Paint.net

Pros

I think Paint.net is the best starter program for those just learning how to do digital art. Paint.net lacks a lot of bells and whistles. The program runs a little faster than Photoshop and much faster than GIMP. In fact, I still use Paint.net for really simple edits because it runs faster. Also, their filters rock almost as much as Photoshop’s and you can download free plugins in order to expand your arsenal.

Cons

Paint.net is kinda skimpy on its features and their brushes really suck. The only brush that’s useful at all is the basic brush, unless you’re creating simplistic designs.Paint.net also doesn’t have a lot of the features that I’ve grown to love and rely on when using Photoshop. They have the lasso tool, which allows you to select specific parts of an image you’re working on. But they lack the polygonal lasso, which is great for artists who don’t have steady hands. They lack the pen tool, which makes it difficult to select very specific sections of the art and also makes it difficult to create complex polygons with curves (though they do have the curves tool). But for me, the most unforgivable sin for Paint.net is that they lack a blur and smudge tool. Without those tools, a lot harder to blend different parts of your image together. They do have the blur filter, which can replace the blur tool if you select certain portions with the lasso tool and you have a really steady hand.

GIMP

Pros

GIMP has most of the really important features on Photoshop. They have the coveted pen tool. They also have the essential blur and smudge tool. I can’t remember if they have the polygonal lasso or not. But that tool can be replaced by the pen tool easily. They have some good filters and plenty of plugins. This is a good program for those who want most of the features of Photoshop but never want to pay for the Photoshop program.

Cons

Oddly enough, the size of GIMP’s brushes are limited. This is a strange feature, since it can’t be that hard to increase the size of the brushes. GIMP also has the slowest running time. When using GIMP, I was met with frequent crashes. Also, for some reason, the lines that I created using the pen tool weren’t always perfectly smooth.

The Moral

Adobe is a little absurd charging nearly $1,000 for their Photoshop programs. Yeah, Photoshop is seen as the absolute best graphics program out there for most digital artists. But how do they expect starving artists to ever afford that much money?

Download GIMP http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.6.4-i686-setup.exe

Download Paint.net http://www.dotpdn.com/files/Paint.NET.3.36.zip

Alex

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Hi, everybody! Marisol here. Alex offered some ideas for free programs, but if you are heavy into digital art and you enjoy doing it, there are programs that are under $100 available. Yes, they’re not as fancy as any of the Photoshop CS programs, but they are just as good. Alex mentioned that there is Photoshop Elements and Corel Painter, both of which have their pros and cons. I own both and I was fortunate enough to receive them free with my Wacom Intuos Tablet. However, both programs are well worth the money if you’re willing to spend it, especially if you’re really in to digital art.

Photoshop Elements

I happen to like Elements more than CS. Sure, Elements is what the title implies: the elements–your really basic digital tools. As Alex mentioned, Elements doesn’t have a pen tool, but everything else about it is great. You have your blur and burn tools, which are essential in digital art creation, but you also have the option of creating brushes and downloading brushes like its nobody’s business! Photoshop Elements has fantastic calligrapher brushes which make up for the lack of pen tool. However, I never really understood why the pen tool was so important. Basically, if you use the right pressure and you go along in small strokes, any brush can dublicate the pen tool look, but that is my opinion. I’ve never had a pen tool and when I did use it, I found it difficult to handle.

Photoshop Elements is basically the same as PSCS, just without the bells and whistles. A lot of the features are the same and the program is easy to use. Personally, I love Elements because of some of the cool effects you can create with it. There is a photo fram feature and a feature where you can create Andy Warhol-esque images. Very cool. Photoshop Elements is the best bang for your buck.

Corel Painter

Personally, I am not a fan of Corel Painter mainly because I find it difficult to use. Sure, the features are great, but I find the program to be glitchy and lacks that special oomph that makes it a great program. The drawing feature on Corel Painter is hit and miss because sometimes the lines pick up, others times they don’t, no matter what the pen pressure is. I find it to be very lax on features, however, it’s a great beginner’s tool. If you are a beginning artist, practice with Corel Painter, but I highly recommend you download the free trial. However, a lot of hardcore artists do use Corel Painter and love it, so maybe I have had bad luck.

Marisol

Assorted Brush #1

This brush is made up of small circles that are strung together. When drawing in a line, this brush creates what looks like a slinky, cord or some type of microbe. If you scribble the lines together, it forms a black splotch with little renegade circles all around it. If you use the mouse to make single clicks, this brush will create tiny circles. This can serve as an alternative to using the ellipses tool. All you have to do is resize the brush using “[“ or “]” in order to get the right sized circle. However, the lines will be blurry. This might not work if you are searching for more fine lines.

Assorted Brush #2

Assorted brush #2 is just like brush one except that this circle has two circles instead of one with one circle contained within the other circle like a bulls-eye. The result is a darker line and little individual circles that look like tiny bulls-eyes. Like the other brush, as you increase the size of this brush the lines get blurry.

Assorted Brush #3

This brush is made up of a bunch of X’s stringed together. This brush has all sorts of uses ranging from texturizing a picture to creating something that looks like a metal fence. Individually, this brush can really create interesting texture when the brush is scribbled in one location, though scribbling too much will only create a black blotch. Making singular clicks of the mouse will create little X’s that could be used for stars. If you enlarge the X, the X becomes more blurry and the X appears as if its made out of blotches that start off larger in the middle and get smaller towards the tips of the X’s.

Assorted Brush #4

This brush is a diagonal pound symbol. But when used for drawing lines, it creates a line that has a rough edge and a thick black line in the middle. This creates nice little edges on the lines that are great for texture. I like how the text looked when I wrote it. When the brush is drawn over itself, it creates very thickly black blotches with rough edges, which reminds me of some paint mediums. Placed individually, this brush creates a sharp that gets progressively more blurry the more you increase the size.

Assorted Brush #5

I like this brush a lot. The lines created by this brush have very scratchy edges that look manmade at the same time because they are so uniform. This might be a useful brush for drawing the silhouette of an animal such as a caterpillar. The edges of the brush are reminiscent of fur. If clicked individually with a mouse, this brush leaves nice little gridlines that can have different applications.

Assorted Brush #6

Do you want a lizard, a fuzz ball, or a spiral? This really awesome brush creates the illusion of scales with drawn in a straight line and creates what looks like a ball of fur when the brush is draw over itself. When clicked individually, this brush creates a little spiral. Let your imagination run wild with this brush.

Assorted Brush #7

Made from diamonds. Not sure if a diamond is an artist’s best friend. This brush can create lines that look like they have bad quality. This brush might be useful in some way, but I can’t really think of any uses right now.

Assorted Brush #8

Looking to create lace? This brush brush is for you. This brush allows you to draw lines that look like laces. A very fun brush to use, but I cannot think of any applications beyond creating lacy material. But that’s good enough to make it useful.

Assorted Brush #9

I guess this is a cool brush. At a smaller size, this brush creates lines with really interesting edges. Make the lines larger and they start to remind me of centipedes. The symbol used to create this brush is kinda strange. I don’t really find the blotch in the middle really interesting.

Assorted Brush #10

I like this brush overall, though I don’t like the blurriness of it when you create larger sized strokes. This brush gets thicker as you travel horizontally and thinner as you travel vertically. The brush creates a 3D look that reminds me of the ribbon brush. The splotch is kinda boring and the individual mouse clicks created little marks that could be flames in the right picture.

Assorted Brush #11

Even though the shape of this brush is way different, this brush is like the opposite of brush #10 in effect. Lines get thicker as you travel vertically and thinner as you travel horizontally. The brush is kinda shaped like a genie lamp. I like how the left side of the brush seems to fade.

Assorted Brush #12

This is a cool brush but I’m not sure what it would be useful for except for really neat font. The lines sorta make me think of the edge of a rock, but that might just be my eyes playing tricks on me.

Assorted Brush #13

I almost skipped this one. This brush might be useful for texture, but it mostly only creates what looks like railroad tracks. But it’s a little too much on the blurry side.

That’s it for the first half. There’s a bunch more brushes in the assorted brush section like the star brush and the black widow brush. I’ll hit those tomorrow.

Alex

Anyway, I’ll try to get as much as this tutorial up as I can, since I’m also going to be hanging out with Mari and Alex today, which I look forward to! <3 They are truly great and my medicine for everything. Now, how about we get to that tutorial now shall we?

Start on a new layer, above the skin layer. First you need to pic a soft brush (which is just a hard round brush with the settings on Other dynamics –> opacity jitter set to pen pressure and flow jitter set to pen pressure) and start shaping out the hair. Now, the color isn’t too too important right now, as I’ll show you how to change that without having to make a huge mess of everything. For Azzie, I picked a dark reddish brown color, something that would almost resemble black, even though I didn’t want to go too dark there, it works fine. Sketch out the flow of the hair, shapes, that sort of thing, right here it doesn’t have to be perfect, we’re just using it as a base.

Alright, taking a smaller brush, about a size 7-9, and a darker color, I start to give the hair some dimension, coloring out dark clumps of hair, giving it more shape, and then taking a smaller brush 3-5 and making wavy strands. The more strands, the better it turns out. Hair isn’t just a big clump, it has motion, and there’s something about loose strands on a guy’s face that makes them look mysterious and sexy, that’s why I LOOOVE guys with this length hair. XD Aherm, anyway…moving out of fantasy land… once you depicted the hair, take the blur tool and get it to a nice large size, and brush lightly over it, to where it’s blurred enough, but not too much to smear the detail away.

Alrighty, now we’re getting somewhere, see it’s not so bad! Here I did the same thing as above, only taking a lighter color than the base color and shadow color, and started to make more strands with a hard brush set to 3-5 pix. Keep working on the flow of the hair, making more loose strands as it gives a wavy motion kind of look and really enhances your picture. After that, use the blur tool again, going very lightly over the hair. Do you like how it’s turning out so far? Of course you do! If now, then… >.> maybe you messed up. =P

Continue with the patern above, adding light strands, tracing shapes and making the hair really flowy. For every new color you use, try to blur it out, because hair isn’t perfectly sharp, it has some detail, but most of it is pretty blurry, besides it blends very well this way. Here I added some blue for the reflection of the background I’m going to be using.

Now is the part where I said you can change the color. I’m realizing that this brownish red color is way too light for Azcona, his hair is dark, he needs to have it dyed. Oh no! Look at all that hard work though! Does this mean we should start all over from scratch? No no child, you don’t need to, for there’s an easy way to fix this, just follow my lead.

Go to image—> adjustments—-> hue/saturation (Or just hit ctrl+u) and a little menu will pop up with three different options, hue, saturation, and Lightness. Hue will change the color of the layer, in this case the hair. Scroll through left and right for different options, I chose to keep it the same hue, but what I want is to make it darker. I went to saturation, which tones the color down, or really brightens it up, but I toned the color of mine down just a bit, to where it was a little greyer. Then, Lightness. If you go completely to each end, you’ll see one is pure white, and one is pure black, while I like the pure black look, I don’t want to lose all that detail I added in, so I turned the lightnes down just a bit to where it was dark, but you could still see the details.

Here is the end result, I still have my details in there, and the hair is nice and dark. I went and took a 3 pix size brush and very lightly painted some blue highlights where the reflection would be. I also colored in his eyebrows to match his hair color. There you go! It’s simple, and if you want, you can even add more colors to this, maybe even add more strands (but don’t go too crazy or else it will look like the hair is just made up of nothing but string).

That’s all for the hair tutorial, quick, easy and fun indeed! More should be coming soon, maybe I can finish one before I go to sleep tonight… since I have icky work in the morning at 9 am! Bahhh, May Neptune have mercy on my soul. ;-; Any how, till next time, this is Tala signing out!

A week ago, I created a tutorial that was about kid’s crafts. Well, it’s time to continue the “Crafty Kids” series. Today (or tonight, since it’s 2:00am for me), I will teach you how to make a S’moreman. Yes, you read that right, a S’moreman. Are you ready? Here goes!

What You’ll Need:

A large cotton ball, a small cotton ball, a graham cracker, a small piece of cardboard (about three by three inches), a paint brush, black thin-tipped marker, glossy varnish, brown paint, glue

1) Take your graham cracker and coat it with ten coats of varnish. Let each coat dry thoroughly before applying another coat. Yes, 10 coats of varnish may seem like a lot, but it is needed to make your cookie sturdy, shiny, and unbreakable. After you add the last coat, set the cookie aside where no one will eat it, and let it dry over night.

2) Take the piece of cardboard and bend it slightly two times: once down the middle one way, and again down the middle the other way.

3) Paint your cardboard brown; apply three coats of brown paint onto the cardboard on ALL SIDES. Let the paint dry before applying each coat of paint.

4) After the brown paint has thoroughly dried, add two coats of Varnish, letting each coat dry thoroughly. Place the cardboard piece aside.

5) Take your large cotton ball and your small cotton ball and keep them in their square shape. DO NOT FLUFF. Put some glue at the bottom of the small cotton ball and place it on top of the larger cotton ball. Let the glue dry for about an hour.

6) After the glue has dried, take the black marker and draw a face on the smaller cotton ball. Your S’moreman can see and talk to you now! YAY!

7) Take a little bit of the Varnish and LIGHTLY brush over the cotton balls with it so the cotton becomes slightly stiff.

Take some glue and add it to the bottom of the S’moreman. Grab the cardboard piece you painted earlier and glue the S’moreman to the top of it. Let the glue dry.

9) Take the S’moreman and his cardboard and glue it to the graham cracker you varnished earlier. Let the glue dry.

After the glue has completely dried, your S’moreman is complete. That was easy! Now turn your S’moreman into a Christmas ornament and give it as a gift.

I will be adding pictures tomorrow when I have time, but for now, it’s bedtime. Happy creating!

Love always,

Marisol