digibutter.nerr

[Abstract]

I was bored so I made this.

A lot of people are under the impression that paint sucks for pretty much everything. Well, aside from people who have done spriting, anyway (aside from professionals, anyway). Paint, well, yes, it does suck. It's not the best program around. Actually, it's probably the weakest program that you have on your computer right now.

Now, let's get past the fact that paint sucks, especially when compared to high-end programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter.

I like MS Paint. It's quick to load, and does exactly what I need it to do. I often sketch out ideas in paint (or on our very own takamin oekaki), mainly because it's just so damn fast. It's great for doodling, and it's a lot more fun to make a quick picture in paint than spend a good 12 hours on a single piece that I won't like a week later in photoshop.

In short, MS Paint is good for what it's made for, and that's doodling.

Anyway. The "techniques" I use in MS Paint are exactly the same as in every other program I use, unless (excuse my oekaki-speak) I'm using watercolours. I like BOLD, DYNAMIC shading on my pictures, and minimal highlights.

So, *crag* the rambling.

SKETCH

Now, this is actually lineart. I just accidentally wrote sketch on the picture and I don't want to fix it. Shut up.

So, here's a picture of me. Looking much prettier and much more petite than in real life. buhhhh. Oh well. Whenever I make my lineart, I use the second and first setting on the brush tool. I avoid using the first unless I want to detail small... things or whatever. Like that flyaway there.

Sometimes I use the first setting to assist in tapering. When I use the first setting to taper, I'm usually adding onto the lineart (which is often fairly bare at first). I do this because it bugs me to have the thicker lines everywhere.

Usually, I taper using the eraser tool or the brush tool set to white (or whatever background colour I may have). An example of this is the bangs. I simply erase the tip of the line to make it look sharp, to it looks like it's disappearing or something. I don't taper much in my art, unless I'm trying to do some seriously dynamic shit. And this isn't dynamic shit.

In the lineart, I'll colour in things that I can right away. Like the eyes. I know I probably won't be changing them at any point, so I just go ahead and fill them in.

Conversely, I'll choose to leave some areas completely undetailed. Like that hat. That *crag* hat.

Also, I almost always do base lineart in black. I sometimes add onto it after colouring. Weird. lol

BASE

Here I r*pe the paint bucket tool. Because MS Paint pictures are fast.

Oh, and I'm never going to colour that *crag* hat again, I tell you. I'm just gonna draw myself wearing my AC/DC hat from now on. Speaking of the hat, you can see my weird habit of colouring in areas then drawing line art over top of them here. I did that with that brown band.

I make sure my colours are relative. Otherwise the picture would look really awkward.

Ummm, also, for skintone, I actually just took a photo of myself from Facebook, pasted it into Paint, and grabbed my skintone. Might look a little weird because my laptop's colours are a little messed up, and I probably grabbed the wrong tone. OH WELL.

SHADING

I take the base colour, and customize it, obviously. Since light is usually assumed to be yellow, I make the shading purple. Why? They're opposites, idiot. So, whenever I shade something (aside from the pants), I dragged the slider DOWN (to make a cooler shade, rather than a warm one) and towards either purple or red, depending on where the colour sat. I particularly like how the shading on the shirt turned out in this one.

Normally, I'd made the skin's shading go towards purple as well, but that wasn't relative to the rest of the colour, so I moved it towards red instead. Mostly because of the shirt, I think.

The shading is probably off in this, because I don't actually imagine how the shading in a picture will look. I just.. well... slap on the shadows where it looks right and call it a day.

Also, I didn't do much shading on the hat. I didn't want to. That's not fun.

LIGHTING

I don't like SUPER SHINY PICTURES. So I usually just stick to one.. uh.. focal point when it comes to shading and leave it at that. Basically, when I light, I pull the crosshair thingy up (warmer tone) and the one on the side up as well. Also, I move the one on the left SLIGHTLY closer to my lighting colour (yellow). It's essentially the opposite of shading.

I try to use pure white if I can, as I am terribly lazy.

The lighting in this picture is very minimal and sloppy. Some of you may not notice it at all.

TOUCH UPS

I change the colour of the lineart if I want to, and add "bars" into the lighting and shading where I see fit.

Bars are really fun to make, and they look cool. I didn't add any in this picture aside from the band on the hat.

When I make bars, I think of a gradient. When a lighting effect is closest to its opposite, I'll add in little lines of the base colour to create the illusion of the shading or lighting softening. It's like tapering. But for lighting effects. I use bars sparingly, because they can make a picture look really weird.

AND THAT'S ITTTT

yeah I got bored of typing I'm sorry.

k I'm not bored anymore.

WHO WANTS A MINI COLOUR THEORY LESSON, ALTHOUGH I KNOW VERY LITTLE OF COLOUR THEORY, AS I AM SELF-TAUGHT?

k.

BASIC COLOUR THEORY

So. Let's go over some of my colour choices in my picture.



Those numbers probably don't seem too important. Unless you've used PaintBBS or something, then, yeah, it'll seem pretty damn important.

Now, I'm not saying that you have to type in your numbers every time you want to get a colour. Actually, I never do it. Ever. Unless I really need a pure colour.

Anyway. The numbers. RGB, if for whatever reason you didn't know, stands for red, green, blue. There are other colour systems (like CMYK), but don't worry about them. Unless you want to print stuff or something.

In RGB, the maximum value a colour can have is 255, and the lowest is zero.

In this picture, you can see my base red is fairly close to pure red (224), and has green (25) and blue (39) mixed in. It looks slightly orange compared to the shade, which has a grey/purple base.

As I said before, this is because the light is yellow.



I could have shaded in a lot of other ways, though.

Shading and colour choice effect a picture's mood. The closer to grey you go, the more dull it's gonna be. The more bright colours you use, the more dynamic a picture will be. Of course, you don't want to use TOO MANY dull colours or TOO MANY bright colours. If you did that your picture would be boring and muddled, or too crowded and noisy.

Anyway.

For the first one, this is basically just darkening the base colour, and calling it a day. This is the most basic form of shading. You're probably all familiar with it.

The second one is purple based. There's either a yellow or purple light coming towards this surface (of course, if it was a purple light, this would be a reflection rather than regular shading). This is my favourite form of shading, as it really makes a picture pop out.

Grey shading isn't very good looking most of the time, so I'd just avoid it, unless you're not doing solids. It would really just be used to alter an image's mood.

Black is something you should NOT use unless you're prepared to use a lot of bars, want a REALLY dynamic feel, or have no other choice. Too much black in a picture can completely throw it off in an instant.

also.



If you ever want to come up with some sort of fancy style of shading, or experiment with colours, you can use a limited palette, like the one above. It forces you to think about your colour choices, and can result in some pretty cool effects.

[MALAK]

Agh, you make it look so easy, but my mouse is a dipshit. :C

[Tayl]

Whoa, this is really good. You call it a doodle, but it'd take me a long time to make something like this, especially with a mouse.

The only reason I hate Paint is because I'm not very good with a mouse. Too unsteady for me. So, I basically hate drawing on the computer with any program then, lol.

Anyways, yeah. Cute drawing~ (:

[BAMFing ARCHER]

That's actually some really good advice there. I've actually been having a lot of trouble trying to work around with drawing in Paint or other programs, since I'm more used to paper and pencil, but these really help. i don't think I'll actually need a scanner to transplant my newest idea.

[Frozenwinters]

[Abstract]

[Geno]

I may be getting a tablet after I get my birthday money. Then my Paint work won't suck. Haha. Oh, and what's the difference between the lighting and touch-up phases? I can't tell.

[Abstract]

[Geno]

[Abstract]