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aqua03Party Planner
May '21

So I've been experimenting recently with my art and art style. Especially in how I color and shade things as well.

Recently, I've been looking at artists like this one and really liking this style.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPan9RLMr_W/146

What's a good way of getting a style similar to that in photoshop? Especially in regards to choosing the vibrant, yet not over saturated colors and brushed to get those nice effects?

What would you call this style and what other artists have a similar look that I can study more as well?

Thanks for the help. :slight_smile:

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    May '21

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    May '21
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Yulek
May '21

I call it fake water colors :D.

basically, you use a noise filter, a colored line brush that's textured.. like a pencil.
and then color it with a brush that mixes with the ground color

getting colors harmonic like that is easiest if you smudge the shadow color with the base color, and then pick a tone from there.

vary shadows and highlights beween soft and hard where it's appropriate

but it would be easier to help you out when you have an example of where you're at atm

FightTheSun
May '21

image.png1183x654 888 KB

Generally keeping the your values light will limit your saturation to some degree. a pale pink will never become bright pink without becoming a darker value. They also seem to be applying some sort of color layer over everything to unify the colors.

rajillustration
May '21

For the example you showed, it looks like they used a soft, pencil-type brush for the outlines, and then they made selections for each piece, probably on different layers, so they could color in those selections without interfering or going over the lines. And then after that, they painted shadows with an ordinary circle brush. I assume this circle brush is your standard brush, but with a slightly soft edge.

In the tail, they probably switched to the same type of brush, but as a mixer brush, so it picks up a little bit of the background as it paints.

Here's the settings I'm guessing they used, I could be wrong:

standard-mixer-brush.png1048x148 10.2 KB

(these are the settings that will show up when you switch from brush to mixer brush.)

In their other art it looks like they use mixer brushes a fair amount to get that soft painting look, it takes some practice, but because you're mixing with the background color it does help unify the colors. Just don't go too far or it'll look muddy.

After that, it looks like they added a new layer and hit it with some patches of soft airbrush (probably in a peach color) and set the layer to overlay (probably in a lower opacity. I can recreate it with it set to 28% opacity, but I don't know exactly what shade of peach they used.) to act as bounce light from the ground and to act as warmth on parts of the body like the tail and the toes and the hair. I'm guessing this whole picture was actually black and white, so the soft pinks were added last after they hit it with overlay and were like "mm love this sunkissed look."

After that, it does look like there's a bit of texture on it, which may be a noise layer that they've set to screen or overlay and then turned the opacity down on, or it looks like it could be noise from compressing too far. I'm going with the latter. It's looks pretty compressed.

aqua03Party Planner
May '21
Yulek

Ah, here's my current art. (Both the cel shaded and watercolor styles i've been playing with recently.)

Sorrel Thin Line Style Test.png960x1200 860 KB

Masked Pupper Watercolor Test.png640x896 710 KB

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of where I am and where I want to go.

@FightTheSun @rajillustration

Ah, thanks for the pointers. Those sound like good places to start as I fiddle around with my brushed and tools. Might use those techniques in some practice studies of their's and others' works to better get the hang of it and try to reverse engineer it. :slight_smile:

Kaydreamer
May '21

You use Clip Studio, right?

A big key is using a naturalistic pencil brush for lineart, and aiming for a middle-thickness. Also, using a greyish colour for lines, rather than black. Lines are a little loose, and don't necessarily 'close' all the time. Keep in mind, you may no longer be able to use the fill tool for flatting with this style.

As for the shading, using a painting brush which slightly blurs into and picks up the colours adjacent to it is very helpful. Also, turning up the 'mix secondary colour' slider, or whatever that's called on Clip, and setting that to pressure. That will allow your stroke colour to change subtly, relative to pen pressure. It can help with unifying colours, as well as giving everything a more 'painted' effect due to the mixing of colours across the flats. (I use Procreate, which has a similar feature, and I lean on it quite a bit.)

MerrowBros
May '21

As for choosing colors that aren't too saturated, try choosing your colors with the canvas being medium-gray instead of white. White is really overpowering, so you'll choose colors that are too saturated to try and compete with it. Then when the white background is finally covered with other colors, you'll realize everything is too saturated. This helped me with toning back my color choices, at least.

aqua03Party Planner
May '21
Kaydreamer

I use Photoshop for my work. But I can easily translate your advice into Photoshop, correct?

@MerrowBros

Huh, that might be a good idea to try now that you mention it. I know I heard a similar ip years ago as well at a digital art class I took in high school. Thanks! :slight_smile:

Kaydreamer
May '21

Photoshop does have options for brushes blending with a secondary colour via pen pressure, but I have no clue where those setting are. I haven't used Photoshop for nearly a decade. The setting is called 'colour jitter' in most programs.

I thoroughly recommend using Clip Studio over Photoshop, though. It's way cheaper, and much more geared toward illustration and comic work. I'd be very surprised if the example you're trying to emulate wasn't drawn in Clip; the work of the artist has a number of the hallmarks of that program. (You can see it in the way colours in their brushes blend, Clip does that so softly and cleanly.) Plus, the illustrator is Japanese. Clip is pretty much industry standard for illustration over there, at this point.

If you're using an older, non-subscription version of Photoshop, it's not going to have colour jitter. I think it was only added after they moved to subscription-based versions.

JustLiz-o
May '21

Colour-jitter is usually directly in the brush settings.
There is also a tool for mixing colours and simulating wetness of paint but I've no idea what's called in English. Mix brush probably? It looks like this:

No idea how good it is, though. I'm mainly using Photoshop to make graphics and edit photos.

JustLiz-o
May '21
aqua03

I forgot to mention: If you're planning to get Clip Studio, they have a sale every three months or so. The last one was in march (I think) so you might get it for half the price soon :slight_smile:

DNoble
May '21

nope. no. nopenopenopenope no you stop that right now.

I know it sounds cliche, but you are never going to get anywhere trying to imitate other people's art styles. You do not 'get' an art style, you don't need to acquire one, you already have one. Your job is not to 'get' an art style, it is to find the one that's already there.

I recognize you might be referring specifically to the technical aspects of brush and pen settings here, but your phrasing sets off every red flag I know of when it comes to inexperienced artists trying to improve, so I'm going to rant about that for a minute.

There is definitely a lot to be learned and gained from examining the technical aspects of other creators, and you most definitely can just straight ape specific details from any artist whose work resonates with you. That's part of how you 'find' your style; you apply layer after layer of other artists to your own work, taking the nose from artist A, the line weight from artist B, the color palettes from artist C, so on and so forth, and as you work more, those layers will slough off a little at a time, and you'll be left with the pieces that 'fit' you to begin with. Something like a patchwork quilt of the things you love, coming together to make something new and unique.
That being said, I spent years of my artistic career attempting (and failing) to 'be' another artist, usually a new one every couple of weeks. I got very tunnel-visioned on the notion that 'if I could just draw like that artist, then...', and the thing is, I never came up with the end of that statement. I felt a powerful compulsion to try to imitate every single detail of their style that I could, and it drastically hampered both my development and my self-image as an artist.

Finding that line between being able to learn from another artist and becoming obsessed with imitating an artist you admire is hard, but it's very important to do. Don't try to have their style wholesale, find the pieces of their style that naturally resonate with you, and graft them into what you do, piece by piece.
Your job as an artist is never, ever, EVER to be 'as good as' or 'better than' or 'just like' any other artist in ANY capacity. Your only, and I mean ONLY obligation as an artist is to be better than you were yesterday.

Okay, rant over.
If you were merely referring to the technical aspects, I'd say it's about a 70% chance that image was drawn in Procreate, 30% it was done in Clip Studio. Photoshop simply doesn't have the tools to create naturalistic ink-wash effects like that without some serious doctoring and photomanipulation knowhow.

Paper Textures and crunchy brushes are your friend for getting that rustic feel (but, refer to rant above: you are by no means obligated to utilize that style just because it looks nice to you. You can accomplish things just as beautiful in countless different ways). You can more easily control your colors if you learn to use the sliders instead of the standard color picker (and the aforementioned advice of working on a neutral grey instead of pure white can help a lot to prevent oversaturation), and brushes or adjustment layers on gentle blending modes (such as Soft Light or Overlay) using a low-saturation complimentary color can help push down and mute colors that are too loud.

play with brushes (you can download like hundreds of thousands of them for free if you search around on Deviantart) and find one that has a 'feel' you like. The exact marks that the brushes give you are far less important than how it feels to draw with it; does it get thicker and thinner in the way you expect? Does it fade out the way you intuitively expect? Does it make the mark look nice and interesting automatically, or do you have to fight it to make it look the way you want? Finding a brush that does that is more important than one that has the exact right texture built into it. (Clip Studio is also really good for this because it has so many more options for the movement of the brush in addition to the actual marks it makes on the canvas)

rajillustration
May '21

A lot of doubters in chat that think this can't be made in Photoshop and like--as someone who has used it for like I dunno...15 years...It can absolutely do this. The painting techniques in this illustration were probably done in SAI, if I were to guess, since that is the program of choice in Asia (Clip I would put as 2nd place). But, the brushes used in this are standard in nearly every major drawing program. It's just a round brush. Occasionally they used a mixer brush. Nothing that fancy.