I’m seeing a lot of first time entrants to the Brightshine Jubilee contest, so here’s some helpful skin/accent tips

1. Color your Shadow and Line layers. As long as the lines and shadows are visibly distinct from the other details of the dragon, they can be any color. By default these layers are transparency locked, meaning you can paint on it without going outside the boundaries of what’s already on the layer. Some programs also to use the Hue/Saturation thing to colorize it. Coloring your lines and shadows make your colors a lot more vibrant.

2. Be careful with your use of default photoshop brushes.
You know how in movies you occasionally hear that stock scream that so many other films use? Doesn’t it take you out of your immersion for the moment where you think “Hey I’ve heard that before..”? Well there’s a similar effect when you use the most common photoshop brushes. These brushes still have a place, but I find they’re good for the sketching process or a small part of texturing. You need to add more to them if you don’t want the Wilhelm effect.

3. I’m about to make your life so much easier if you didn’t know this tip.
You aren’t allowed to go outside the bounds of the dragon, so you need to make sure there’s no stray lines. This is something you can do when you’re totally done with your design, and you can do it in two seconds.

Photoshop works just about the same, but I’m using Sai for this explanation.

First, CTRL+Click your Skin Parts folder to select the whole dragon’s silhouette. (If you only use the Base layer, the linework is excluded, and that’s a problem for some species like pearlcatchers and imps since their whiskers are included there.) You may have to turn off layers you made, if you put any in that folder. In photoshop, you might have to merge the folder first.

Once you have the dragon’s silhouette selected, find your layer(s) with your designs. It’s easier if you have them all in a folder because you can just apply the next step to the folder. Find the Layer Mask button and simply click it. BAM, now there’s nothing outside the lines. As long as you don’t edit your mask, you can even draw new stuff and it won’t allow you to draw outside the lines.

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’: