More Handclaps!

akjshdfjkashd oh gosh thank you ;u; and i’m totally saving this list to check out later!!

Guuuurl, no need to thank me! When I saw you started to follow me, I got super ridiculously excited. Keep on being rad and adorable!

Here is a list of awesome tumblr artists I follow (there are a bunch more than this, too, but here is a small group to start with). You should follow them, too!

philnoto, gingerhaze, kaymurph, troffie, hoursago, mingdoyle, nataliehall, typette, alphabonesoup, baruyon, arst, jessfink, spacedrunk, crapmachine, causeimdanjones, vestien, catbluhblog, andells, wratshit, kippery, samsketch, shoomlah, miraongchua, aidosaur, emmyc, kingkaiser, natzilla, zooque, nedroidcomics, ren-ne-rei, seventypercentethanol, kakimari, oddlookingbird, nogutsnoglory, gigifritter, charliebowater, kuitsuku

OK. Maybe not such a small list, BUT STILL. These folks are awesome. Oh, and an honorable, non-tumblr mention to Kate Beaton and Emily Carroll!

frankjavcee:

Hey, man! Thanks! And damn straight - I need more handclaps. Mooooore.

drawgenegenie:

I don’t know what to say to that, so here is a bad gif I made of a moose dancing.

wesurearecute:

Duuuude, I had not heard this before, but now I am listening to it on repeat. If ya’ll have any more suggestions, hit me!

And yes. Boners. Give them to me. (No, don’t - I would be very upset and confused).

‘Eeeeeeeey!

I finally got around to making a Commissions page! Exciting stuff. So if you are into that sorta thing, click here (or that other link a couple sentences ago - either one).

If that is not your jam, here is a video of a Corgi with a case of Beatle Mania so this post isn’t total filler.

actions are the awesomest….I use them to make my gifs. You want, I will show you next time we hang out.

YES. Chris and Rob can do dude stuff while you show me all of your secretssss.

I so need a tablet. How many times easier is it with a tablet than a mouse? I’m still really undecided about buying one at the moment. :\

Here is what it looks like when I try to draw with a mouse:

Keep in mind that I have been using a tablet for years, though, so it’s what I’m used to. I remember thinking I was hot shit with a mouse back in the day (during my oekaki/Cardcaptor Sakura/Inuyasha fanart days, oh yeaaaah), and the first time I picked up a tablet felt really weird.

If you are thinking about getting a tablet (and are worried about the price), you don’t have to splurge and get the super huge/expensive models.  You can find a Wacom tablet on Amazon for about $50, apparently! And non-Wacom ones for less than that, though I would do some research on those.

You can also make an action for the expanding and filling to make it even faster! :D Record a new action > Expand selection > Fill selection!

Oh, hey, cool! That is pretty handy! I need to edumacate myself on Actions.

PRO TIP, YOU GUYS.

OK! Now that we’ve got the basics down, let’s do some more basics!! Sketching, inking, and a nifty selection trick for laying down flats, mainly. (I keep trying to put a cut here, but Tumblr won’t let me, so I apologize to your Dash).

Alright, so you have a new document in Photoshop ready to go - now what? You can import a scanned sketch (I uh don’t do that, so I can’t really help you there), OR just start sketching straight in the program (this is what I do).

Make sure you aren’t on your background layer when you start sketching! Make a new one. Lock those other ones up if you gotta (with the little lock icon in the layer panel - I will get to the other buttons in another post). I have drawn on the wrong layer far too many times. And still do. It is infuriating. Naming your layers is also a good practice to be in and can help avoid this problem (sorta).

Anyway!

I like to use blue when I sketch - anything different than the inking color, really. Once you’re done with a rough sketch, make a new layer.

I set my sketch layer to roughly 50% opacity, make sure I’m on the inking layer, and just… go at it. I included my brush settings in this picture, but I only now realized you can’t read that for shit, so my bad. I will cover brushes later, haha. I am the best teacher ever!

OK, so you are done inking. Time to lay down some base colors!

This next tip comes courtesy of my friend Krista - who is practically Deviantart royalty, so she knows what she’s talking about, kids.

Make a new layer. Whip out the Magic Wand tool - make sure “Sample All Layers” is checked up at the top. Click the part you want to color (like the body, shirt, hair, whatever). If your lineart is solid, marching ants will appear in the correct area - you can play with the tolerance/fiddle with the lines some more if it isn’t.

OK, this is the cool part. Once you’ve selected something, go to Select > Modify > Expand Selection. A popup will… popup. Expand your selection by 2 pixels (that’s my standard anyway - use your own digression depending on how thick your lines are).

Now throw some color down with the Paint Bucket!

If you hadn’t expanded the selection, you’d have had a weird line appear when you tried to use the paint bucket (not pretty). There are still some spots I have to fill in myself/refine, but much easier than coloring in the whole thing by hand, huh? To get rid of the selection, press Ctrl + D (Cmd + D).

Alright, that’s the gist of it. You’ll want to use this same process for each color you do (you can do everything on one layer, but I am a fan of using AS MANY LAYERS AS POSSIBLE).

Let me show you one more cool trick, though.

Holy shit, dino on dino action! Let’s say you want 2 windows up of the same document. Maybe I want to see how the whole picture will look while I work up close and personal on dino nostril. Maybe I want to see how a picture looks on 2 different monitors (this is what I primarily do).

To bring up another window, go to Window > Arrange > New Window for blahblah.psd. Any changes you make to one window will immediately affect the other. Pretty neat!

OK, that’s the end of this post. I’ll probably cover clipping masks in the next one. Questions/comments go! (?)