A long time ago an anon asked my thoughts about drawing backgrounds, so I finally got around to putting this together. It’s more prop-centric, but it still represents my philosophy to backgrounds.
I’ll try to do something more about drawing actual background spaces in the future! Please let me know what you think, if anything is unclear, or if you have suggestions for other tutorials you might find helpful!
I gotta admit, I see this around a lot, especially in more mature artists. We have a bunch of people going through that mentality, and the repercussions of the inferior-complex it instils once it festers.
It’s toxic.
It comes down to something as simple as rhetoric. Never judge yourself as an artist as being either “ good or bad “.
You can judge your art pieces as “ strong “ or “ less strong “, but I would never encourage anyone uses terms such as “ bad “, “ weak”, or in any way directly implying inferiority of their own art. Because once we get used to these kinds of terms we engrain it into your subconscious, and it will become problematic later.
There’s a couple of motivational posts here on the blog you can read for further advice: I‘ll link them beneath.
What is also important to remember is that age plays no significant role in the art world. You can be in your late sixties and still achieve great things artistically. It’s not a race.
Vincent Van Gogh had his first exhibit at age 37 and Louise Bourgeois didn’t have household-name success until her late seventies.
I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them.
Firstly, what you need are
— CUSTOM BRUSHES —
Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:
For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):
This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu
You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once
This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME
Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:
– under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15%
– under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.
– If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your backgrounds
The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
— PATHS —
But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.
Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:
Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.
Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:
Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years
You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.
I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’:
Here is another photoshop tutorial for you all. This was requested by @simsthatsparkle , thank you for the suggestion! Also a huge thank you to @ridgeport for creating the stunning sim! Keep reading to go to the tutorial.
Hey obsidianvsyurei I know exactly where you’re coming from – because I’ve heard that same criticism before. They aren’t saying that you should stick to simpler looking characters (because you can spend a lot of time making a simple character look good), but that your focusing too much on how the drawing looks over the performance itself. If you find yourself spending way too long on one drawing during the initial first pass, then that’s something you can change up. The first pass should be as loose as possible – this is so that you can focus on the overall performance. This is where your thirty second life drawing/observational gesture drawings come to play.
Since you only have a short amount of time to capture your subject, your drawings should be really loose and that you’re trying to capture the gesture and energy of your supposed model. Don Hahn’s drawing life books elaborate more on this!
So with that being said, your first pass should first focus on the overall performance other than how detailed the drawings look. This means, create a short hand of your character!
With simpler shapes and more gestural lines, you can focus on things like squash and stretch, its easier to exaggerate your drawings; making your drawings bolder. You’ll notice that you feel more confident in animating something like a stick man over something with a lot of design beauty. So the thing to be loose and simple in your first approach.
Once you feel that your performance is solid, then you can add another pass on top of those roughs where you can finally tie down your drawings with a bit more detailed.
I know these aren’t the best examples since they don’t really showcase an acting/performance choice – but its the only files I do have that still has a first pass laid out hahaha!
Another practice you can do is to thumbnail all of your acting before you even start laying all the initial drawings. That can help you find the statements you want.
Anyways those are my two cents, hope this helps!
This applies to storyboard work as well. Great break down
if you’re trying to write a character with a job you don’t know that much about, there has been a rising trend on youtube in the past few months of professionals watching shows/movies about their job and pointing out the inaccuracies that you might want to check out! it’s a lot of very good niche information in a short (and entertaining) format!
test 