Latest Posts by cosmicsmoothie - Page 6

the creature urges are strong tonight and yet alas i cannot go sprinting around a college campus on all fours or else someones gonna get security on me

HOW TO USE THE "MAKE ART GOOD" BUTTON TO MAKE YOUR ART GOOD

HEY, YOU! Yeah, you, amateur artist! Have you ever seen a digital artist with really good fucking colours and wondered "HOW DID THEY GET THOSE REALLY GOOD FUCKING COLOURS?!" Is it experience, talent, and an eye for colour? FUCK NO. I'm here to tell you what the pros don't want you to know, which is that right within your very art program (assuming you're using Clip Studio Paint) is a single button that will MAKE YOUR ART GOOD*

* or like, marginally better than it was before most of the time

Let me show you how I took this BORING, UNGOOD Slime Rancher painting I did as a final project for my traditional art course from BORING...

TO RAD AS FUCK

IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES

THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE BUTTON.

You'll have to put everything on the same layer (I recommend putting it in a folder, duplicating the folder, and then collapsing all the duplicate layers together so your original work is still untouched), but after that, you can open the Gradient Map menu and go hog fucking wild.

This is what you're gonna see:

Basically, what gradient maps do is they map the darkest colour in your piece to the darkest colour in a gradient, and the lightest to the lightest, and then VOILA. All of your colours have been changed to the colours of the gradient. Neat!

You can use this to do things like automatically change skin tones or hair colours, or in our case, colour the whole painting!

You can download sets off the asset store and load them into your program by selecting the wrench icon and picking "Add gradient set."

All you need to do is load a gradient in the tool and voila...

...okay actually that looks like shit. (The gradient I'm using is #11 from the Yunywave set on the asset store! Go download it! It's a good set!)

So, our solution here is going to be different depending on the goal, the gradient, and whether it's a colour piece you're trying to zhuzh up or a B&W piece like this.

For this one, I duplicated the original layer and set the second one to Overlay at 100% opacity, then applied the gradient map to it.

INCREDIBLE! PERFECT!

Here are some other examples of how I've used gradient maps...

See, Overlay is a really good blending mode to use for this kind of thing, especially if you painted it with "normal" colours and just want to give it a little kick! But you should experiment with other modes, too. For a pastel piece, try Screen. For a subtle change, try Soft Light. For a moody or dark piece, try Multiply.

And you can also add even more details over the gradient layer to add that extra punch to it! In the example painting, I wasn't happy with the foreground tree's highlight being so dark, so I painted over it with an orange colour picked from the background, duplicated it, recoloured it to a dull yellow, and set the layer to 60% Glow Dodge.

Digital art gives us so many tools to make SICK FUCKING ART with, and gradient maps are like, the most powerful tools of all! USE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM AND GO MAKE COOL STUFF!

the next time i make any dragon character and a D&D nerd starts trying to correct MY lore about MY DRAGONS based on a tabletop roleplaying game's story i am going to shove a mythological compilation of dragons throughout history up their ass and then stab them with a big sword. same goes for people who tell me my dragons arent actually dragons because they have slightly different numbers of limbs. burn in dragon hell.

Might try this actually, i've got a fair few characters with pretty vibrant color schemes (exhibit a: profile picture

Art Challenge: Draw your OC in Black Light!

Made this colour reference for my server! It isn't EXACTLY right like how it is in real life, but I did my best anyways! free to use for everyone!

having ocs is so funny. "its canon bc i said so" but its literally just true

Tonight we are drawing. With intense i want to die emotions. But we are drawing.

AHEEM HEEM can i show you horrors that will melt your bones? oh please please please??

almost have to actually scream "trust the process" repeatedly at myself because i am once again trying to change up how i do lighting and it looks WRONG but its NOT DONE YET CHILL OUT

Art Side Blog

i did the thing guys i made a side blog where i reblog my art to so if you hate me and just want to see my art and not any of my other presence then go follow @smoothies-scrawlings

all future random thoughts will be tagged with "#smoothie's ramblings" and the art will now get "#smoothie's scrawlings" for more organization

i dont really make new years resolutions since everything i want to do i just do or it takes more than a year. years of being a student makes me feel like this is really the halfway point rather than the start of a new year. Oh well.

i think this year i want to transform my art style from the ground up. It's changed a whole lot from last year, but I didn't do much foundational stuff for it. It's just better anatomy and actually using lighting that isn't one layer of poorly thought out cell shading.

I'm not even an artist as my main thing. I just do it for fun. But I think it's better to make goals for fun things than weigh yourself down with big consequence-heavy resolutions.

Might make a side blog for just my art this year. also organize my stuff.

New profile picture coming either when i cant stand the sight of the current one or on my birthday, whichever comes first.

hyperfixating on wizard of legend but theres like no content about it so i have to actually get good at the game

every day i take 50 uquizzes and every night i fight the demons they incur. through this cycle i will become enlightened and finally know who the fuck hozier is

tumblr. tumblr no. please just stay on wof tumBLE>R>. NO DONT START WITH ALT RIGHT PROPAGANDA. TUMBL

sometimes i like scrolling through the "stuff for you" because the tumblr algorithm is like a little buddy trying to show me its new hyperfixation. it went from mcyt to breaking bad to wings of fire. no advertisements. just beep boop fixations.

sometimes i like scrolling through the "stuff for you" because the tumblr algorithm is like a little buddy trying to show me its new hyperfixation. it went from mcyt to breaking bad to wings of fire. no advertisements. just beep boop fixations.

Artists, reblog and tell me in the tags what your favourite and least favourite part of your process is! With digital art, I love lineart so much, but I get really impatient with filling in flat colours.

Man how do people make interesting magic systems look so easy ive been struggling to remake one for a project i already have guiding foundations for

I call this drawing position Little Victorian Boy Dying of Tuberculosis

i have neither a good imagination nor aphantasia, but a secret third thing

MY JAW IS ON THE FLOOR

thank you tumblr very cool

i need to rebuild basically my entire art style from the ground up to improve or refine it more. i can just feel it. i am so so scare but i need 1000 hmmms. i cannot stop until i get 1000 hmmm.

i forgot the lore so i dont know if i should say NOOO FREE HIM FREE THE BOY or YEAH FUCKIN HATE THAT LITTLE LOSER

pick whichever one applies :P

Me appearing to give my poor boy a worse day

Currently in the process of buying tumblr will announce terms shortly

my friends are making an AI to replace me but they won't give me paid vacation time >:(

i have now become that one artist that draws nothing for weeks on end and then goes feral as soon as they pick up a pencil. i cannot open clip studio lest i be consumed by a trance and wake up 17 hours later with art i dont understand and 25 unfinished sketches

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE

anyway blackout poetry not just as an art form, but as an act of violence against other works of art

taking a piece of text that someone probably put their heart and soul into creating and using it as your raw material, cutting out everything that you deem irrelevant to the point you want to make

i mean imagine cutting up a painting and using it to make a collage, or taking a marble sculpture and carving pieces out of it to make a different sculpture

just to be clear: i love blackout poetry, im not criticizing it here. i am just waxing poetic about it. i dont really know where im going with this i just have Thoughts about art being destructive

Only good thing about Christmas time is I get to hear carol of the bells all the time but the bad part is I have to act normal like that song doesn’t go hard as fuck

Important