Latest Posts by kevinthecantaloupe - Page 2
had you ever look at character and thought something like "in real life we could be friends"?
yes, I really like Reynir and all his character’s traits :D
i just. i just think he's neat
erin/the void dragon is from @comicaurora
im redrawing panels
erin ruunaser everyone. goes on a study abroad trip and gets possessed by a star eating dragon. and his other half's chosen one wants to kill him to stop the end of the world. and he's only 1 of 6 main characters.
I found the glort texture. expect more etch-a-sketch like drawings in the future
2.4.17
And with Erin’s suffering the bingo card gets another box checked off
sometimes you’re hit with a friendly realization that yes, life is good. you have your comfort characters and you have archive of our own. life is actually beautiful
maybe if i imagine the character all my problems will be solved
Your friends watching something for the first time and getting to that scene VS you, the knower.
people are getting high as fuck on new stupid drug called "night drawing" its making them stay iup all the goddamn night drawing. and brother let me tell you. the drawings. not even good
why can't you stay here awhile? stay with me...
How I Made the Colors in Hunger's Bite So Good
first of all: buy my book. buy it and look at the colors. (if you cannot buy the book, ask for it at your local library or i GUESS you can look at these spreads i posted)
we're gonna talk about colors, but more specifically we're going to talk about overlays. if you're an artist you are probably familiar with overlays. we love our overlays. we love to color a picture and then at the very last minute go 'hm. looks bad. i'm going to put a yellowish overlay on it to make it look less bad :)'
do not do this.
i mean you can, and it'll work sometimes, but all you're really doing is tricking your brain into thinking different is better. you've been staring at the image for potentially several hours. none of the choices you made at the beginning mean anything to you anymore. you're just finishing what you started. one of the big reasons you might look at your art and go 'man, this doesn't look that good' is because You drew it and are intimately familiar with it. you know all the flaws and mistakes because You made them and You know what your vision was. one of the great frustrations with art is that the piece in your head doesn't look like something you actually made. you want it to look like somebody else did it, so you can enjoy it as a viewer, not as the creator.
so when you put that overlay on, and suddenly the image looks very different, your brain will go 'this doesn't look like the thing i've been staring at for 2-3 hours! this is different! now it's good!'
and again, sometimes it Is good. but do you actually understand why it's good? or is it just different?
okay so what am i supposed to do smart guy
i'm glad you asked. the trick to making overlays work is to have them on from the start. this requires knowing what mood you want to convey in your scene from the very beginning. hopefully you know what mood you want to convey. you do, right? and i don't just mean happy or sad, i also mean safe, threatened, familiar, strange, soft and harsh. blue is not always sad. green is not always healthy. yellow/orange are not the only way to convey a companionable warmth.
okay did you pick the mood? do you have an idea of what color you want to use to represent that mood? great. i'm gonna use blue to convey the cool, clean white of a ship's maintenance corridor without making things literally white. and i'm going to stick in two characters whose color palettes consist of bright yellow, brown, and wine red. awesome. i definitely know how those colors would behave under blue lighting.
(here's the thing: no i don't.) this is where a gradient map correction layer comes in. i want my page to be Blue. alright. let's make a gradient map that's Blue.
a gradient map is basically just A Gradient with specific colors connected to specific values. you have your darkest values on the left, and your lighter values on the right. at 100% opacity, this gradient map layer will read the value of anything below it and go 'okay this bit is this dark, so it should be This shade of blue. and this bit is this light, so it should be This shade of blue'.
kind of like a hue or color layer except determined by a gradient rather than one color, so it could also go 'this is light, so it's green' and 'this is dark, so it's purple'. it's math. i don't really get it either. but anyway this is probably not what you want if you want your characters' palettes to be recognizable. emery's sweater is supposed to be a wine red! neeta's skin should be brown, and her shirt should be yellow. these are their Key Colors. generally, i want them to be recognizable. so let's lower that opacity down.
nice! you can definitely now see that emery's sweater is red and neeta's shirt is yellow. and everything is relatively balanced. nothing is too saturated, nothing is significantly brighter than anything else. it's all got a little bit of blue in it. but i've skipped the step of actually picking your colors. because here's the thing with gradient maps.
they hate you and want to fight. when working with gradient maps you must imagine there is a monkey sitting on your shoulder dumping paint in every time you pick a color. the monkey has a tube of blue and he is going to put that blue into everything you paint, but it's not normal paint. it doesn't mix, it overtakes. it won't turn something yellow into green, it will turn it blue. it wants everything to be blue. if you want something to look like the color it's supposed to be, you will have to make it extremely saturated under the layer to essentially fight the paint monkey's blue. hence, emery's sweater is a BRIGHT red, so it will look a little more purpley under the blue. and neeta's skin is very orange, so it can be dulled down into a soft brown.
this is the sort of thing you will have to learn by feel, because it will be different with every gradient map, especially if you start getting into weird ones that aren't monochromatic. you want to know one of my favorite maps to use?
i have memorized where on the value scale all of these colors appear. i can color something using only shades of gray when i have this filter on. i am evolved. if you want to use gradient maps effectively, you'll have to get a lot of practice.
anyway this post got really long and i'm about to go to a movie so i'll talk about how to use screen/multiply/overlay layers later. but gradient maps are the main tool i used to make hunger's bite's palettes so unified across scenes. but you can see way above how they work to turn insane saturated colors into the nice harmonies--and the trick is that i'll never see those saturated colors while i'm working. because i have accepted the paint pouring monkey into my heart, and i trust him. except when i'm coloring wick's coat. holy mother of god every gradient map hated that man's purple coat.
Hehe, foreshadowing ;P
I finally did something! :D
Actually that should be (and maybe that would be) a part of a little… series of pictures about coming back from dangerous scouting but seems I’m not able to finish things… anyway the best part is here
my god, I love that story so much. just give me friendship, give me danger, give me magic, give me crewmates who care for each other and I will be the happiest person on the earth. I need so little
redraw of the last panel on 1.22.49
this one
I love it when people yell at Erin.
And the ‘days since Erin has been last electrocuted’ counter gets reset back to zero
Nice sword, loser, what's it made from? Dumbass-cus steel?
I suppose, every fan of the Stand Still. Stay Silent webcomic thought of EXACTLY THIS cat today XD
Character and webcomic belong to @hummingfluff
owch
sorry your boyfriend split his soul in half. yeah he was trying to isolate the “evil” in him so he could be wholly good. no yeah it doesn’t work like that so he’s just punishing the part of himself that cares. btw we just saw into his mind and the personification of his own repression has your face. just thought you should know
“write what you know” is boring. i write what haunts me at 3am.
Love when cartoons which aren't allowed to say "die" in whumpy moments are brave enough to get away with words like "perish" or "fatal". Use that thesaurus, kid show, make your point
you should stack as many aurora characters as you can before they fall over
my touys;;
Hi!!
So you know how the Magnus Archives fandom has the Do Not Archive tag? It's just something that Jonny Sims has blocked so if people don't want specific posts of any sort to be seen by him, they can use that tag
Does Aurora have anything like that? I know you don't exactly go looking through the fandom tag but it's also hard to stop other people from tagging you in things with no warning. Not your fault at all, but it can be startling and I feel like it'd be easier to implement a solution by going to you about it rather than spamming the fandom tags begging people to ask first
The tag could be something like "adamant prison"? I dunno I'm not clever
Thanks!!
That's an interesting idea! We can codify that, sure. I'll block the tag "adamant prison" and everyone can have a field day in there
the secret to having everybody compliment your colors in your comics is to make every scene one color. this is the Green Scene and this is the Red Scene and now you are a genius
idk if this counts as a full panel redraw or a smaller silly thing, you could do it either way but. sad dainix from the last panel of 1.21.7
hes very 😔🥺
Drew this yesterday testing out how streaming works from iPad. Got a pretty good grasp on how to do it :> I'd like to stream drawing comic pages since that's what I draw mostly anyway, obviously those who don't want to be spoiled shouldn't tune into it. But those who don't mind too much, it could be great!
Being a writer is basically emotionally bonding with fictional people and then ruining their lives for fun.
Every poll on this blog is about fictional characters only. This request was sent to us and we made a poll in response to it. Send any Blorbo-related question you want to our inbox and we’ll make a poll on which people can vote with their own Blorbos in minds
sometimes the best writing advice is "just let it be bad." revolutionary. terrifying. but it works.