My Art blog

You can still call me Violet. 27 years old now. I art but I don't.

[quaintpanic]

Pixel Art Tip - Upscaling/Exporting

When upscaling any pixel art, always try to upscale it by full numbers (ex. 2x, 5x, 10x) and not ones with decimals (ex. 2.5x, 1.25x). This will make sure the pixels upscale as nice even squares and not rectangles. If you’re given the option for ‘smoothing’ when upscaling, generally avoid it.

Here’s some properly upscaled pixel art vs upscaling with smoothing. Huge difference!

When exporting, avoid lossy formats like .jpg at all costs. This will compress your pixel art and screw up the colors, defeating the entire purpose. Go for formats like .png or .gif, they’re great for pixel art. Also, .jpg doesn’t support transparency, so keep that in mind.

Here’s an example of .png vs .jpg. Can you tell the difference?

Thanks for reading! Good luck with your art! -panic

[fulifuli]

CLOSING THOUGHTS

- Start small. - Make mistakes and try new things.  - Practice as much as possible. - Share your work with others and get feedback. - Study the work of the artists whom you admire. - If you don’t have a tablet, get one. Small ones are cheap and easy to carry around. - Have fun!

[naturecalls111]

The way you color is absolutely phenomenal! Looking at your latest Naruto piece I’m just absolutely astonished by how the colors all work together. If you could give any recommendations for tutorials for a fellow artist I’d so appreciate it!

Keep up the amazing work 💕

~pudding 🍮

Wow, thank you so much!!! That’s so kind! I’m very happy you like it! To be entirely honest I’m still learning how to colour—a lot of what my process is right now for colouring is just… vibes. I play around with it until my brain is like ‘I like this’, and I haven’t really watched many tutorials for colouring (I should…) so my best point of reference is to see how an artist you likes does colour and experiment on your own canvas to see how they achieve that. Studying and experimenting is a huge part of the learning process, and finding what works for you specifically.

The simplified version of my process is that I paint with colours that act as the general idea of what the base colours are, and then play with curves to lower contrast + darken. I did a very quick example of what that looks like with this Naruto chibi:

This is what curve setting I use on procreate (it’ll look a little different when I do it on clip studio or photoshop, but the points remain the same. First dot is brought down a little, second dot is brought down a little, lol):

(usually I play around with curve settings a lot depending on the piece, but again the variation is based purely on what itches my brain. I just try to maintain that the curves, for me, lower contrast and darken the colours.)

For shading I will often desaturate+darken the flat colour, but I 1000% go in with a more saturated tone in between the shading and the flat colour, and over the course of painting and colour picking, it just ends up being this amalgamation of colours that work together since they are MOSTLY within an analogous range. Does that make sense?! I’m a terrible teacher, LOL!

If you’re interested in slightly more details of my process, I will say that when I do have a background, that colour is usually the first thing I put down onto my canvas. I will fill in the lineart with a darker version of that colour and then start getting a basic idea of shading down before doing any colouring and rendering just to see how the general composition will feel. With the narugaa piece you mentioned, it looked like this (ignore all the white around them, this was going to be more type-heavy before I realised I hate doing text LOL):

It’s not quite just shading, but the goal is to find the values that I would be happy with seeing throughout the piece and on this hue+value of background. Also, at this point, I’m drawing with the assumption that if I were to do this completely monochromatic, the values would look like this, ya know. And then afterwards, like I depicted in the simplified version way above, I lay down flat colours. In this case, my colours were laid down on a layer that was on the “hard light” blend mode, but I think you should just do whatever blend mode gives you the colours you like best. From here, if you combine layers so that it’s a normal layer, then just playing with the curves should get you the effect that I usually work with, but this is what those base colours looked like in my case:

You can skip this part if you feel you’re good enough at colour picking, but it helped me personally with laying down colours. I did curve adjustments + new blend mode (pin light) so that I could play with complimentary colours in a way that would add some “flavour” to the drawing later. In this case it was this greenish+reddish colour for Gaara and yellowish+purple/bluish colour for Naruto (I know his skin looks more pink/red than anything but it’s significantly more cool toned, which is what I was considering for colour harmony/relationship):

I did most of the painting over these colours before using a lasso tool to pick out specific areas and change the curves to be the Actual colours of the characters, but you can mostly tell what sort of colours I maintained from the previous version vs which ones I changed. I really do think this made for more interesting visuals, but I also think it’s sort of a convoluted process that you can just do from the get go if you have a better grasp of colour theory than I do. Unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about colour to get colour harmony just by picking out the colour from a wheel. This is why I love curves so much!!! Anyway, this is what it came out to:

And then I duplicate the canvas so I can merge all the layers into a single one, and then do the final curve adjustment to make everything feel cohesive. I mostly used the curve adjustments that I showed in the very beginning of this post, but because so many of the colours in this piece felt analogous, I actually valued slightly more contrast in this piece than I would want for most other pieces. Posting the final piece here for convenience:

And that’s it!!! I’m super mega sorry for how long and convoluted this probably is LOL but this is my process……. I’m certain other artists have better tutorials and I will always recommend Sinix Design on YouTube for ANY art tutorial that you might need, but if I’m being entirely honest, anything I know of colour is entirely just me consuming a lot of art over the years and going ‘oh, I like that’ or ‘oh, this is a pattern between these two artists, so it must be right’ or ‘oh, this random artist posted a tutorial and it looked good, let me glance at this and hope it somehow subconsciously sticks’ LOL. There are definitely fundamental rules that would help to know (shadows will usually be less saturated, deciding between high key vs low key composition as far as your value scale goes, what sort of emotion each colour combination/scheme evokes, the power of tints and shades) but a simple google search on basic colour theory will already explain most of this to you. Passively implementing these practices into your drawings, in my experience, helps make a lot of these rules second nature when you’re drawing. Above all though I think you should just do whatever itches your brain LOL. I have a huge reference library that I often refer to—I recommend any artist to do the same :3

[racketballz]

Do you have any tips on going from digital to traditional painting? I have some old oil painting stuff from school and I haven't used any of it since I really started teaching myself art on digital. Now I want to try traditional again, and I've forgotten everything about technique, mixing colors properly, layering, carving/designing shapes, etc.

This is gonna be long 💆‍♂️

I think you can tell by now they’re not even close the same medium LOL but the have some aspects that are similar like it’s very forgiving! Oil because it stays wet for long periods of time you can erase and manipulate it for long periods of time layering is also something I’ve been able to utilize in both especially when it comes to coloring! I will say for me I treat oil painting and digital as two completely different aesthetics process and techniques for the most part so I have come up with some stuff the don’t really correlate. But I think as an digital artist the process is like 10x faster so be patient with your self due to that tho I am very used to the fast pace so I usually completely drop the sketch when I’m painting and go straight into an underpainting and specifically lighting!

Underpainting is really important please don’t forget to do it‼️ I see some times people either go penciling to laying down and using colors on blank canvas but I think the underpainting is extremely useful and the in the process you can solidify what color palette your using for the painting! If your someone who is like me and you use a lot of black in your digital art for sketch or whatever I recommend solidifying what would be the equivalent for your black in a painting and go from there

Like for these painting you very well could use black as your underpainting but the result will look very different then something that’s brown purple pink or whatever for instance your “typical” portrait. I think people use vandyke brown or burnt umber a brown is a good way to stay a painting it’s a good medium between all the colors and has a very good range for values like you can go super dark and light with it that’s why it’s popular! (This is why I also like to use purple and black for underpainting) this is very similar to how when people start off a drawing with a gray or colored background first it’s basically setting you up for what you want to use as you’re darkest value medium value and light value it’s a trick of the eye for the viewer and also something that helps you cement yourself in the work whether it be a painting or the drawing

Anyway depending on what you use for your under painting the depth of the painting will change (as well as the tone and stuff so you have to think ahead of time what you would prefer to use based on conceptual reasons yadda yadda when it comes to digital there’s not a lot of preplanning you have to do with painting I typically have a lot in mind such as the brushes I’m using if I want to blend stuff and the style I want as well as composition

This is more color theory stuff but Because I am doing a painting that is supposed to be closer black my range for color it a lot smaller than the painting that’s started off with the purple one that I knew was going to be so my approach is very different I thinking of color though VALUE on the left and HUE on the right.

If I do a greyscale edit you can see the range if a lot smaller on the left ofc because I’m not using any white for my lightest bue but it’s similar in depth because of the underpainting

ANYWAY when it comes to oil painting alot of the parts to learn other than color, technique, composition which you have to kinda learn by looking as masters and figure out your taste and what your preferences are! Something outside of that is tools (which I honestly don’t have the best brushed and because I don’t paint super frequently I don’t care if I throw the away and ruin my brushes :P) the only thing you have to remember about brushes is that oil is not like acrylic paint so you need sturdier brushes like the ones that look like horse hair not the ones that feel soft and nice but! The use of Linseed oil as paint thinner is something i highly recommend!

It has change the game for me as someone who used to use literal HOME DEPOT paint thinner (which you can’t use in closed environments for long periods of times because it stinks really bad and causes cancer :P)

but basically working with oils you need something to thin your paint to utilize the layering aspect to better for with blending and mixing since oil is so THICK.

I don’t mind using galkyd but it will literally dry and solidify in your container if you store it wrong and you can’t use it anymore but has a nice velvety feel! (I don’t miss it tho it was a pain in the ass)

they basically do all the same thing to speed the drying process and thin paint but how thick you want it to be and how fast you want to dry

My onion based on usability and price

linseed oil>paint thinner (cancer juice)> galkyd

I like talking about painting idk if I answered all the questions or maybe I need more specific ones to be clearer but that’s all I got!

[smokedvanillagumbo]

[ancienttheblackangel]

GET YOUR BODY OUT OF SURVIVAL MODE SO YOU CAN CREATE FROM YOUR HEART

[custer-mp3]

[ofishal-fish-posts]

at the next inconvenience, i'm going to become a fish

[ormacritis]

How will this affect the trout population

[ofishal-fish-posts]

the trout population will be affected.

[hannahlockillustration]

Patreon sticker for this month!

Join here.

[dailykrusie]

Day 9

[waterfallmelody]

[datadegroove-deactivated2026042]

fuck 4chan

fuck twitter

fuck reddit

fuck tumblr

and fuck you

[bsodddd2]

good kiddo

[nataliahdyer]

*always adding more

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[castielscheesecakehasmoved-blog]

sarcasm is my only defense: Masterlist of Writing Help for Writers

[ducktollers]

🐊🐊🐊🐊🐊

[junkyardshrub]

SCROLL BACK UP THIS IS A PAINTING

[erizosdecolores]

🤨📷✨

[freedomcage]

HE ACTUALLY DID IT WBAT IS THIS.

[pjharvey-moved-deactivated20250]

i am an ally to all embarrassing and uncool women forever and ever

[tamarrud]

Zionists: why won't Hamas just negotiate?!?!

Also Zionists: *assassinate the chief Hamas negotiator*

[tamarrud]

I want to add that this has historically been a policy of Israel to assassinate Palestinian leaders who are the main negotiators in long-term truce agreements with Israel.