For people curious about my settings
1. I use the brush tool for almost everything, even for lineart. Easy for rough sketching.
2. Blending, works better with a texture thrown in.
3. Flat brush gets you a semi painterly look, wonderful for laying down color and whatnot.
4. Overlay abuse, I actually do most of my color blending with them haha
Brushes downloaded from here I believe
Hospitalvespers posted their brush settings and I thought I’d try it out… Just because I was in the mood, I compared it against Chun’s old one and my own personal (latest) preference as well!
I’m not using the exact same textures and shapes for these brushes, just close approximations. No matter what, “flat” brushes don’t work as well if you go above a certain size—you lose a ton of control. So be aware of that if you’d like to switch from a traditional round brush shape.
By the way, you can download the ‘pencil’ texture from this Japanese site. Anything else can be found under my brushes tag.
reblogging even though I don’t use Sai. :0
Want more space to work with SAI? This reminds me of OpenCanvas.
Open misc.ini in your SAI directory, set PopupPanels and PopupNavigator to 1 and save.
This also lets me resize the tool panel so I can see all of it.
I will have to try this.
Re-updated all my old brushes! These are the updated version with bonus bg brushes!
Also, i use a ton of textures for BGs and some brush textures, which you can find all on DeviantArt! :0
This was an experiment I ended up liking. I did it to draw this and this. Basically, it’s a quick way to get started on a painting. This is gonna be a face so I can show the details. I decided I want to draw a guy this time, with a smug expression. This should be fun.
THIS IS FOR PAINT TOOL SAI. You’d be doing yourself no favors trying it in Photoshop.
01. I fill the canvas with a dark, desaturated color. Above that I begin to block in colors in a shape that resembles what I’m painting. The color I used is a peachy skin tone.
02. Using a brown or tan color, I draw on some line art. It looks ridiculous right now and that’s ok. All of this is done on the same layer.
03. On the same layer, I begin to block in colors (over the lines somewhat). I’m concerned with just covering the blue of the canvas. I’m being bold with a lot of the color choices, but it’ll pay off.
I use this little chart for starter skin colors:
04. With my water color brush on these settings (the size/density get toggled, and usually on the side of larger + lighter opacity):
I begin to blend with a sort of pinky peach color, to start. I blend all the colors together on the same layer, just basically mixing everything. I change the color depending on the saturation of the area being painted, so I switch to an orange for more red areas. Basically, try and match the colors. If you paint over a cooler area with a warmer watercolor, it will change it, of course.
05. This is the brush I do the first few details with! I got it from Tumblr, you’ve probably seen it around, it’s that really good blend-y edit for the acrylic brush:
(I toggle the size and opacity, but on the side of smaller + darker.)
I begin to pick up colors from both the canvas and the color wheel to make details. A lot of nice pretty colors are on our canvas already and it’d be a shame to waste them. But using the same colors to blend without eyedropping new ones will make the color palette a bit flat. Thus, I do both.
06. I also tighten up with an airbrush on these settings, changing only the opacity and size. I remember that it is entirely possible to overpaint things, so I try and enhance what I’ve already done instead of trying to repaint it. This is a mistake I and a lot of artists make, I think.
07. Still fixing up with the airbrush + watercolor (sparingly) + acrylic.
08. Once I’ve made some headway on refining, I get a gigantic airbrush (about 200px) and turn down the opacity to about 8-11% and begin to brush some reds and yellows onto the face to warm it up. Alternately, I’ve brushed greens and blues and purples to cool skin before.
09. I pick my background color and begin to use it to clean up the edges.
10. Last thing I do is paint his eyes! Time to export and edit the colors a bit in Photoshop. I try and fix them as much as I can in SAI with painting, but digital lends itself to the ability to fix quickly. Pretty much why I like to digital paint, besides it being cheap.
11. Before I export, there’s a few things I can do to make it better. Since it’s kind of quick and cartoony, I can lightly line it and make it pop. Or I can refine further with a nice textured brush and make it look more realistic. I dig the lines, so I’m going with those.
12. After I PS it (which is nothing more than a linear contrast curves layer and some warming via selective color) I shrink, duplicate the image and run a Paint Daubs filter (both settings on 1) to sharpen it. I take down the opacity of the sharpened layer to about 40-60%. I’m done!
I like samecity’s skin tones a lot, so here is a quick tutorial-y thing she did on ‘em.
Got lots of asks about this, so here it is! Doing these are different and fun~ I made up this way of doing them by playing around, so I hope it makes sense!
I haven’t done a tutorial in 3 years
I’ve had a general idea what these things did but wasn’t completely sure what their specific functions were. I decided to sit down and figure it out, and I have thrown together a short reference guide for anyone who is confused about them. I know there are multiple translations of SAI floating…
More sai coloring practice. This round I decided to do Magma Dragoon from the Mega Man series. Came out alright and comic like in some ways. As to the sketch, this one is done by an old penpal of mine Rinpoo Chuang http://rinpoo-chuang.deviantart.com/ Good luck trying to contact her. It’s near impossible.
Definitely feel like going back to photoshop for the time being but it was still nice to experiment in sai again. Definitely will be doing more lines in sai in the near future.
