Hi, Maya is my name. There is noone the same. I am 22, quite in love with soft colours, fairy tales, dreamy landscapes, animation and art. Feel free to message me. ;) And a little of poetry is never bad.This is my little blog for reblogging thigs I love.
mayawhiterose-art is my personal art blog
Color-related bc you've done such a good job with your past explanations on the topic in a way that was really helpful, but I had a quick question regarding choosing background color(s) for a character. For a character that has multiple colors, how do you pick a background color that will complement the subject? Just as an example, if you have a chara that's, say, a girl with long red hair, peach skin, and a blue dress, how do you choose a single bg color that will work (cont-)
I think more often I overlay the background into the character/objects rather than the other way around!
This might seem a little weird, but I can’t really find an example that is the opposite. Even if I do a white bg, usually there’s an imaginary lighting that could be put in if I needed to.
So for example in this one:
these two were drawn separate (actually before) the bg. Their colors are kind of… flat? they’re not incorrect (by themselves) but they don’t fit in the picture.
This is the final, post a few gradient maps, level adjustments, and rendering on top. Everything took on a blue green tint to accommodate the bg.
You can do this without photoshop’s abilities! Its just knowing that casting a red light on blue will make it purple, yellow light will make it green, and so on. References of the materials in that light helps.
On ‘flat’ backgrounds, I sometimes switch the color a lot! The last one I did I knew I wanted ‘teal and orange’, not really how. I flip-flopped the color scheme midway through.
So my advice is to
pick the odd color out to complete a color scheme (red hair, blue dress, I’d go yellowish bg for warm, purple for cool)
decide on complimentary colors that are just going to ‘overlay’ the actual colors like the bottom example.
or match the colors of objects and figures to a predetermined ‘light and setting’, even if it’s not a full rendered bg. Everything will harmonize under that like the first example!
so here’s a tiny tutorial about light reflections (i’m no expert though!!)
the drawing made in july is lacking on light reflections
the one done in september looks much better since i paid attention to them
Also remember that the intensity of the lighting depends on the material on which it is reflected, eg. glass / metal / fabrics etc. Glossy surfaces reflect the lighting more than matte surfaces
quick diy tutorial for fast lace patterns or whatever. even if u dont use them in the end its still fun to see what works! (hint: its literally anything)
Apparently this guy was at his mother in law’s house and they were all going through photo albums and he sees he photobombed his wife 11 years before they even met. I fucking love this.
I have some general advice that could be useful. Use as few layers of paint as possible when learning how to use watercolors. I know watercolors has transparency as one of it’s signature qualities but it’s often led inexperienced painters to make muddy illustrations without meaning to because they keep overlaying different colors on top of each other. Remember color theory and how layers of colors work over each other. Keep it simple in the beginning and once you get the hang of it, you can start getting complex and crazy. Try to be tactical about where your putting the brush and what color you’re using. It’s not a forgiving medium, so you have to learn to be extra careful. Take it slow and be patient, you won’t get better overnight. Kind of redundant, but have a pencil drawing underneath to make sure you know what you’re painting. Try to mix your colors rather than taking it straight from the tube/cakes. This kind of depends on what your working on, if your painting is more realistic, mix colors to give them a natural feel. Using colors straight from the tube is great for saturated points of light or focus. Regardless, I would encourage you all to mix colors because it’s helps you understand how color works. Get good white gouache, for the highlights and lighting and stuff. Work from lightest to darkest, less mistakes that way. Keep your palette dirty, the leftover colors can be revitalized with water and can give you great neutrals to work with. After a couple of paintings, clean it completely so you have a fresh plate to have a different palette of colors. Take care of your brushes. Always clean them after you finish your work, it’ll make them last longer and keep the tip nice and pristine. I almost forgot to mention this but for goodness sake, use a larger brush for painting large areas. It’s criminal to put so much pressure on a tiny brush to fill a large space. Basic math, if the area is more than 3-5 times the width of the brush, use a bigger one. Make sure your cup of water is kept clear as often as possible. Using dirty water has often led to murky colors and unwanted greyness in paintings, so keep that on check. If your painting looks a little browner than you wanted, its probably because of your cup. Clean it out. Keep you work station clear and organized. This helps with cleaning up and also keeps motions fluid and uninhibited. Look at other watercolor artists, Ilya Ibryaev, Rex Brandt, G D Paulraj, G D Arulraj, and G D Thyagaraj, as some examples. Even Miyazaki’s watercolors are phenomenal. Dropping Kazuo Oga’s name too, even though he doesn’t use watercolors, because he’s the bomb diggity and his work is amazing. Here is video of one of his paintings, watch it, it’s good shit. Don’t be limited by what you see, do make the effort to look up as much references and inspirations as you can to help guide you to where you want the result to go. Be patient, and practice, practice, practice.
If you like the watercolor effect, but have trouble with analogue execution, I would highly recommend getting Kyle Webster’s Watercolor Brushset,which can give convincing results if you learn how to use them properly.
There is more stuff to learn about watercolor than just the tips here. Experiment, learn, research, educate yourself, and have fun!
so i posted [link: this] last night and the question i get the most whenever i animate is “how is this so fluid/smooth!”, so I thought i’d answer that and take some time to talk a little about some animation principles?
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second most often question i get is “how do you animate linelessly” which i’ll answer first because it has a much shorter answer which is - its actually super easy and you can get away with a lot by just moving coloured blobs around LMAO
animating w lines is a lot harder bc you have to maintain the model more precisely for it to not look garbo n i dont got time for that.
besides, i see things in shapes not lines anyway so its just more intuitive for me to work linelessly! most all of my animation starts with circles to capture the motion!
here’s a clip from while i was still working on it,
as u can see i basically work by moving blobs around LMAO
heres an older thing i animated last yr that shows the circle thing better
when im animating something, im more concerned about how it moves than how it looks - refining the looks can be done at the end, a pretty picture with bad underlying animation is still bad animation no matter how pretty i make it!
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anyway back to the first question - this is actually a bit of a misnomer! “fluidity”, “smoothness”, the thing about that is you can create smoother animation by adding more frames.
consider:
but I can actually do a lot more to make the motion here appealing and believable with just 7 frames at 12fps, than all 24 of those frames at 24fps
this isnt down to the smoothness of it, but a few principles of animation!
- timing
no natural movement happens at a constant rate. moving up and down at the exact same amount and speed like this:
you’re only gonna see that coming from a robot or a computer..! So the first thing i’ve done here is change the rate of movement:
the ball or whatever slows to a stop before it changes direction, and then it builds speed before it stops again. theres a lot of like fancy words for this like inertia but in animation this we call slow-in and slow out.
but, like, basically the point is we’re not robots and we dont have mechanical movements, so we won’t move at a constant rate of motion! we gotta accellerate into a movement, and when you stop not all of you stops at the same time.
- squash and stretch
you probably picked up on this already, but i made the ball squishier. you can see this actually happening in real life if you watch super slowmo videos but this isnt actually about realism as it is about selling to you, the viewer, that this thing is hitting something or moving very fast!
you can really feel it hitting the ground and then pushing up into the air when it gets squashed like that you know??
- anticipation
another thing that’s going on when you add that slow in-out like that is you build anticipation for the motion that’s about to come. when the ball hangs in the air for a second, you know that in a split second it’s going to fall back down again.
think about when a looney tunes character runs off the edge of a cliff and looks down before they plummet to the ground - that’s a really extreme example of building up anticipation! you see them hanging in the air and you know any second now they’re going to fall.
and, when you expect a movement to happen like that, it’s really satisfying when it finally happens.
this is something I really focused on playing up when animating saturday shorts pearl. compare the last kick pearl does here to the one brian does:
brian actually hardly does a kick at all! but I just really wanted to build the anticipation here for the transition between moves
and brian here has a really fun transition if you’re watching his head or his hands - but unfortunately, if you’re watching his feet the motion is a little hard to track particularly when transitioning to 2d, and since the kicks are the primary motion that’s happening here i opted to emphasise it to make it easier to follow
in fact if i play the whole clip you’ll hopefully find pearl’s feet nice & easy to keep track of:
if id given myself more time i’d’ve added more bounce to it all (and all kinds of things) but Alas. anyway hopefully you can see how while i referenced the original, what i actually animated is not actually the same!
- overshoot
if I slow this down, you can really see what’s going on here:
if you focus on her feet first, you’ll see that anticipation build up before her foot actually over swings a little bit before finally pulling down to the floor.
this is called overshooting, and you can also see this much more strongly if you watch her hand
instead of stopping where the first arrow ends, her hand continues for a few frames before pulling back in to finally hit the target!
this overshoot is part of the same motion as the anticipation from the foot, by the way. the more you build anticipation for a motion, the more likely it is that it’s going to overshoot!
- secondary animation
so when you animate something you have your primary animation, this is something like “pearl kicks her legs and swings her arms and hips”
other things will then react to this primary motion and move independantly in response to it, and this is called secondary animation.
consider - you have a piece of string hanging from between your fingers, and you wave your hand back and forth. the primary motion is your hand is moving, the secondary motion is that the string is reacting to that and moving as a result
secondary animation adds a LOT to the believability of something’s movement - consider, here is pearl’s shuffle with the secondary animations removed
and here it is again with the secondary animations - her hair and her short’s drawstrings - added back in
this is some pretty complex secondary animation i’ll be honest - but the basic principle is, when pearl moves, her hair & the drawstrings follow behind it, and when pearl’s feet hit the floor there’s a shockwave that goes through her body that causes them to be jostled.
let me slow this down so you can watch it:
pay attention to how, for example, when pearl starts swinging her hips, the drawstrings trail behind a little! it takes them a moment to react to the change in direction, and they overshoot before following along again
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to me, good animation is not about realistic movement, but tactile movement.
when I watch something, I really like to feel like i can actually feel the movement happening. so this is why I didn’t animate exactly as brian did - that’s realistic motion, but it’s not tactile motion. when I watch brian, I don’t feel the impact of his feet hitting the floor, or the swing of his arms and hips!
when there’s enough anticipation, overshoot, squash&stretch, and secondary animation, it all comes together to create, for me, a really tactile sense of movement! these are the four principles that I consider to be the most important, and inform all the animation that I do.
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anyway those are just a few of the principles of animation, theoretically i could break down everything i did while animating this but we’d be here for days so instead here’s a nice little video about the 12 principles and i hope what I covered here was insightful for you!
full disclosure i’ve been animating since I was 12 so i’ve had a whole decade to internalise these principles, if it’s a little hard for you to grasp things don’t worry! if you’re interested in getting into animation, [link: this list of exercises you can do is a great place to start.]
