Fly me to the moon, and put your hands up!

I've occasionally been drawing silly things again, so sure, might as well post some of them here... Or at least this one. Some of the others are intended for specific people (i.e. might contain in-jokes for my WoW guildies), so I don't know if it'd make sense to post those here.

Oh well. This one here's a silly combination of two new fandoms I acquired earlier this year, so I immediately had to draw it. =p

Retro Reimu

Long time no see. Been meaning to get back to this... as usual.

I started drawing something at random, then suddenly found myself channeling the 80s. And I found I was ok with that.

Lame Reimu lineart

Not really that lame, I just wanted to say that sometime.

Couldn't think of anything I could draw in an hour or so, so I just wound up doodling random poses and trying some different line thicknesses and weightings.

Filling in gaps with black looks good for some reason? Using thicker lines on focal points like the eyes and chin looks good too, but it looks pretty weird if all the other lines are uniform, so its not as easy to do as I thought.

I really need to settle on a style for eyes sometime...

Happy New Year 2010!

Hello again after a year :)

It's the year of the tiger or something like that, right? Apparently it's also the year of biodiversity...

How To Draw Anime CG: Highlights

My computer got fixed! I got my files back! Now I can finish this off!

...is what I thought a month ago.

This is the last major part of colouring - adding brighter areas to reflective surfaces. Anything that isn't completely matt reflects light to some extent - depending on your style, this might be represented as anything from white spots through to full gradient lighting with correct colour reflection, but things will look better if you add some lighting in the right places.


I usually only do a single subtle layer. Splodge down some white, and erase to make gradient edges as appropriate. Then, adjust the opacity of the layer as you see fit - this is around 20%. Since the core of the white areas was originally opaque, this gives you nice even intensity across all the areas on the layer.
If you want to vary the intensity, you can either use multiple layers, or if you're feeling lazy, apply a large low-opacity eraser to the whole area you want to fade, to maintain your even intensity.


The reflective areas will have a 'bright' spot at the center - you can represent these as small full-intensity white spots at the core of the highlight areas. This is kind of exaggerated - Miku's suit appears to be made of rubber, and CG skin always seems to be highly polished for some reason, but it looks nice and that's what counts, right?.
Even if you skip the previous step, doing the high-intensity spots tends to work well.


For hair, I normally do a simple pointed stripe (as seen here) but since I'm doing a tutorial, I went and looked up how to do fancy zigzag highlights that you see so often. Should I be explaining something I only just discovered?...
Basically, you splodge down a reasonably thick line in the shape you want the highligh to follow, then use a high-opacity smudge to smear it into a spike. It tends to come out a bit transparent, but you can just clone and merge the layer or whatever to make the core opaque. It also needs some deft touches to make it clean and consistent, but its quick and easy to apply.



So, here's Miku with the aforementioned highlight applied. Again, the most intense areas are those facing the camera, so I partially erased the parts that would be at an angle.


It looks a bit odd with just a white highlight, so I applied two more steps.
The first was to group a green layer to it, to tint it slightly green (white is white, but the edges blend into green nicely).
The second was to splodge on some white behind it, apply a gaussian blur, and set the layer to 'colour burn'.
There's a strange effect you can get - if you make a layer folder (the folder icon) and set the folder to 'colour burn', the effect on contained layers is much more intense than you can get by setting it on the layers directly. It looks like Komatsu Eeji's stuff, although I haven't worked out how to use it that well...


A couple more things to finish.
The glow on her lights was just done by a copy, gaussian blur, colour dodge (or overlay? I forget).
Also, I added a slight blush. This was just done by taking her skin colour, adding lots of red, covering her face with it, then erasing down to highlight the cheeks and reducing the opacity of the layer. This lets you represent areas of skin that are normally darker than average - cheeks are an obvious use, some artists apply it to elbows and shoulders, or you could take it to an extreme and produce fairly realistic-looking skin like Masamune Shirow. I wanted to look at it a bit more, but I don't think it turns out well on Miku here, so I might revisit it.

Thats pretty much it for Miku... I don't think she came out spectacularly as a piece, but I think she works as a tutorial. I think I've covered the major technical stuff I do when drawing, but like I said at the start, don't take this as a list of 'stuff to do when drawing' - play with the steps I've suggested yourself, and also think about them when trying to work out how your favourite artist did a particular effect. It'll be more effective than just aping my stuff :p

And so, back to proper artings for me!

How To Draw Anime CG: Colouring 3

We have some basic shading down, but it looks a little flat. This last shading step will add a bit of depth to it.

Start off by making another layer to hold the new shading.

Pick a region, and make a new deeper shading colour. You'll want something darker than your first shading colour, but you'll also want to change the hue more this time, since shadows are tinted by ambient light.

Select the original mask you made for it. Then, go to your first shading layer, and choose 'intersect transparency mask'. Make a temporary layer, and flood fill with your new colour. (This is to help avoid colouring over areas that weren't shaded on the previous layer; however there's nothing wrong with just painting a blob and erasing as before if you prefer).




Now, erase the new layer to reveal the previous shading. You want to leave the areas of heavy shadow untouched, and blend the rest of it into the previous shading, so the gradients will be a lot more gradual than before. I was using a 200px brush a lot here, as well as reducing the opacity of the eraser.


Keep doing this for all your masked areas. The shadows are a lot deeper and more subtle than before; keep it simple if you don't really 'get' the places that should be shadowed, but it will almost always look better with this. I also added a little of the 'shadowed edge' I've seen in other pictures - its another element I don't quite understand, but on curved surfaces, a lot of artists have a dark highlight along the edge of the transition beween light and shadow.

One point is that the skin is shadowed with a slight purple tinge - the skin colour has had a slight blue tint added to it. You see this a lot (try sampling!); I don't understand it, but it looks nice so I'll run with it.

How To Draw Anime CG: Colouring 2

Now it's time for the biggest step: shading.

To start with, make a new layer to store your finished shading. You might want to make one per colour or one per area; however since you have the masks that you made in the previous step, I find it more convenient to just put all colours of shading onto one layer and use the mask to seperate them if I want to adjust colours.

When shading an area, the first step is to choose your shading colour. Grab the base colour and adjust it as you see fit; typically you'll be reducing both the saturation and brilliance, but it's often nice to change the hue a little as well. The hue changes due to the effects of ambient light; it's particularly affected by unusual lighting conditions too, such as moonlight or otherwise coloured light (go look at other art or photos).

Another case where hue is affected is skin colour; skin is slightly transparent, and so the red colour from capilliaries tints the shadows slightly red - ever tried shining a torch behind your hand? Here's a basic description; it gets kind of technical when applied to human skin, so try observing photos and so on, or just wing it.


Time to get started. Make a new layer, and throw a blob of colour on that is bigger than the shading you want. Use the mask to trim the unwanted bits, and manually trim anything that overlaps inside the mask where you don't want it to (its easier of the initial blob doesn't overlap, obviously).


Now, grab your eraser, set it to be a soft brush of appropriate size, and trim away parts of the blob to give a nice gradient edge. Use different sized brushes to give different gradients - here I used a 65px, 35px and 17px brush, with strokes as illustrated in the 2nd picture. This gives you a good amount of control over the shading - I find that its much easier to form smooth gradients by removing colour with the eraser brush rather than trying to add it with the colour brush.

I don't want to force my opinion of how to actually perform the shading, since I don't think I'm particularly good at it; still, basic advice would be to keep in mind the position of your light source, since you are effectively drawing shadows, and that when it comes to anime-style CGs, its generally both nicer-looking and faster to keep things simple.

Another odd rule is that it looks nice if you erase a little of the shading where it meets the lineart (as with the lowest 17px stroke above). I'm not sure why; something to do with ambient light and reflection? But you can see it a lot on professional drawings; it looks nice, especially with skin.

Once you are done with the blob, you can merge this layer back with the rest. If you are happy with it you can merge it back into the main shading layer; I tend to keep a main layer for the whole masked area that I'm currently working on so that I can touch it up before I merge it back to the main layer. Be careful that you don't accidentally merge layers badly and ruin your base colours or masks! Plus, be careful to apply the mask to the area before merging back into the main shading layer or you might end up ruining completed work - I haven't found any quick, practical way of preventing this, so you'll just have to be dilligent and keep a large undo stack...


Keep making layers, trimming blobs and merging back until you've completed each masked area. Since the brushes have a limited size, you can save some time by doing several blobs at a time, spaced apart enough that you can erase one without overlapping with the next one. For example, I painted half the fringes on one layer y doing every other spike, then the other half on a second layer, instead of making one layer for each spike.



And so, we have a shaded Miku. We're not done with the shading yet though...