on the lighting), but with the knowledge of “I want this to be a sad scene, so I’ll make the grays and greens lean heavily closer to blue, so the audience knows that it’s time to be sad.” Stuff like that. They’re cheat codes for strategic intent, not strict rules.
Now hopefully when it comes to covering more specific things, like how I design my characters, you guys now know the baseline foundation I’m running off of so I don’t have to explain all of this first before I get into the nitty-gritty hairs of “why I made this character purple and green vs why this character is blue and yellow” lmao.
Color is a hard subject to explain! Most of the color theory explanations I’ve heard primarily cover stuff like the science of reflecting light, then name drops all the famous kinds of color palettes, tells me what a cool vs warm color is, explains nothing else, and dips. Which, personally, has literally never been helpful for me when it comes to understanding why the fuck my painting should include the color blue in the shadows. Heaven forbid applying any of that shit to character design. Ough. No I had to figure that out on my own lmfao. So therefore this tutorial is more skewed towards that kind of perspective, someone who doesn’t really benefit (at least at this skill level) from the scientific cerebral shit. I want to know the why behind your creative choices!!! Tell me why the curtains must be blue!! That’s what’s important to me on a practical level. Dont get me wrong, I’m sure one day I’ll learn the purpose behind the scientific stuff, I’m sure there’s a reason behind it, but you’ve gotta figure out how to take the first steps at all to begin with before I can get to the master level stuff of like………scientifically understanding how bounce light works. And if we don’t understand why the curtains are blue, I don’t think we’re gonna get why the bounce light should be blue, too. So I wanted to explain it!!! I wanted to cover it!! Because I’ve never seen it explained before!!! And it’s important to know the why!!!
And uhm. Hopefully I managed to do an alright job at that lol. I hope you guys enjoy! <3
me and @microbiologistmusings made a guide! we were talking about how frustrating it can be when so much (well meaning!) art of wheelchair users seems to get the chairs...not quite right. so maybe this will help :) i had a lot of fun drawing it and thank u to levi for your unending wisdom <3
kaledo-art
titsay
vaporwave
izzy806
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
