CS4 Brushes ( works with all versions prior to CS4 )
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A lot of people ask me while livestreaming what brushes I use, and since I only use some out of certain brush packs, I figured it’d be easier to just clump the ones I use the most together.
If you want to download all the content from the original brush packs, you can download them here:
In at least Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign CS5 (maybe other programs/versions too), if you go to Window > Extensions > Kuler, you get a palette with preset color palettes that compliment each other, as well as a tool to help you make new ones. Then you can save it to the Kuler list, or to your Swatches palette.
More notes. They are not in order by the way. There is still more stuff to say about the world building/drawing/exploring topic. I just haven't gotten to these notes yet.
This one is about lights but it's in progress as well. Feedback is welcomed
hello! this is a bit of a hard question to answer since i dont think giving a tutorial of how i colour without learning any foundational colour concepts first would be very beneficial, so i’ll try to give you some basic tips on picking colours instead since this is a very VERY expansive topic and im simply not the kind of person that can pass on that knowledge very well especially since im not the best at it lol
when im picking colours for my drawings, i try my best to “unify” the colour pallet so that it seems more cohesive, this tip from ggdg sums it up pretty well i think
other than that, i usually try to pick colours that generally look good together based on different colour harmony concepts, like these!
i’ll try and show you an example with something i’m working on right now. you’ll notice i didn’t colour pick tinkaton’s colours from its art and went for a warmer pink and saturated the blues of the hammer a little.
you’ll also notice the canvases i draw on are NEVER pure white. this isnt to say pure white is something that can never be used but white is a colour that usually influenced by surrounding colours, so pure white in most pallets just wont look right. so its not usually a colour i would use as a backdrop if youre trying to pick good colours for your art. but again, there’s always exceptions and this isnt a hard rule. here’s pure white compared to the colour my canvases usually start with
another thing i should touch on briefly is colour relativity and the importance of value and saturation.
value is SUPER SUPER important for making sure all the colours in your art stand out from each other and read clearly. as you can see here, most of the values here stand apart from each other, and i can see that i probably need to adjust the darkness of the light blue in comparison to the pink hair tips, though the lineart separates them well enough already i think. this is also a good way tocheck you havent made any dark skinned characters too light. values are important guys!
hot tip: put a layer of pure black on top of your art and set that layer to “colour” and BOOM! you can see the values of your art in grayscale.
and i’ll also briefly touch on colour relativity. because we percieve colours relative to each other, we usually read a colour as something its not when its surrounded by certain other colours. let’s take a look at my background drawings in the cover i did for the shuichi saihara zine:
though i only used a bunch of different purples, when all of them are perceived in relation to each other, a warmer purple can look like blonde hair amongst all the other purples!
as for the brushes i use while colouring, i like textured brushes! i bought these so i cant share them for free but im sure there are many free alternatives out there
anyway, sorry if this isnt exactly what you wanted, but there are TONS of people out there that have worded this better than i ever could, i would suggest looking up some youtube vids on colour theory, but i hope these little tips are useful enough!
colours? colours :) one of my friends generally wanted help on colours and i went. a little bit overboard and decided to just fully format it into a pseudo-tutorial
if it’s not clear what the first image is, basically what you do is merge all your colour layers multiple times to be shadowing and highlight layers and mess with their hue/luminosty/saturation levels, much like on the lineart colouring section. again, making it more saturated and more purple/blue for shadows and lighter for highlights.
don’t take it as gospel or anything it’s honestly just what i do to make it easier for myself due to having Joint Issues but i think it might just help people Without pain possibly do art a bit faster and/or experience less frustration? maybe???
ps. im aware this information probably won’t be new for quite a few people but there’s always going to be new people who didn’t know, so i don’t see the harm in posting this
A few people have asked about my process, so I figured I’d make a little guide on how I do things. This tutorial is intermediate level, so it skips over colour theory and the basics of directional lighting, shading, tone/ saturation etc. It’s ore of a guide on my general process!
Let me know if there’s anything else y’all would like to see, or any clarification needed.
Da, da, da, daaaaaaaa…… that’s a little more dramatic than I had intended. I love all these wonderful Sai tutorials that get posted on here but I haven’t seen much attention payed to Sai’s Lineart tool which I can’t get enough of. I’m sure there probably are Lineart Layer tutorials out there - I just haven’t come across one so I’m just adding to the pile. The Lineart tool is so awesome it deserves any number of tutorials anyway. It’s so easy to use, it saves me so much time, and it offers so much control which I really love. Honestly, the tool is so easy to use that this is less of a tutorial and more of just a general encouragement to just whip it out and start playing with it. Yeah. So say we start with a simple line like this swirly-wirly thingy that I drew with the marker tool. Well, the first step would be to create a linework layer by clicking the linework layer button.
There we go. Now, a lineart layer in Sai is different from any other regular layer in Sai and it will bring up a completely new range of tools. I’m gonna briefly go through them but the best way to understand exactly what each does is to just try them out for yourself. There’s no substitute for experience or however the saying goes.
Pen - This is your freehand lineart tool and to best honest I don’t really use it that often. That’s just me personally. I have an expensive gaming rig that has all sorts of magic running under the hood but we all know that Sai’s memory management is pretty crappy and I don’t need the lag or crashes that come with this tool when working at a high DPI. You may have a different, entirely pleasant experience with this particular tool but for me, if I’m doing freehand inking, I’d much rather just use the regular Pencil tool.
Eraser - Kinda speaks for itself.
Weight - This one I do love. Say you’ve drawn a line - or a path as Sai calls it. With this tool you can adjust the thickness of the particular line by simply selecting the brush size and then clicking on the line.
Color - Same as Weight. Simply select your desired colour and then select the desired line you’d like to change. Very useful. For the aesthetic.
Edit - This one comes with its own subset of mini-tools that I’ll get into in a moment. But this is definitely a useful tool - for me it’s probably the most useful.
Pressure - This is the one that adds the character to your linework. I’ll explain further below.
SelPen - A selection tool. Pretty standard. Since the Lineart layer works in ‘Anchor’ points (which again, I’ll get in to further down below) I don’t really use this one.
SelErs - Selection Erase. Goes hand in hand with the SelPen. I can’t say that I personally use this one much.
Curve & Line - The Curve and the Line tools are the cornerstones of the Linework layer. I’m explain both further down.
The Edit tool, as I mentioned, brings up its own list of sub-tools. And they definitely have their uses. Again, it’s best to play around with them to truly get a grasp of what they do but I’ll just run through them quickly before I get on with the main tutorial.
Select - For selecting anchor points of paths. Honestly, I don’t really use this one too much simply because hovering over a point or path and clicking will select it.
Move/Add - Now this one I use a lot. Moving an anchor will affect the curvature of your line if you’ve used the ‘Curve’ tool, or you can add curves to a straight line by clicking and dragging in between anchor points.
Delete CP/Curve - Kinda speaks for itself. It will delete an achor point in your line. Sometimes this can be useful for making your curves rounder if you’ve added too many points to it.
Deform Path - Again, kinda self explanatory. It will warp your line. I don’t really use this one myself but that’s not to say that it couldn’t have its uses.
Deform Anchor - See above.
Move Path - Instead of moving just an anchor or adjusting the curvature of your line you can move the entire line at once. Can be useful.
Duplicate Path - Does exactly what it says - creates a copy of your line. Haven’t found much use for this simply because I don’t particularly like copy/paste stuff in linework. Faults or differences add character.
Delete Path - deletes a line you’ve drawn independently of other lines on your linework layer. Can be useful as well.
Connect CPs - This is difficult to explain the benefits of. It’s one that should be experimented with. It basically joins lines together. I use it quite often. Just pick this option and drag from one anchor point to another to join them.
Pointed/Rounded - See the diagram below for this one. I find it very useful.
As you can see I used the Curve tool to draw a simple curve (left) and then I used the Pointed/Rounded tool to convert the curve into a point (right) by selecting the tool and then clicking on the anchor point at the height of the curve. I find it very useful. Anyway, back to our swirly-wirly thingy.
Because our swirly-wirly thingy is basically one long curve, I simply select the curve tool and start clicking. Starting at the centre point on one end, I click to add anchor points as I trace the shape of the object. Each point adjusts the curvature from the last point. It’s kinda hard to explain verbally or even visually but try it out and you’ll quickly see how it works.
Once I have a line over whatever I’m inking done I like to adjust the weight to suit my preferences. I like to work with thicker lines because they give more room to play around with weight. So to adjust the weight you click on the Weight tool, select a brush size and then click on your line. If only it were that simple in life.
Once I have a good weight selected I move on to the Pressure tool. The pressure tool gives you two options. Pressure for width and pressure for density. Width is like controlling the weight of the line at individual points and density controls the transparency. I don’t usually use the density option. As with traditional inking I prefer to denote depth, shadow, etc. with weight as you can see in the image above. To adjust the pressure, simply select the pressure tool and then select an anchor point. Click, hold and drag to the left to make the line thinner of more transparent and to the right to make the line thicker and more dense. As you drag, a percentage will appear over the anchor point you’ve selected. This can be useful for keeping things consistent.
That’s all well and good for curved lines but what about straight lines? That’s where the line tool comes in. It works exactly the same way except it won’t add a curvature to your anchor pints. Still very useful though. Especially when combined with the Weight and Pressure tools.
Here’s an example of one my drawings. It’s Dark Empress Kitana from Mortal Kombat. The one in red is the pencils which if converted to black would probably make a pretty good linework layer. I’m a firm believer in taking the time to clean up your sketch/pencils layer because it will dictate your entire drawing. The one below in black was done using Sai’s linework layer feature. Although not entirely.
As much as I love Sai’s linework layer, it can look a little too clean which is not great when you’re drawing people. Although, it’s all art so it’s all up to personal preferences and personal style. There’s no wrong way to do it. For me though, I prefer to do skin, facial features, hair, etc. by hand using Sai’s Pencil tool on a normal layer and reserve the Linework Layer for architecture, clothing or any non-organic substances. I inked Kitana’s eyes and eyebrows freehand ( or as freehand as you can be with Sai’s amazing stabilisers) but everything else such as her armour or her fan weapon thingy was done using the Curve and Line tools on the Linework Layer.
I hope this tutorial has been useful. Or if not useful - then at least encouring to try out Sai’s linework layer. It’s such a robust feature that I don’t see get much attention and I can’t even begin to describe how much time it saves me or how much I adore it. If you have any questions (because I’m well aware how unsuited I am to writing tutorials - this is so damn rambly - sorry!) then feel free to drop me an ask here at keithbyrneart.
P.S, sorry about my handwriting in the stills. It’s gotten a lot messier these days.
