Hey there! Hope you don't mind me asking but I've recently gotten into graphic making but have no idea how to do the things I want haha (right now I'm thinking about that neon line art look) do you have any advise on where to find tutorials and what not? Thanks!
hello hello! i don’t mind at all bud and i’m honoured that you thought to ask me for advice! i’ve only been doing graphics for like a year now so this ask surprised me in such a good way! sorry for the delay! i was dealing with things💛
as for tutorials, i’m afraid i don’t have any i can pass on to you. a lot of what i’ve learnt is through trial and error and taking certain techniques i’ve learnt like overlays and textures from gif making and applying it to graphics.
for advice, shapes and colours are your best friends! there’s a lot you can do with graphics when you limit yourself to certain palettes or even when you add shapes by different overlay methods.
for a lot of my graphics, i tend to stick with 5 or less colours for the palette because more than that can make it too messy. finding colours that work well with one another and offer good contrast while keeping things cohesive can be hard. if you ever get stuck with a palette, i find adding black as one of the 5 colours can work wonders! it adds a deepness to the lines that might be missing or even offer a nice contrast to bright colours so it isn’t as hard on the eyes.
in this dabi one i made, my palette was 3 colours only: black, yellow, and red. as you can see even if you have yellow and black as the main screencap colour, like i did with the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th panel, adding the red string on those panels tied those three panels back to the other three so it was cohesive. the orange that pops through on the lines is because I had added my colours using a gradient map so the change from red to yellow featured an orange. by playing around with the gradient map feature, you choose which colour is more prominent by how much of it you put in using the little scale/bar. i used this method of black + 2 other colours a lot (ishigami senkuu, sherlock holmes, bakugou katsuki, and soukoku + genshin au).
this victor nikiforov edit i made was another example of 3 main palette colours: blue, yellow, and black. however instead of using the colours through gradient maps, i focused on using the selective colour, colour balance, and hue/saturation features. i used them to make the colours i chose, stand out from the rest. the black was the colour that tied all six together, whether through the typography or through background colours (like viktor’s scarf).
one colour palette that i love using is a red, black, and white one! i’ve used it so many times and I never get tired of it (portgas d. ace, donquixote rosinante, bam, and nakahara chuuya). as you can see it’s very simple but you can do so much with it, whether applying it to a gif or a screenshot.
the other thing with graphics that i’ve learned through trial and error is typography! sometimes finding a good font can just make a graphic. for typography the two things i pay attention to is 1) not overloading a panel with too many fonts and 2) size. in one panel i never use more than two fonts together. two is my max because then it becomes too clunky and messy. i also never do two cursive fonts together. one cursive and one standard are my go to because it’s less straining on the eyes no matter which pairings you do. with size, you can use the same font in one panel but make different words or lines bigger or smaller to add affect/emphasis. the first panel of my nanami kento edit shows what i mean. this aizawa shouta one also shows the differences in font size but because they’re the same two fonts despite the size difference, the set still flows.
you can also play to the character’s aesthetic. take colours from their clothes and run with them for the colour palettes if you’re stuck. or if you want, do the opposite of the character’s aesthetic. that’s what i did for the dabi edit from before. dabi’s aesthetic in canon is blues and blacks, cold colours. i flipped it for that edit and took warm colours as his palette which made for an interesting and jarring change because that’s not normal for him.
last thing i will add is really just have fun and go wild! the fun thing about graphics is that you can literally experiment and try so many things!
hopefully this made sense, but if not feel free to send me another ask🌻💛
