There’s always space for yet another armor tutorial, right? (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Note that the armor I drew would be worn around 15th century, the more into the future the less and less components knight’s armor had (i. e. in early 14th century instead of greaves a knight would wear long boots only; in 12th century knights didn’t wear plate breastplates and instead a chain mail only). Also the design of armor pattern changed by year and was different in every country (i.e. in eastern Europe armors, while still looking European, were heavily influenced by Turkey). so just make sure you always do research whenever drawing an armor. And one more thing to keep in mind is that armors were expensive, knights wearing a full plate armor weren’t an often sight.
Some links that may be useful:
Armour Archive (I strongly suggest to browse its forum, there is no country or period of which armor wouldn’t be discussed)
Therion Arms (armorer’s page; each accessory is photographed in big resolution and several time so it’s a nice page to use as reference for drawing)
Revival Clothing (another store, but both with medieval clothing and armors; I suggest to read the articles, they’re often supported with pictures)
Basic Armouring:A Practical Introduction to Armour Making (pdf)
Educational Charts (pdf, shows how armors and weapons changed over the years)
Medieval & Renaissance Material Culture (actual medieval resources, mostly paintings. And my favourite subpage - women in armor)
Dressing in Steel (youtube; a demonstration how to dress in armor)
How shall a man be armed? (youtube; another demonstration but with 4 different knights from different periods)
Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art-- especially older traditional art-- had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.
This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)
If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!
Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...
Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!
You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!
Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!
YELLOWING!! Digital art is very blue-light based. Cold, clean, flat. But traditional art has warmth to it. Why?
Over time, paper gets yellowed with dust, oil, dirt, and nicotine from cigarettes! So colors got warmer. This makes art look pretty aged, on top of the slight toned papers and hand made/factory made inks they printed with.
pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.
hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!
so, ways to get around this:
turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us
don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace
a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)
instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian
including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too
including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue
for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend
when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!
if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache
some online resources and museum collections:
fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples
the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates
costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)
v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece
lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces
nypl digital collection for photographs
national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art
national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific
stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource
wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain
auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!
anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)
Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.
Hey!! I love your artworks and want to ask you ....how do you make waving leaves in trees and plants/ name of the extention (if any)
Hi, thanks! For the waving leaves, it’s actually super simple and easy to do, though it can take a bit of time.
I always separate each leaf (or sometimes small groups of leaves). Once you have hundreds of them, or when it already looks like a tree, you can animate them to move up and down, left and right, or even diagonally.
Here’s an example:
it's simple, just shifting their positions. Hope that helps!
how to make those water ripple animations I keep making:
I use gimp, and in order to keep this from being unreasonably long, I'm not going to be handholding you on where to find each of these render thingies - if you can figure out how to download gimp in the first place, you'll figure it out. Also my gimp is in 50% finnish, so I can't guarantee that the things and tools I'll be talking about are actually called what I'm calling them in english.
First, we render a spiral. The colours of the spiral are irrelevant, and will be gone in the next step. Because the next thing we go is to go to filters -> artistic -> waterpixels, and set the superpixels colour from "average" to "random". Also depending on your image size (I use 1600x1600 images), you might want to scale the "superpixel size" up to fairly large. This is looking funky already.
Now, the colour selection is all over the place - and the way I do colour palettes is by starting with All The Colours and then removing one. For this one, let's choose red. Take the paint bucket tool, set it on "fill whole selection" and "color erase". Then paint the whole picture, and you no longer have red.
Adding another layer underneath the main one, I figured I'd just do it in cyan, but that looked kind of boring, so I ended up making it a gradient instead. Then merge those layers.
And now, the next part is where the fun starts happening. Go to the filters, and choose "animation", and from there, "waves". I like to go with 40 and 40 on the sliders, and set the amount of frames to 30.
And now we are cooking with fireworks! This is the part where you can start fucking around with the colours and other settings as you please, but in order to keep this simple, I'm not going to try any particularly frivolous fuckery. This is the part where we can do the sub-pattern. To keep it simple, I'm making it a tile floor again. So open a new image, the same size as the first one, go to filters -> render -> checkerboard. Again, you can use whatever colours you like, but it's best to make even the lighter part of the pattern be on the darker side.
Then, you put a ripple effect on it. It should be in the animation filters, just below "waves". The bigger your pattern is, the stronger you can make the effect, but the important part is to make sure that the amount of frames on it is EXACTLY THE SAME as the wave animation you did before.
Whee! Wiggly!
Then you go to the files, choose "open as layers", and then open the wave image on top of this one. And for the next part, copy the last frame of the wave animation and set it from "normal" to "multiply", "linear burn", or whatever thing you think is best to make them darker, and merge it down. Then you repeat the same process with every single one of the 30 wave layers. Yes, every single one.
And then I like to go back to "waterpixels", but this time keep the superpixels colour as "average". Make a copy of all the wave frames, and do "waterpixels" filter on one of the two. Then change it from normal to "darken only", and merge it with the other matching frame. Then we repeat the same process with every single one of the 30 wave layers. Yes, every single one. The process should look like the one below:
Then open wave frame 30 and the floor tile frame 30, put the paint bucket to "color erase", on black, and fill the whole wave frame. This is the part where I fucked up, having made the lighter colour of the tiles way too light. I specifically should not have done that. Time to go through every single one of the floor tile frames one by one to make them darker. Yes, all 30 of them.
Then I went back to the original wave image, did the same waterpixels -trick as earlier but this time merging them down as "lighten only" instead of "darken only". Added a new layer, putting black-to-transparent gradients on two opposite corners, set the layer from "normal" to "erase", and copied and merged the erase layer to every single one of the layers, making all of them transparent at the corners. All 30 of them, one by one.
Opened the wave animation onto the floor tile file as layers, set them all from "normal" to "screen", and merged each layer to their respective layer, one by one. Yes, all 30.
And so, respectively, the last three steps look like this:
I wasn't happy with how the whole thing looked like before figuring out the screen layer thing, and this kind of unexpected surprises save my work every single time, which is why I got hooked on these wave animations in the first place. Then I take the 3D perspective tool, and tilt every single frame to 70 on the X axis without touching either of the other two. And then repeating that on every single frame - yes, all 30, one by one.
And then you crop the extra corners off, and there you have it:
The fun part is that no matter what I was planning to do, I never know what it's going to turn out becoming. They're all different, depending on what kind of fuckery and settings I try on them, and this one wanted to be Ghibli water.
A tip from another gimp user: sticking things in folder groups is very useful for stuff like this, especially if you have the plugin which merges your group contents (very very useful for animated gifs, since gimp won't let you directly export an animated gif with grouped layers in it)
if you need to do a mass perspective thing, just cram everything into one folder group for a moment and apply the transformation to the entire group by having the group folder highlighted when you use it. just make sure you unload everything out of that mass folder after you're done and ready to flatten your smaller layer groups at the end.
i'd like to add that the shadow color isnt necessarily dictated entirely by the primary light source, but the bounce light! so for the example of a sunny environment, the reason the shadows are blue are because of the light from the blue sky reflects across the environment; but, if the character were to be under tree cover, the bounce light would be coming from the leaves and thus the shadow would look greener.
James Gurney is an absolute master and gives really good clarity on colour techniques. Yes, it is traditional paint focused, but the principles are the same. Yes it is informed by the environmental colour but as a painting technique it is achieved this way!
I would also suggest that in digital processing, rather than apply a regular colour layer at a mid opacity, try out the different types of layers, Eg. Screen or Multiply. This can give you at least a starting point to help direct your colour palette.
Layer Blend Modes are so so so important to working in digital art. There's a ton of math that goes into figuring out how the layers should blend together, which is why some of the modes you can pick are literally called Multiply, Add, Divide, and Difference (that's subtraction). The graphics software takes the color values of your base and blend layers and runs a calculation to get your resulting layer appearance. The ones that don't have specifically mathematical sounding names are still doing calculations, but they're more complicated (think linear Algebra and higher). Some of them, like dodge and burn, are named for actual photo editing techniques.
While it's not super important to know about the mathematical side of blend modes, I think it's worth knowing at least enough about how each of the categories of blend modes works and why they do what they do; if for no other reason than having a starting point when you start experimenting with them in your work.
An overview of the basic blend modes and how they work from Genevieve's Design Studio: Accessible with minimal color knowledge; practical and illustration focused. https://youtu.be/kMc87hQrJd0?si=TWCB365pKSfWS8p0. (16 minutes) This creator also has a ton of free resources you can download, including a Blend Modes cheatsheet, but fair warning: you have to create an account to get them!
Want to learn even more about the math-y stuff? It has great film visuals! A video from FilmmakerIQ: You need some basic knowledge of RGB color models, understanding of values/luma, and at least a tenuous understanding of Algebraic formulas. (26 minutes) https://youtu.be/F7_kaTP7_W4?si=x0urqXZ8f51nQVKl
Been going through a lot of animation reels this past week and a bit and one prevailing thing I noticed was that a lot of animators either struggle with, or completely disregard, the timing and pacing of their frames.
Timing and spacing is (to me) utterly essential to create some nice, smooth and well flowing animation, otherwise it can look very jittery, jumpy, volume will fluctuate greatly and won't look too good.
This clip here should help show you how I place my keys, breakdowns and inbetweens to get some nice movement. (I wish I had room for timing charts!)
As you can see from the timeline grab here, a lot of this is on 3's, with a few 2's here and there. Even some 4's to help ease. With proper placing of frames even 3's and 4's can look smooth!
AND, if you have toon boom, and you wanna have a deep dive into this file, I've attached it below so you can really have a good look!
i watched one (1) video on how to draw hands that changed my life forever. like. i can suddenly draw hands again
these were all drawn without reference btw. i can just. Understand Hands now (for the most part, im sure theres definitely inaccuracies). im a little baffled
Do you have any tips for making gif comic pages? Whenever I make them the file is so huge and different than the other pages...
I was wondering bc I really like the Kochab pages and they maintain their quality!
yeah, it's just hard to make them without a huge file size :') some things I do to lessen it a little:
I make gifs in Photoshop and save them by going to File > Export > Save for web (legacy), lowering the amount of colors as far as possible without losing too much quality, same with dithering, and try to keep the image size under 1000px wide or tall at most, if possible. you can play around with the settings in those panels to see how they affect the file size, and make changes.
keep the animations to about 20-25ish frames. less frames = smaller files I think
after I'm done in PS, use https://compressor.io/ to lower the file size a bit more. I do that for big illustration jpgs, or illustration gifs, as well as comic page gifs ✨
I’ve been showing you some adopts I make for a living, I also have these bald guys :>
P2U (pay to use) base is a digital art resource, a premade lineart that you can use as a template/shortcut/reference once you’ve acquired it. It’s widely popular on DA but I’m not so sure about advertising it outside, however, it doesn’t hurt to try, right. If art bases are your thing, I kindly invite you to visit my DA!
How did you learn to draw and animate? And how did you develop your own style? Also do you have any advice for people suffering from creative/art burnout? Thank you so much and i hope you’re doing ok
-mostly just learning from others online, learning the fundamentals, studying animations frame-by-frame, doing exercises etc..!
-styles are pretty much just a mashup of other art you like, i studied work that i love then mix those looks/techniques together. you can probably see influences of tamagotchi, anime, animal crossing, sanrio etc. in my art
-collect tons of inspiration and references!!! organize a place to look at everything that you like in one spot and refer to that constantly. if you use ingredients you like you’ll naturally like whatever you end up making. do studies of art you like to see how it works. plan out your process and add breaks!!! take even a day or longer in between steps. never draw while hungry.
A good tutorial/breakdown, the only thing I'd add is not shying away from the slightly asymmetric expressions and facial features, they can add a lot of personality and liveliness to your art.
