How to Compose a Central Idea

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First, as always, become familiar with your palate of choice. For this tutorial, i'll be using Paint Tool SAI. There are a lot of other programs you can use out there, such as photoshop, sumopaint, etc. Anyways, whether you're doing traditional art o   

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The first step, is seeing what you want in the end. Of course i see what i want here, right? The two females, back to back in some cool pose. I can see this, with my own eyes, but when you start with a drawing you can only ENVISION this concept. No a   

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Now comes a very crucial step in creating any kind of drawing with human figures and/or subjects. Set up the muscle locations, how the character's facing, their dynamic-you want to display emotion in your work, because with any art, you're trying to    

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Next, you can create another layer and begin on the actual muscle structure and composure of the character's body. Remember, its your style. Play around with it some, get used to it! Every style's different in its own unique way-art takes time and pa   

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Next up is hair. Define what you're doing to the hair, because hair's very...Volume-y. It can go a lot of ways. This picture implies the woman to the right is moving back, because her hair's flowing upward the other way-and from the right's hair, we    

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Next up is clothing. Now clothing can be very complicated until you master how to draw the flowing of fabrics. There are usually creases where the body tends to bend, whether its bending at a large angle, or if its barely bending at all-the cloth is    

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Now erase all of your guidelines. With a digital program, this'll be very easy. In traditional format this might prove a challenge.

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The 'folder' button creates a new folder. From here, i just put the layers in this folder and dim the overall opacity of the folder itself to dim all the others. This serves a good purpose because now, i can have a rough sketch of what i want, i can    

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Now, we have a nice outline. This is where people become moderately confused as i've seen in a few drawings here or there. The key is to add the color without causing it to over-lap with your outline, and this can be executed in many ways.

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Click the image and read what's there, its very important information. Coloring-you want to keep it below the lineart layer.

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Where'd our image go??? Don't fret. What i did on this step was i added a BACKGROUND to the entire thing. Right above the folder i used for sketches, i added a new layer, and made it this nice color. From this color, i'll be creating a background.

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Add a few layers above the black background and begin to experiment with brushes, see what works, what doesn't. Don't be afraid to make ideas and pitch them. Art is a learning process, and the more you learn from a project, the better.

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Now, add color. You can either do it all on a few layers, or many. Just try to set up a system of how you do it because if you use a lot of layers, its going to get complicated. Now, it looks fairly decent, but it doesn't have detail. The thing that    

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This is a very crucial step. In red highlighted on the picture, is 'layer clip.' i chose to make each color on separate layers. 'Skin', obviously was the layer with the skin color on it. To add a layer clip, you click the layer you want to add it to.   

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Now, do this to the rest of the layers. WARNING-this is probably the most trickiest steps because you could mess up and not even realize it. Define your light sources. As you can see, the light source here is coming from the left. Never forget to def   

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So you're probably worn out asking 'are we done yet?' Not just yet, but we're almost there. Add details, add lighting, add add add. You want to make an impression with what you make, so take pride in how you make it, even if you don't complete it in    

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Now i added a layer above everything and set it to multiply. With the brush, i just applied some black around the entire picture, and used the 'fuzzystatic' on my eraser, and cleared it up to give it a grainy feeling to it.

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And finally, add a few special things into it-multiply, overlay, screen. Layer effects go a long way if you use them properly. This is it, you're finally done with your piece after you've toned it up and created it the best possible. Just remember, i   

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Released

February 20, 2013

Description: Hello everyone. I made this picture for a friend, but when i thought a little further I realized how far i've come since i started drawing. now of course, i have much more to learn, but since i started drawing about a year and 7-8 months ago, i've learned quite a bit since then. So I want to help some artists out there who have trouble with putting ideas together to form one central aspect and theme-whether you're a traditional artist or digital, you draw anime or you draw strict realism-i hope this tutorial helps you out.

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