Sketch Blog

OpenToonz Animation Timelapse from Draconian Rain on Vimeo . I made this in hopes of showing others that you don't need to be in a studio or use fancy software to make animation with cool looking effects. It's a shame that so many people strongly believe that you need After Effects to create anything halfway decent. It's simply not true. All you need is passion, determination, motivation and a willingness to not only learn but be prepared to do problem solving. After you learn OpenToonz, your only real roadblock is yourself. Keep trying guys. Just keep at it and please always use freeware to learn animation first because so many people after they realise there is not "do it for me" option and find out that you have to do everything yourself, these people give up while others come to find that despite the results they absolutely hate the process and also give up. Don't waste your precious money on paid software until you are certain that animation i...

I've started to use Krita again in preference of photoshop. My only gripe is that for some reason my brushes won't export from my laptop properly and I only end up with about half of the brushes I put into the pack. It's very frustrating. Well anyway, there's really not much to say. This was an unplanned work I managed to record on livestream.

2nd experiment: Painting hair and darker skin tones. Usually I paint darker skin to orange. Not just because I have some issues seeing certain colours in a certain hue properly but also because I lack the skills to balance it out. The best thing about Krita is that the layer Blend modes function a lot like Photoshop (Which I can no longer afford to sub to) AND it has a HUGE amount of other options for adjusting colours or changing them as well as some useful masking options. I used a little bit of masking and at once stage you can see me get confused in this video. So far loving the changes. Usually I couldn't use texture brushes because of lag. Now, it's not an issue. Each update I am noticing the changes in performance and things added. Loving the direction Krita is heading towards!

I have been doing a lot of these but have been unable to record them. So for the first time in a long time I managed to record some art without any crashing from either Krita or Snagit. My main experiment was the brush sizes and lag while recording. I prefer to do my blending with a particular paint brush and some times a variety of blurring blender brushes. Usually though it's just a standard smudge brush with a thick paint load. One thing about Krita, I always seem to draw very dark and often use a lot of grey. It's funny how it works out like that but I like it. I find I can create saturated art a lot easier in Krita than any other art application which is important to me. I often like to do a lot of dark themed art but when I have the opportunity to use sparkly shiny things I tend to lose focus and create the exact opposite of what I was aiming for. My next few experiments in the near future is animating in a painterly style in Krita and creating some animations wit...

SR2 Boss wip 3 by MiwaSketch on deviantART Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad here, right now: $0.02 As you can see I have been into making Saints Row 2 fan art again but with a twist on how I would actually like my character to look with various scars and tattoos. It's been fun and entertaining. I have this displayed on my Fan Art DA account. I have been really enjoying digital painting lately. Something about it is so relaxing sometimes. It's still a work in progress. I have yet to add the person being held by their shirt.

So I had quite a hectic time with this. I had a 1yr subscription that I imported for retas studio. I tried making this animation in it since I learned it and I found that no matter the program or pencil and paper I still had the one issue that keeps coming up. Export, loss of quality and video editing. After spending days to make just this which I changed over to toonboom studio to complete, I realised that I am going to have to learn to use adobe after effects. And it's been so hard. It's been very overwhelming. Unfortunately I don't have the PC power to use it effectively which means both my PC and Laptop will need an upgrade =___=  Still I am pretty determined to get 2D animation to work for me. I just WISH I had the money to buy toon boom animate or animate pro. But I don't so I'll just have to stick to using multiple programs. At the moment I am using Clip Studio Paint, Adobe After Effects, Toon Boom Studio and Flash. Just makes me glad that I can afford ad...

I LOVE screentoing in Clip Studio Paint! Love everything about it. I have found it easier, cleaner and more accurate. It also doesn't hurt my eyes as much as MangaStudioEX4 did.

I do apologise if it annoys people but money is tight and I will be resorting to Project Wonderful ads. I've used adsense but it's always under performed for me. Also offering digital painting commissions for a short amount of time. It's only for this blog's followers. So make sure you're a follower before you ask. The main reason is so I can contact you later about your order if you make one. The main type of digital painting I am offering at this time is currently Digital Portraits. That means the painting is painted digitally in a program like Photoshop. Manually hand painted using a graphics tablet. Specifically an IntuosPro 5. Two examples from my DA accounts (one is my main art account the other my fan art account) Contact me for a quote. Bow Down by DraconianRain on deviantART Missy Wip 2 by MiwaSketch on deviantART

So my grandfather gifted me money to buy Zbrush! Can't believe it. I never see that kind of money for myself and I'm very grateful. I'm going to put it through good use. I've been on and off with 3D but I very badly wanted zbrush since I'm just one of those people that's better suited to sculpting. I can make nice faces in an hour. Nothing pro but pleasing to look at. I was using sculptris and Blender for the longest time. But enoough rambling. Here's a few screen shots of some of the models I've been making on the side during other projects and when I needed some me time rest. It looks like more work than it is but I haven't spent more than an hour on each except for that creepy looking doll thing. It took I think 2 or 3 hours. Because I kept screwing it up and also because I was having so many tablet issues, I decided some mouse modelling would be more fun than sitting and waiting for my tablet to update. As you can see, ...

So I've been busy with life. Mostly washing clothes. It's winter and of course even though the sun is out nothing is drying. But enough about that. My 3D work has made a slight change. I'm using Unity now because the Blender Game engine just isn't working out for me. I must say though with the latest update I finally like Unity. My problem was always textures and rigging but with how Auto-rig works I don't have to worry about mapping my bones any more. I'm also making an effort to learn C# for unity scripts. First C# then I might look at java. But it's going well so far. Mostly I'm just trying to get use to the unity editor at the moment and learning small amounts of C# here and there. I'm pretty happy with things though I'm not sure if I can learn programming well enough to do what I want to achieve. Only time will tell at this point. Also, after loosing two art trades, one of them twice I got back to work on one of them and it's comin...

So I hit 1000 views today. I thought I should at least make a new post since people are stopping by. My current progress in blender, I have worked out other ways to add to toon shader. Also I used Freestyle for the lines. I haven't found a setting I like just yet since I'm still trying to work out how to use freestyle.

So the characters in this work are Salem (The male) and Faith. Yesterday I spent hours, unexpectedly a lot more time than I planned on digitally painting this work in opencanvas. It's not finished yet, I have to experiment more with the bottom left corner. So far so good. I tried out sharpen filter on my painting this time. It definitely gave some unique paint like looks and feeling to it. And it certainly added some much needed depth. My only issue now is to try not to over abuse it and ruing the work but like my first time with overlay, it's going to take time, practise and time to settle down from the excitment over it. Tools Used: Wacom Intuos 5 OpenCanvas 5.5 Regular wacom pen nib, black.

Well I decided to hide away on April Fools day. Almost every site seems to be participating. I have a new webcomic posted on smackjeeves now. Starts out with some action. Visit the webcomic here:  Lost Words The Webcomic Right now I am working on a digital painting that is mostly just for fun and is a bit of a spoiler for early readers. Please do not steal or use without my permission or remove my watermark. I spent hours and hours on the cover art only to screw up the text. But it will do for now. I'll be updating the comic either monthly or several times a month. I mostly want a reasonable update schedule. The first image was drawn and painted in OpenCanvas 5.5 and the bottom image was drawing in Photoshop CS6

This drawing was a colouring and painting experiment in Photoshop CS6. Please repsect my work, these images on this blog belong to me. I used Gradient Map for the first time on the hair and I adore the effects of it. I think I will be using it more often. Pinky by ~ DraconianRain on deviantART

Here are some of my MangaStudio tutorials that I have posted, most on DeviantArt. http://draconianrain.deviantart.com/journal/Manga-Studio-EX-4-Walk-Through-Part-1-305058988 http://draconianrain.deviantart.com/journal/Manga-Studio-Walkthrough-Part-2-3D-305366109 http://draconianrain.deviantart.com/journal/Manga-Studio-Walkthrough-Part-3-Wavy-Text-Text-305375882 http://draconianrain.deviantart.com/journal/Manga-Studio-EX-Tutorial-From-Sketch-to-Finish-321648109 http://draconianrain.deviantart.com/journal/Manga-Studio-Why-Are-my-tones-showing-up-gray-306389127 http://miwasketch.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-13.html Hopefully you'll find these helpful Happy drawing!

Painting in paint tool SAI again. Used photoshop lens flare for the sun effect and the text but the rest was all done in SAI. Had a lot of fun making the hair and dress. Not fussed on Jaide's jacket. Bit annoyed with the clouds too. Didn't quite go the way I wanted to but I do like how they look though so that's a plus. Need more practise drawing clouds. It's been a long time since I last drew or painted them.

So for a while now I've been tossing an idea around in my head and I've decided to just dive in head first and go for it. But first I really should write it. Anyway here's a doodle of one such idea I have for the story. I might post more later. If I got through with the comic I'll post links. Drawn in sai. Also I discovered a nifty line smoothing feature in sai. It's called Stablizer. I turned it on and off throughout drawing this pic. Original characters, Jaide and Arabella. Characters and art belong to me so please respect my work and do not use without my permission. An alternative hair colour picture of Jaide. At first I had navy hair but then I wanted to see him with something blonde like. Then I tried brown and black and they all looked so nice with his skin tone and green eyes I decided that he can just dye his hair in the comic lol. I'm not quite set on Arabella's eyes in front view just yet, she's still in the early stages of desig...

These were all made using J-Wildfire. Most were randomly generated, others made and some generated then tweaked. They make pretty funky wallpapers and very interesting textures for clothing and anything artistic you can think of. If you make something, I'd love to see it. But since it's randomly generated I've no problem with them being pinched to do whatever. Just credit me please.

Pros: No waiting for things to dry No cleaning up. No mess. Exact colours and any colour always available. My pet peeve in traditional art was running out of black or white. No worry about too big or too small. Easy to resize canvas. Print out Take as long as needed without worrying about damaging what you're working. I mean this in the way that over painting paper can damage the paper. Quicker Relaxing to do on a laptop in a comfy chair or in bed Tablet is portable Me personally I can draw emotions better, my art is more alive but other artists are the opposite. Relaxing to draw in paint tool sai and enjoy many hours of drawing with full freedom. There's less restrictions than in traditional. No need to buy more supplies, it's a one time cost for the drawing program and tablet if you take good care of your tablet. Gets addictive because once you no longer feel restricted the ideas come pouring out. Cons: Can't do it without some form of computer C...