Hey if you’ve got open commissions for drawing FFXIV characters give this post a like so I can check ya out! Tried searching in the tag but hard to tell who’s are open and who’s aren’t 😦
Would love to commission some peoples for art of my ffxiv character tho!
I’m rebagelling just in case you’re interested! I have an art tag, my commission page, and if anybody sees this feel free to boost it!
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’:
hey sei, adding in as a blind artist/writer – image descriptions for long-form comics do absolutely exist: comics empower is a comics company for blind readers, for example.
another option you can play with is something that i’ve been experimenting with a lot recently and that i think has a lot of promise: using tactile graphics in combination with blocks of color (for those whom that helps) and clarifying labels. if you wanna talk more about concepts for that, you know where to find me!
also, auden @thequeerwithoutfear has transcribed a couple comic books for me if you want to either just flip through and check out the methods and level of detail they used, or you can totally talk to them directly – they really care about comics accessibility and theyre sighted but Good
hi yes! i do really care about comics accessibility.
so, for the comics that i transcribed and described for avia (and for my daredevil project), i used a method that follows more closely with descriptive video services than with traditional image descriptions. it’s probably closest to the story version that you mentioned in your ask?
i think the most important thing when transcribing comics is to make them still readable and engaging — a traditional panel-by-panel description is i think really not… that. it’s not how comics are meant to be read, and separating out each panel and each bit of dialogue and image that way is clunky and awkward.
because comics are integrated text and image, i do an integrated description for comics — again, in the style of DVS, where dialogue and description are integrated to flow more seamlessly. i think it’s less important to include every detail in order and more important to represent the tone of the story — this is especially important when text is split between panels. splitting up one bit of dialogue with image descriptions in between is i think really confusing to read.
an example of dialogue split between panels with very different images that’d be confusing exactly as written:
Inside, Billy is still shifting through realities. They show the Thing, the old Captain Marvel, a group imprisoned by a Skrull before a wall of flames, Doctor Doom.
Billy narrates. “So many possibilities. So many stories. Infinity is bigger than you’d think. With hindsight, it all seems like that’s the only way it could be. But that’s a lie of perspective. It could be different.” He stops searching, staring at one image. “Teddy’s Mom. When she was killed… ” he says of a woman, green like Teddy, with similar pale hair. The image shifts to a Skrull throwing flames at her. Billy’s face becomes determined. “No, before she was killed. I could never find a universe at this moment again. It’s a needle in an endless haystack. It’s now or never. Don’t say I never get you anything, Teddy,” he says, as the room fills with blue light and the shape of a woman holding her hands up to protect herself appears in white before Billy’s seated figure.
i also do some interpreting of visual details when i write descriptions — for instance, this is a bit in daredevil (2014) #4 where a color change and the placement of the panels marks a flashback. rather than describing the specific differences, i just name it as a flashback:
Later, Matt sits at a restaurant patio with Kirsten McDuffie, food piled in front of them. He’s still in the suit he fought his way out of Owlsley’s mansion in.
Kirsten: “So that’s just it? You just took your fake subpoena and went home?”
Matt: “Well, you’re making that sound a little easier than it was…”
A quick flashback shows Matt, running flat out across a lawn while a machine gun fires at him, jumping over a pack of guard dogs, and leaping a high spiked fence with his billy clubs and grappling line.
Matt: “…but since Owlsley’s compound was designed more to keep intruders out than in, I… managed. How’s the scampi?”
Kirsten liberally peppers her food.
Kirsten: “Too spicy for you. Coleridge left no trail?”
Matt: “I am only an effective bloodhound when I’m not being shot at, Kirsten.”
sound effects are also kind of different to write — i don’t always put them in, since my descriptions usually do what they do visually.
another thing to be careful of is internal narration — separating that from audible dialogue with different formatting can be useful, if your comic has both. daredevil, for instance, has a lot of internal narration:
I think when it comes to writing captions for comics, it depends on the amount of detail. For example, comics by @everythingliar are drawn with simple designs, so not very much needs to be described. ( Click here to see a link ). But on the other hand, this drawing I reblogged from @patrexes has more details so it needs more description. @qjusttheletter has a good post about captions here.
Coleridge: “I said, it’s under control!”
Matt releases one of his billy clubs and grips the other tightly, attached with grappling line.
Matt, narrating: Clearly.
Coleridge: ‘We’re doing this my way! Do you hear me?”
Matt: “Max, stop protecting him!”
another thing that i tried just for the sake of academia was three additional related forms along with the transcribed/described typed-up issue: 1) an audio track of the same description/transcription (which is what comics empower does, although they do more panel-by-panel stuff), 2) an eBraille/BRF version in grade 2 braille to be fed through a refreshable braille display, and 3) a hand-brailled, paper copy, which i made by taking apart the printed issue and adding in brailled pages in between the comic pages so it had both the original comic and a transcribed/described version in braille. if i were to do it again, i’d also add a large print version of the transcription/description as well.
Oh my goodness, this is really, really wonderful. I have been wondering how to work out comics for the longest time and what the real solution should be, and I think this sums it all up almost perfectly. This is exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for, thank you guys so much!
I’ve heard of comics in power, but I wasn’t super fond of the audio format rather than written text that I could read with my screen reader or braille display, and I like this more seamless transition rather than exact panel-by-panel descriptions. Thank you for providing us with the link to the Google folder as well so I could get a good example of what this would really look like, because it help me determine that this is in fact what I really would want.
I believe I just might mark this post as a resource…