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Animation techniques and more Ghibli thoughtsIn my last journal I mentioned the strange effect of seeing super cartoony flat characters moving around in a hyper realistic world. There's actually a name for this, it's call the "masking effect" and it was quite elaborately detailed by Scott McCloud in his book "understanding comics."
In comics, frequently the main characters are portrayed as cartoony and simple, while backgrounds often get very detailed. The basic concept is pretty simple. The more cartoony a character is drawn, the more appealing and relatable it is to us as we can more easily imagine ourselves in the role. The more realistic something is, the less of a personal connection you have to it. This is why villains tend to be drawn more realistically, and heros more cartoony. But it goes beyond just the characters... the environment also is affected.
If a person in a cartoon picks up a sword and starts swinging it around, the sword becomes an extension of their body and since it's animated, it becomes a drawn thing whic

Quick Tips: On Referencing AnatomyReference from real life whenever possible.
When you reference or copy from another artist's studies/sketches/art, you may be copying their mistakes as well. Furthermore, an artist's studies are their notes and --just like with history or chemistry notes-- copying someone else's notes will not help you fully understand the material. To completely understand anatomy, you must take your own notes and build your own understanding through observation.
This is probably a no-brainer for many artists but... ~scruffynerfherder and I were talking about this last night, and with the increase of "anatomy studies" showing up on dA's front page, it's been on my mind. DA's resource category has some great material, but I also feel like there is a lot of misleading information taught by amateurs who really probably shouldn't be teaching things like shading or anatomy, because they have a less-than-stellar grasp on it themselves. I'm not trying to knock anyone here, but it's a bit tr

Know your Basics - PerspectivePerspective comes in different forms, the most obvious & basic of which is the use of the word in relation to the appearance of relative orientation in a three dimensional space. At first, it may seem irrelevant to photomanipulators, (because, hey, the photographs already are perspectively sound,) but putting more than one photograph in context requires that you learn to see what makes sense and what doesn't.
The Technical Stuff

Perspective (from Latin perspicere, to see through) in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn:
Smaller as their distance from the observer increasesForeshortened: the size of an object's dimensions along the line of
sight are relatively shorter than dimensions acro

SOPA, Internet, Censorship, and Youhttp://spyed.deviantart.com/journal/Regarding-SOPA-amp-deviantART-269431917 $spyed's journal entry regarding this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act - Wikipedia
This is a informative article, outside of the normal DLD activities, to bring awareness to a pair of bills currently under much discussion and debate. These bills are called called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIP (Protect IP), presented to the House of Representatives and the senate (respectively) in the United States. Later in this article, we will also discuss how these bills have a world wide significance. At the end of the article are several links to the actual bill, news articles, and forum/journals related to this topic. Our aim here is to give to a brief overview, and to answer some questions concerning this debate.
SOPA itself is an attempt to stop online piracy both domestic and foreign by the United States Gov't. It employs a variety of tactics in order to achieve this, including scannin

Tutorial Treasury 03In the Tutorial Treasury, you will find tutorials geared towards Photomanipulators and some that will deal with a broader subjects, such as lighting, colour etc. The tutorials will be from dA as well as from all over the web and in each episode, there will be 3 to 6 tutorials for your reading pleasure (any more than that I guess no one will have time to read anyway). If you find any good ones, shoot me a note so I can include them in the next installment!
The Tutorials

Create this beautiful treehouse artwork using a combination of photo manipulation and painting techniques. Find out how to easily draw a surreal-looking tree easily using the Brush tool, clouds from scratch, and more! You’ll learn all these techniques in this Photoshop tutorial.

read the tutoria

Stars TutorialYup yup, new tutorial from me. Link to it on my website:

I'll eventually make DA-compatible version of it, but that will have to wait. I can't exactly use the same kind of layout format as with my previous tutorials, as this one has waaaay too varying kinds of images to fit into a mold like that and still look good. And holy moly, that's a lot of text! Took me several hours to write! But at least I've explained things by depth, hrrmh. o_o
Indeed, I drew that image over a month ago, and I've had the all the necessary pieces of the tutorial lying around, ready to be tutorialized, ever since. But with everything else going on it had to wait. But now the tutorial is done and I'm going to have some icecream! And then it's time to draw yet another comic page...
~
Which leads me to this: Eeee! I can't believe the cover page for the prologue chapter got a DD! I'm so happy! I've been smiling so bad that my whole face hurts. When I lo

DISCOVER A NEW FEATURE ON DEVIANTART!!!Click on ~world or follow this link. It shows you faves/llamas etc being given...
What do you think of this new quaint and useless feature?

A tough question now. How are you going to thank !prosaix for showing you this funky new thing and letting you in the zone? :iconleleleplz:

If you want more people to see this, this journal.
Yay random gifs

Twenty Tempting Textures III
Wintery Blue,Grey and White tones,combined with delicate lacy grungy frost crystals.
Perfect for your Winter themed Arts.
Enhance,add depth or create an ambient atmosphere with these wonderful frozen and grungy
Textures that are just calling to be incorporated into your digital projects.
Use them in backgrounds or just overlay and blend into your winter-themes to add interest to
a unique area of your designs.
With your fantasy the possibilities are limitless.

Interested in Dreamworks? Lighting ResourceSo I attended a talk by Bert Poole - He's currently serving as a CG Supervisor on their new movie "The Croods" scheduled for release in March 2013. His most recent movie, you all know of is How to Train Your Dragon, where he was also a CG Supervisor. If you don't know what that means, that means he worked on lighting C: What I'm putting below is from notes I took during his lecture.
His job is to take the directors vision and make the movie look like it. He's making compositions and helping the story to better read. If you've ever talked to me on DA for three or more posts, you might have heard me blab about my major and what I'd like to do. I'd like to do into Lighting, animation second. I just don't feel my skills are as suited for animation, even though I really enjoy it.
Before they start lighting, they work on color Keys
Color Keys are painted works that are used to indicate:
time of day
mood
Key/Fill ratio
Key/Fill color
Hard/Soft light
Atmosphere
When you're lighting a piece in

Gaining Exposure To ArtGaining Exposure For Your Own Art:
Being active on the site is probably the best and most effective way to get yourself and your art seen. Leaving thoughtful comments on others art will often result in them coming to your page to find out more about you and see your art. Being involved and making friends will promt people to focus on you and your art giving you a bit more exposure. Leaving critiques, helping to moderate groups, posting in the forums, or simply chatting it up in the chatrooms. These can all be beneficial in getting you more exposure. Below I'd like to outline some of the wonderful ways, I believe, you can gain extra exposure to your art.
Groups:
Joining groups which are relevant to your interests and the art which you make can be very helpful in getting your art out there and seen by like minded individuals. The introduction of groups by dA has made it very e

Drawing Resources, Sharing is caring!Though I would share some cool tutorials I found. This place has got some pretty boss tutorials made by pros http://www.imaginefx.com/02287754330326480692/workshops.html you can download them in pdf form

Also found some resources. Lots of people ask me where I get my brushed and tones and what not..I don't actually remember where I got the tones since I got them 3-4 years ago and I make my own Photoshop brushes but I did find some cool stuff while browsing for new stuff.
Screentones http://www.idrawdigital.com/2010/03/download-screentones/
Comic book text http://www.idrawdigital.com/2010/03/download-fonts-for-comic-book-lettering/
There are lots of great brushes right here on DA. Here are a few of my favs;

Also love all these brushes http://concept-on-mac.deviantart.com/gallery/1033022
few example

Gesture practise http://lovecastle.org/draw/
and lastly..textures! for all your free texture nee

7 Tips To Instantly Become A Better ArtistPractice, practice, practice.  Gah.
Attend life drawing classes over the summer.  Blegh.
Take a sketchbook with you everywhere you go, and fill up ten of those bad boys at the coffee shop.  Pfft.
Let's be honest here.  We all want to become better artists, like, right frickin' now.  We don't even want to have to suffer through hour-long tutorials of some pompous snooty hack bloviating over the intricate methods of drawing eyes on YouTube.  We want progress, we want improvement, and we want it on our desk in ten minutes ago!
Fine, fine, I hear ya'.  While these aren't going to make an instant Leonardo da Vinci out of you, these might get you up to...ehh...Basquiat caliber.  Sure, I've made tutorials, but those are more about setting up Photoshop for the sake of coloring an image, and not so much building yourself artistically.  Those are more technical lessons.  Artistically

Border CSS TipsYou'll find many border css styles all around the web .. I am not adding anything new here .. just collecting some of my favourite border styles and tips together .. Also I want our students in ~eCSSercise to check on this blog .. hope u'll find them useful

Wow .. thanx for the feedback .. with ur help I'll add more tips below .. keep an eye on them XD
What's a border?
Border is what surrounds your html/css object/item, let it be a text, an empty box, or an image .. etc
What makes up a border?
Border has four properties:
Color - Width - Style - Radius
Whether you choose for your border to be visible or not, bear in mind it's made up of four parts:
Top - Bottom - Right - Left
How to use that in CSS?
The border properties have different ways to write down their values, but I always use a fixed/limited way:
color: #------; --> border color
width: --px; --> border thickness
style: solid, dashed, dotted; --> border ap

Tutorial Treasury 04In the Tutorial Treasury, you will find tutorials geared towards Photomanipulators and some that will deal with a broader subjects, such as lighting, colour etc. The tutorials will be from dA as well as from all over the web and in each episode, there will be 3 to 6 tutorials for your reading pleasure (any more than that I guess no one will have time to read anyway). If you find any good ones, shoot me a note so I can include them in the next installment!
The Tutorials

Create realistic rose text using some simple layer styles and custom made brushes. This Photoshop rose text will not be completly made from scratch, we'll have to use a beautiful Rose PNG stock image. A nature inspired text effect can be used in so many creative ways, to decorate your scrapbook for example.

read the

American Comics, Manga...AND WAR!This is a major turning point in the history of comics, World War II. This period of time not only changed comics as we knew them, but also other areas in graphics such as propaganda posters. Now mid to late 1930's we've seen the birth of the modern comic book. Due to the war as well we're also now seeing the birth of war comics. An obvious example of this as I'm sure many of you have already guessed is Captain America Comics in 1941 (before American involvement in the war). Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby who worked for Timely Comics, which of course has now become Marvel Comics. He gained amazing popularity and is often fighting the Axis powers in World War II.
Around this time in Japan has been rebuilding itself, its political and economic infrastructure was changing. Whilst American occupation disallowed art or published material that glorified war or the Japanese military. This policy though didn't block th

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Submitted: November 10, 2011

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Water Tutorial

Journal Entry: Thu Nov 10, 2011, 12:22 PM

Oh yeah, that's exactly what I made; a water tutorial!
->link to the tutorial<-
Finally! I haven't made any new tutorials in such a long while, whew! But I think I'll be doing a few during the upcoming year. I've got a whole bunch of great ideas from you guys, and I finally feel like I have the necessary skills to make a couple of those tutorials.

I'll upload the Water Tutorial here on DA too some day, but I've got to wrap it up in a neatly designed little package first, and I have absolutely no inspiration for that right now. It would just end up as something un-inspired and bloopy. Eh, it still might end up as something bloopy , but a little bit of inspiration would be nice anyways.

Critiques are, of course, welcome in case there's something blurghish going on with the tutorial. Helps me make better tutorials in the future. :3

~

By the by, I bought the worst bag of candy ever a couple of days ago! It's so bad that I still haven't managed to finish it and I'm so disgruntled that I'm actually writing about it here, urrgh. Wine gums with natural flavor, my ass... sure, if the flavor they used was monkey bile.
I think I'll just stick with my two Swedish sweet-hearts from now on: Ahlgrens Bilar and Jordgubbs-Snören! Man, some times I feel like my motto is "never try anything new". Talk about lamest motto ever...

A Redtail's Dream
Published pages: 63
Chapter 2
Updated Weekly

~

I'm not uploading the
pages of my webcomic
"a Redtail's Dream" here
on Deviantart for one simple
reason: that would just lead to my
whole gallery becoming completely
spammed by comic pages, and that
would make kittens sad. After all, 1-2
pages a week accumulates quite a pile of
stuff in a pretty short amount of time. And
we don't want sad kittens, now do we?

34 Comments

Water Tutorialby *MinnaSundberg

Journals / Personal

~RainyDayFun Dec 23, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Cool stuff! thanks!

~MistingWolf Nov 15, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

~Reluin Nov 12, 2011

Thanks for making the tutorial! It's so helpful, exactly what I was looking for <33

=DuskSpark Nov 12, 2011

_{Not much to say here, but thank you very much, this tutorial is absolutely amazing c:}

~jacky705 Nov 12, 2011 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

YAY!!

~Jaeniart Nov 11, 2011

Nice tutorial....
good Jobs created.

~Iam add to My Favourite~

*SinnerDom Nov 11, 2011

I see what you mean about it taking hours.
V. accurate and useful but labour intensive.
Thank you very much.
I have it bookmarked and am going to practice some of the techniques tonight.

~Plugin848y Nov 11, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Really great!

~dragonteen1 Nov 11, 2011 Student Digital Artist

oh my gosh it's perfect for what i need! thank you so much!

~The-fishy-one Nov 11, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

Great tutorial!

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