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Now this isn't for everyone. Some people are already way better at art. This is more directed at the goon who is too bashful to post his scraggly stick figure in the art threads. (or just anyone curious how I make my MS shitposts) There won't be any tablets, there won't be any software beside MS Paint. Just you and your mouse. We aren't going to delve into color theory or proper lighting here. This is also not meant to take away from the current MS Paint thread. Feel free to share some techniques you find useful or just questions in general. Maybe some goofy examples using my technique. To start I'd like to offer some general advice. You don't have to follow these but they might make your piece look better. Firstly, use a smaller canvas! I recommend something around 500x500, this isn't a rule but it simplifies how much you're working with.  This image is only 500x500 Now the tools we'll be using. I tend to stay away from the brushes in MS paint because they are anti aliased, this doesn't play well with the fill tool. And since we don't have layers (at least I don't on windows 10) it's a pain to work with them quickly. Try to stick with the pencil tool instead. If you want use brushes just expect to do a lot of manual filling.  A note on tapering and lines. Using a small pencil tool can often look very squared off, if you want to add some line weight try starting with a thicker line and shaving away at it with a color from behind it. You'll get more organic shapes doing this.  Now if you're like me you're either colorblind or don't know anything about color theory, well not to worry. We can always steal a color palette from another image. (optional) Today I'll be drawing kermit the frog, so we'll start with a picture of kermit. Constantine  Great! You have your reference image ready. Let's pick out just 3 colors for the simplicity of this visual guide. We're going to need a highlight, a midtone, and a shadow. You can always pick more or less. More colors will just makes things much more complicated.  Now that we've saved ourselves a few happy little colors we're going to want to start with a midtone. It's easiest to start here since you'll only need to move up one or down one step to add some detail. I'd like to start by drawing some of the very simple shapes of kermit.  You'll notice it looks like absolute poo poo, and that's fine, no masterpiece needs to start out looking particularly good. I also hope seeing it at this step inspires some confidence; even I like to start with stickfigures. You can add some more details if you like (I'm going to add a dress and some breasts as one does), otherwise on to the next step.  Now what we're going to do is fill in some of the drawing with the same midtone we just used. If you're afraid of losing some of the details in the process you can leave some of it unfilled.  Let's start filling in some of those details we left empty. I like to start with highlights usually but you can start with shadows too if that's more comfortable. Don't worry about getting it all highlighted perfectly on the first go, just simple blocked in shapes.  Next, add some simple shadows. These will really help you decide how things will relate to each other from here on. Keep it simple! Details are not important right now.  Let's take a brief moment to talk about blending and textures. Since we're only using 3 colors things might seem a bit flat or uninteresting. But you can add a lot of perceived values with just a bit of technique.  On the left we have no blending or texture (cel shading), in the middle is a very rough texture, think of something like rock or metal. And on the right we have something a bit softer. You don't have to blend if you want something very toony or cel shaded. I have a short video of how these were made if you're interested. I recommend watching at 1.5x speed or so if you don't want to get bored of me grabbing the wrong tools over and over since paint doesn't have tool hotkeys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85y8c97AuDA You should play around and experiment with this sort of thing, you can get all kinds of textures just by stippling or hatching some colors together! The size of the pencil makes a big difference too. Don't forget that Ctrl+Z is your friend! Don't like the line you just did? Undo it. Now that you have a few ideas to play with we can go back to our rough picture and start blending in some textures and mixing those colors!  Don't forget you can erase using a brush or pencil instead of the eraser tool! Just use a color from behind your object. Clean up any of the figure you don't like and keep playing with the colors until it is roughly recognizable as a frog with tits.  And there you have it, a happy little frog made of just a handful of colors. I hope it was mildly informative and not just Step 1: shape Step 2: the whole owl. I can try to add more context, examples, or even video if there's anything not explained particularly well. Now just get out there and make something. Everyone and myself likely want to see anything, from the mightiest stick figure, to the lowliest stick worm. The diversity really makes these MS threads pop. BONUS TIPS: Transparency Selection tip Duplication/Effects! File>Properties>Black&White Grey Cat fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 17:13
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I rock linux op
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Jul 21, 2023 17:32
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Jul 21, 2023 17:33
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Sweet! This is a great tutorial and I'll give your step-by-step a try when I have the chance! Thanks for taking your time and doing this!
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Jul 21, 2023 17:33
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Icochet posted:I rock linux op That's fine too, either wine wrap (or equivalent) an MS paint exe or use something like Tux Paint or Krita!
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Jul 21, 2023 17:36
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this is cool. as a fellow colorblind, i like the tips on picking a 3 tone color palette. i often use the color picker tool and sample from a reference image when editing/doodling something, but i've never thought of it in terms of making a real palette with the specific purpose of shading.
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Jul 21, 2023 17:56
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Bad Purchase posted:this is cool. as a fellow colorblind, i like the tips on picking a 3 tone color palette. i often use the color picker tool and sample from a reference image when editing/doodling something, but i've never thought of it in terms of making a real palette with the specific purpose of shading. I'm glad to have brought up some food for thought! It's really how I learned to work around that issue and still be able to study things. (value is more important than color anyways) Sure I know the hexes or where the colors on the wheel vaguely are, but that wasn't enough to learn from. I also just thought it's especially funny as someone who can't see Kermit's green to do a tutorial with drawing kermit. Grey Cat fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 18:01
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What a weird thread to switch to after seing your posts in the pixelart thread . Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 18:07
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Wipfmetz posted:... say, are your contributions to the pixel art thread _also_ done with MS Paint? Great question (also hello fellow pixel threader), the short answer is no. The few pieces I sent there were in a few different things. The standstill characters were originally done in clip studio paint. The first animation I posted was originally done with photoshop, each layer being a frame and exporting as a gif. Then redone in aseprite after I had downloaded it. The video I posted the art and frames were originally done in asperite then manually redrawn frame by frame in construct 3 (because free trial version). That's not to say you can't use MS Paint for pixel art though, you definitely can since paint offers a single pixel brush with no anti aliasing. You can always import sprites into some software that handles it better down the road. I also wouldn't say it's the most efficient at doing pretty much any sort of art, but it is fun. E: I'll reply to the edit then. Wipfmetz posted:What a weird thread to switch to after seing your posts in the pixelart thread . Link was broken (I fixed) Yeah it's a weird switch maybe to someone who doesn't know me too well. It's relevant since there's currently an MS paint thread stickied so I thought it would be fun since I've seen some comments floating around about not wanting to participate because, "I'm bad." etc. But I definitely like making very silly art as well as very serious stuff. MS Paintposting is just one way to express that. Grey Cat fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 18:12
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I am a novice at MS Paint compared to OP but a couple of tricks I like to use: If you right-click with the eraser tool it will selectively erase Color 1 (leaving behind Color 2, just like the normal eraser), turning it into a color replace brush. The eraser doesn't have the rounded edges of the pencil tool so this isn't always ideal but it can be useful if you want to add some quick shading around an existing detail, or if you decide one of your selected colors needs to be tweaked after you've already done all your shading. For more involved work, while old school Paint doesn't have layers you can use the "Transparent selection" option as a quick-and-dirty way to mask off an area by color, if you want to draw behind something or just want to be able to scribble around the edges of something and not worry about staying inside the lines:  Step 1. Hit ctrl+a and ctrl+c to copy the whole canvas.  Step 2. Draw in whatever you want, not caring about the borders. Then get the eyedropper and right-click on the color that you're intending to draw on (the yellow background, in this case.)  Step 3. Paste in the copy of the whole picture (make sure you're zoomed out so that it will automatically center the paste.) Go to the select tool and make sure "Transparent selection" is selected, and now the changes you made will only show up on whatever color is in Color 2 while everything else will be reverted to your original copy. Obviously, you could just draw the background first and then draw the foreground in front of it, but then you lose the freedom to quickly and easily erase stuff which is a big part of what makes Paint so simple and fun. Also, you can use the same technique to mask off a foreground area if you want to go nuts scribbling in details without worrying about messing up your lines or background: 
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Jul 21, 2023 18:19
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the holy poopacy posted:I am a novice at MS Paint compared to OP but a couple of tricks I like to use: Awesome tip! I knew there was something vaguely like that in MSpaint but I couldn't remember how to do it honestly. Definitely useful if you have some very simple colors to work with too. Downside's that'd get pretty muddied if you have complex colors going on especially behind or in front of something. Also agree the eraser can be useless sometimes when you need to carve a small shape out and instead you end up with a square. Definitely best to use all tools at your disposal if one thing doesn't work out quite right. I'll add the tip to the top.
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Jul 21, 2023 18:27
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Very nice thread op. Might try my hand at something later today
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Jul 21, 2023 18:30
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shading is still mysterious to me. i try to think in terms of where light would be hitting the subject and what elements would be casting shadows, but i never seem to make natural shapes i also don't practice making art at all, and it's probably one of those learn by doing skills
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Jul 21, 2023 18:32
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the holy poopacy posted:I am a novice at MS Paint compared to OP but a couple of tricks I like to use: Awesome! These kinds of MS Paint tips and tricks are really sweet as well! More tools for the arsenal. Bad Purchase posted:shading is still mysterious to me. i try to think in terms of where light would be hitting the subject and what elements would be casting shadows, but i never seem to make natural shapes Yeah, shading can be tricky. I mean most of my ideas on how to highlight and where to put shadows, come from painting miniatures. There you have the actual physical thing to look at, even though light doesn't really fall on a mini as on something a lot bigger. You learn to exaggerate. I'd say that a good way to start is to imagine a light source at one corner of the canvas, then after you've done the midtones, put the highlights towards the "light source" and the shadows on the opposite. I normally just imagine shadows as deep shadows, rather than lets say an arm than throws a shadow across a torso or so. I sometimes have tried these, but mainly if I have a good reference picture where I can try and copy or mimic how the shadows fall. Light tends to be pretty diffuse even in real life, unless you have a really strong light coming at something from only one direction, so being a bit vague on where shadows fall tends to be OK in my eyes. As an example, say you've just drawn an outstretched arm, which is basically just a tube, colour it all the midtone, then draw a line with a lighter colour going along the top and a darker line going along the bottom. That is a good start! Set fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 18:43
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AARD VARKMAN posted:Very nice thread op. Might try my hand at something later today Thanks, look forward to seeing what you make. Bad Purchase posted:--it's probably one of those learn by doing skills Genuinely all of art. Here's an easy way to break it down. On a complex shape we can do it like this. Let's use a face as an example because our brains look at a face and instantly know if something is right or wrong. A great kind of lighting to practice this simple 3 tone stuff with is Rembrandt Lighting. Rembrandt Triangle type pics give us a great division of tones with easy and defined shapes. Pretty much any portrait with really sharp lighting like this will do. The more contrasted it is, the easier it is to break down the shapes.  Identify your tones  Find the simple shapes of those tones
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Jul 21, 2023 18:47
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Grey Cat posted:Awesome tip! I knew there was something vaguely like that in MSpaint but I couldn't remember how to do it honestly. Definitely useful if you have some very simple colors to work with too. Downside's that'd get pretty muddied if you have complex colors going on especially behind or in front of something. Yeah, it only really works if you have a fairly blank canvas so it only really gives you one pass per "layer." It can be handy if you want to block out multiple overlapping characters or objects in unique solid colors and then do the detail and shading on each of them individually, though.
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Jul 21, 2023 18:53
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 great job op!
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Jul 21, 2023 19:04
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Bad Purchase posted:shading is still mysterious to me. i try to think in terms of where light would be hitting the subject and what elements would be casting shadows, but i never seem to make natural shapes Shamelessy pointing at OP's post from the other thread, where you see an orange, second spotlight on the left side of the image. Grey Cat posted:My time to shine Grey Cat posted:Find the simple shapes of those tones Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 21:24
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Sick-nasty, maybe I need to break out the spray tool and do some Extreme Dithers
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Jul 21, 2023 21:43
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finally, after all these years, a good thread in gbs 
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Jul 21, 2023 21:44
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Can you draw/MS Paint a Kermit goatse?
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Jul 21, 2023 22:16
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Bad Purchase posted:shading is still mysterious to me. i try to think in terms of where light would be hitting the subject and what elements would be casting shadows, but i never seem to make natural shapes it can help to think of it as the absense of a light source creating shadows rather than light illuminating things causing them to be cast, since a lot of the time w/ drawing&painting, brightness is just canvas/bg being left partly exposed so it's harder to conceptualize it additively also helps to establish what 100%' and '0%' luminance both are gonna look like first and where they'll be in the picture, then filling the spectrum in between those because without that it's easy to creep beyond what you intended and throw the balance of everything else off also its pretty hard to shade things well if you don't outline poo poo well too. im pretty sure most people who think they're terrible artists with zero potential to make anything that's not bad just never learned how important outlining is for the brain to delineate what means what in illustration unless the drawing also has a very well established sense of perspective and scale, which is way harder to do than outlining. without at least one of those two things it's pretty difficult to not draw like a kindergartener
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Jul 21, 2023 23:24
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Wipfmetz posted:An impressive trick is a _second_ lightsource, something I never come up with myself because of reasons. Dick Fontaine posted:finally, after all these years, a good thread in gbs Thanks for the shouts, all. Bloodfart McCoy posted:Can you draw/MS Paint a Kermit goatse? The thought had crossed my mind to draw a goatse of some sort, but I couldn't think of a clever way to incorporate one without literally drawing a gaping rear end in a top hat. Wasn't ready for a random probe after the hotdog war of '23.
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Jul 21, 2023 23:28
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^^^no worries ill take care of it for you in a bitGrey Cat posted:That's fine too, either wine wrap (or equivalent) an MS paint exe or use something like Tux Paint or Krita! lol tux paint is dope, seconding
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Jul 21, 2023 23:30
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cumpantry posted:^^^no worries ill take care of it for you in a bit I look forward to whatever cheeky thing cum up with, fellow tux enjoyer.
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Jul 21, 2023 23:32
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FirstnameLastname posted:it can help to think of it as the absense of a light source creating shadows rather than light illuminating things causing them to be cast, since a lot of the time w/ drawing&painting, brightness is just canvas/bg being left partly exposed so it's harder to conceptualize it additively good info, thanks
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Jul 21, 2023 23:44
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I generally only share my idiotic photoshop collage work here, but I have a Wacom Intuos, a box full of Prismacolor, a box full of Sharpie, a couple pen cups I stole from work as the plant was shutting down that are overstuffed with pencils and pens of varying type and width, and a bunch of sketchbooks of varying sizes. Drawing is fun even if it's just straight poo poo coming out of your brain onto a page. I might take some cracks at some stuff and see if anything worthwhile sticks at some point.
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Jul 21, 2023 23:48
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It's a good thread, OP.
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Jul 22, 2023 00:02
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MrQwerty posted:I generally only share my idiotic photoshop collage work here, but I have a Wacom Intuos, a box full of Prismacolor, a box full of Sharpie, a couple pen cups I stole from work as the plant was shutting down that are overstuffed with pencils and pens of varying type and width, and a bunch of sketchbooks of varying sizes. Drawing is fun even if it's just straight poo poo coming out of your brain onto a page. Intuos pals. You're right though, drawing can be pretty fun even if it's complete nonsense. What matters is if you enjoy it less than what the product is. You should definitely try to make something! Literally A Person posted:It's a good thread, OP. Literally, thanks.
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Jul 22, 2023 01:22
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Fantastic thread Gave it an instant 5
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Jul 22, 2023 01:33
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Sticky this poo poo
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Jul 22, 2023 01:36
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Grey Cat posted:Intuos pals. My top 2 favorite nibs are the felt one and the springloaded airbrush one, followed closely with the soft plastic tip that feels like a ballpoint or small sharpie, then the one it comes with also I got the pistachio color tab  edit 2: I learned how to paint acrylic when I was like 12-13 and got decent, then just let it sit and the one art thing I've never done (I took a couple art electives in college since I was there forever and got real high marks, that shading object tutorial is really good) is learn to oil paint because it scares the poo poo out of me to this day, plus I don't have the space to oil paint. MrQwerty fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 02:24
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Henry Lee Mucus posted:Sticky this poo poo Put it above the rules thread for how important it is
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Jul 22, 2023 02:27
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Grey Cat posted:Thanks for the shouts, all. The literal gaping rear end in a top hat is sort of the essence of goatse…
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Jul 22, 2023 02:36
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Drawing is fun and good for your brain Even it's just a squiggle you made art. That feeling of 'someone will laugh at me for trying' is in your head. If someone actually laughs at you for trying walk away.
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Jul 22, 2023 02:36
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Henry Lee Mucus posted:Sticky this poo poo ChickenHeart posted:Put it above the rules thread for how important it is I had a  thanks guys.Treecko posted:Drawing is fun and good for your brain I agree, it's like having a friend who treats you like poo poo. They aren't your friend. If someone rips on your for trying things like exercising or drawing, you can pretty much disregard them completely. I will personally hang anyone's art on my refrigerator if they think it's bad. Grey Cat fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 03:17
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Grey Cat posted:I look forward to whatever cheeky thing cum up with, fellow tux enjoyer. sorry for the delay i was probated for describing dracula's pale balls  e: sorry this was done using my tablet instead of a mouse, fibro doesnt play well with mkb
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Jul 22, 2023 05:41
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cumpantry posted:sorry for the delay i was probated for describing dracula's pale balls i already voted 5, but i'm pressing it again anyway
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Jul 22, 2023 05:44
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cumpantry posted:sorry for the delay i was probated for describing dracula's pale balls Lucifer! I stare into the abyss... and it stares back. back sack
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Jul 22, 2023 05:45
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Hello old friend in one page, well done goons. You're on the hook for some tips for straight monochrome stuff now though.
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Jul 22, 2023 05:58
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