Rizian Art

Hi guys! It's Monday, so today I'm going to write a new review about some drawing software I've been using since one year, what I'm telling you here is about my own experience, other people can have their own, but I'll show you a little review and the pros and cons for Adobe Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI.

Well, to start we must talk first about one of the most used software for Digital artwork, it has a lot of tools and uses, so you can find here everything, I really mean it, everything!! You can adjust the default brushes, add your own, use blender, manipulate light and shadows in your paintings, change colours, manipulate photos and add the little final details to your artwork. It is a very complete software, but that's the bad point in Photoshop, you need to take your time to learn to use all the options and tools available, there are so many tools that you can be a little stressed when using Photoshop for the first time.

Pros:

- Very useful and versatile for Drawing or Painting.
- You can create your own Brushes or Download some cool brushes in a lot of Websites.
- You can have every tool in the same program, you can easily do a complete piece only using Photoshop.
- On the internet you can always find a lot of tutorials of how to use this program.
- You can create your own shortcuts, and modify the default actions, so this can be really helpful and can save you a lot of time when working.
- The selection tools are more reliable in Photoshop than in other Programs.
- You can easily edit a scanned draw in Photoshop.
- It is compatible with a lot of formats like PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIF, and others.

Cons: 

- At the beginning is really hard to get used to all the tools, so you have to go slow and have tons of patience.
- This program is a nightmare for slow computers, it needs a lot of resources from the computer to work with it.
- Most of the people give up when trying to learn Photoshop, so they start drawing or painting in other programs.

Paint Tool SAI is for me one of the easiest and simple Drawing software I ever used, because it shows only the important tools to make a draw or a painted artwork, you can easily customize the tools with a simple Double click. The bad thing is that most of the people needs to open Photoshop to add the finishing touches to their artwork, or just to add text to the image.

Pros:

- It is really a really simple Software, so you can memorize the tools more easily than other programs.
- You can customize the available tools, create shorcuts and rename the tools, only by Double-clicking the Tool you want to change.
- It may not be compatible with a lot of formats as Photoshop is, but it has the most used formats in Digital art.
- It is a very light program, you do not need a very fast Computer or the best of the Graphic cards to work in excellent conditions.
- It has better selection tools than Photoshop.
- The Lineart layer add some cool tools for fixing little details in lines and a very interesting tool to create Vectors and modify them.
- This is a very popular software between people who draw/paint Manga or Anime style. So you can give it a try to this powerful Japanese Tool.

Cons:

- This software has no Text tool.
- You can't modify colours, light and shadows as easy as Photoshop does.
- The brushes are very limited, you can create your owns, but in "available forms" you will have a limit.
- You can find some resources for this software but not as many as Photoshop.

So, that's my opinion about these two great programs, I usually use both, because I just can't find perfection in just one. You can make your own conclusions, remember this is only my opinion. So I hope this review was useful to you, I'll be back the next Monday with a new post in the Blog! Have a nice day!

Previous Posts:

Manga Studio 5 Review
Tutorial: Draw Women Hair
12 Tips for Webcomic Beginners
Tutorial: Create Scenery/Background
How to get used to your Tablet
Improve your sketch abilities in 10 steps

Hello! Happy holidays! How have you been? I hope you had a great Christmas, quite cold but a hot meal to comfort always work any tired body or a frozen hands not wanting to draw, draw and DRAW!!

Today I come to give some advice to those who bought their first "Tablet" or digital tablet, but before I will discuss my experience with digital media, not everything is always a garden of roses, you'll see what I mean.

To start I'll tell you, before I start drawing comics my tablet was powdered in a corner of my room, I did not use it since I bought it and came to release it six months after it was acquired, well, not had much respect to digital at first, but when I started drawing comics and this, I began to see an occasional video of "speedpainting" on YouTube and said, "Damn, I want to do that thing too!" I just took out the tablet of the box, connect the cable, I opened Photoshop as a freaking genius, I looked for the tablet pen and I decided to make an image, do not expect ... was not a simple image, but it would be... The best-super-mega-ultra-hyper-image Fourfold-INCREDIBLE! IMAGE EVER! The result was as follows:




Well, OK, I exaggerated, it was not that bad, but it was pretty bad, in fact it was enough to make me want to vomit, and tell myself "I should not buy this filth, after I have taken a look of the face, now I want to get the one with the horrible things that this thing does" Well, today is the day that the tablet I wanted: give, sell, break, throw, throw, massacre, destroy and burn, is being right next to me while I do the "cartoons" to bring the article.

I tell you, I was in search of a tutorial to teach me how to "properly handle the tablet" The result was a straw ball rolling on the desert "Fiuuuuuu ...", and I think two rocks and a cactus were there too, but do not worry I will tell you some exercises that will be useful to your process. Let's do this!

First:
You fall into account in this first, you've bought a digital tablet and if you're here is because you realize that is not the same drawing with a pencil in your sketchbook to do it using your tablet in drawing software like SAI, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever you're using to draw... Many people says that drawing with the tablet is like "learning to draw again" I put it in another way, as "learning to draw digitally".

Second:
If you wanted to buy a tablet is usually because you wanted to do artworks like some other artists you admire, seek for those art pieces, if they have videos of the process that makes it real better, so you can look out how your favourite artist or how the kind of illustrations you want to do are done. One of the easiest ways to learn to use this wonder is to know the techniques and other experts use in their videos.

Third:
Do you have an very nice and solid line in your pencil work but on the tablet you want to draw a line and suddenly you have become a gauge of seismic waves? I recommend you to draw over some drawings and not yours as practice mode and make you noticed in the lines correctly, than trying to "create" and "make good lines" simultaneously. Alleviate the burden and you concentrate more on just improving your line on the tablet.

Fourth:
This is one of the tips is the one that helped me most, not only with the tablet, also improved significantly my pencil lines. Open a new blank document in your favourite drawing program, now take the tablet pen on one end and not support any part of the hand on the tablet surface, try to draw straight lines, vertical, horizontal and diagonal in the sheet, as close as possible without sticking to the one before. The aim of this is to improve your hand pulse significantly, it is also a good warm-up before a drawing session. I recommend seeing the example:



Fifth:

As in the previous exercise instead of making straight lines we now turn to make curves, but I have here a simple trick to dominate the line and probably will make this part more complicated than the previous one, but with patience and perseverance you can achieve this one too.



Previous Posts:

Manga Studio 5 Review
Tutorial: Draw Women Hair
12 Tips for Webcomic Beginners
Tutorial: Create Scenery/Background
How to get used to your Tablet
Improve your sketch abilities in 10 steps

Hello again! You are welcome to a new entry to my Blog Rizian Larc, this time I will show you my method to create and compose scenarios through small keys, instructions and an example I made specifically for this exercise, let's start!

Materials:

Traditional: 

- Sheet of paper or paper of your choice, preferably a disposable paper or already used.
- Colour chalk or colours (any of these will do).
- Eraser
- Hard pencil or mechanical pencil, also a soft pencil to add shadows.
- Pen or Ink pen.


Digital:

- Tablet (It can be Wacom, Genius, the one you have can be good).
- Photoshop, Paint Tool SAI, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, any paint program of your choice will be perfect.

The background design has always been a problem for most people who want to enter the world of comics or illustration in general, we have all had problems with the scenarios and it's very normal because our eye is more accustomed to fixed at one point in time instead of appreciate all at once, for this will show you my tactic to cheat a little our eyes.

First, I call this technique the "stain", and I use it when I need to compose quite a scene in my comic or just to make an illustration with background included. The stain (colour) will help us to shape the basic forms that exist in our mind without having to go directly to add details and details, and there's the first mistake we can commit when drawing backgrounds, detailing and detailing at first. Let's proceed to see the image to keep explaining this step:



This technique helps to capture the basic shape of what we imagined in our minds so that it does not slip from the mind and stay longer the structure of what we are thinking, with basic shapes and a thick brush (colour) now draw the landscape stain that was on your mind in a short period of time before the idea escapes out of your mind.

It is important and I recommend doing this step with the colour of your choice and we will superimpose layers either traditional or digital mode to distinguish the colour of the final lines. Now we go to the next step:

Remember: If you're working in digital I recommend lowering the layer opacity to 15 or 25% where the stain is and create a new layer to keep working and if you're working in traditional I recommend a clean eraser to soften a little the stain and to start to work more freely about it.

Second, now that you have cleaned and softened the spot, now you can proceed to add details to the landscape that crossed our mind just now. Try to always shorten adding details and forget about perfection by this point, we need only identify basic shapes in this part of the process, which is the most important because that will define which elements will have our illustration. I recommend following this step with a coloured pencil slim pencil instead of a conventional gray traditional pencil for the reasons I mentioned above in the previous step.




With the added details and you have a base of what you wanted to achieve at the beginning, but in the process will occur to you "Hey, I just think adding new things possibly are going to see much better", no problem!, adding new things is not a sin, rather make it more harmoniously composition, in this way we can say that "we have deceived our eye".

I recommend you always try to superimpose objects in your compositions, or places focus in a "clear" in them to make the illustration shows what we want to show and not just be "a cute background" which is not what we want to accomplish in this exercise about compositing scenarios. I'm explaining this a little more in a newer entry about background, is called Composition and placement in backgrounds.

Always try to add as much detail as you can in this step so it can help you move to the next one, because the more lines you have drawn in this sketch the easier it will be to define the details and the stage itself.

Third, having our sketch now we can begin to define what is what, for example, the roof is a triangle, the rectangle is a fireplace, the two cubes are two wooden boxes, and things like that. For this step now I recommend using a thin brush of black in digital or a 0.5 or 0.3 mechanical pencil if you're working in traditional.




Regardless if you have a detailed or simple style as I mentioned in my post on "The Power of the Sketch" you can choose whether to add more or less details to each of the parts that you defined as objects in the image. Here we should already have completely the details that appear in our final image regardless of whether you added lines of force to it or not, that's choice of each artist.

Fourth, this is the last step in the process that I devised to compose a scene, is one of the most important to "prepare" our sketch before final production, whether coloured or just inking. This step is called the "shadow" here with a soft pencil or a brush medium in our drawing program we will add our drawing some shadows where needed.




It is always good to plan where they will go the shadows of our sketch as a guide to the finished illustration, and when we go to colouring or inking know where the light comes and not get to experience or invent shadows never have planned for the finished illustration.

Well, I hope you have served my tutorial on how to compose scenarios, I will deepen this and more issues related to drawing on the Blog, I'd love to know if this tutorial has helped you as I am new to the "education" and would love to know your questions or suggestions. Remember to always be attentive to answer questions and other concerns, to follow the Blog I recommend my page on Facebook, Twitter and also the subscription button on the sidebar.Thank you for reading my tutorial and see you next time! Greetings!