In this first “Making Of...” chapter, I’ll cover the tools I prepared before going into drawing.

 

[1] Tool layout

As a basic rule, palettes that are related to drawing (such as brushes) are placed to the right, other tools such as the [Layer] palette and [Navigator] palette are placed on the left, and the canvas is placed in the middle. This drawing tool placement is due to me being right-handed.

 

When drawing, I frequently merge and copy layers. The [History] palette in the middle of the left dock is there to check if the results of these operations are acceptable.

 

Each palette can be selected from the top [Window] menu to toggle visibility. Additionally, palettes can be displayed individually as windows or as layered tabs in the docks on the sides and bottom of the screen.

 

[2] Main brush

I’ll explain the brushes that were used in this piece.

All brushes are the basic brushes with minor adjustments.

 

■ Oil paint flat brush

[Brush] tool → [Thick paint] sub tool → [Oil paint flat brush]

(In Ver.1.8.5 and earlier, select the [Oil paint flat brush] sub tool from the [Oil paint] sub tool group.

If you updated from a version earlier than Ver.1.8.5 to Ver.1.8.6 or later, you can still select the [Oil paint flat brush] sub tool from the [Oil paint] sub tool group.)

This brush is set to slightly mix colors. I use it to layer colors. It was probably the most used brush in this piece.

 

■ Darker pencil

[Pencil] too l→ [Pencil] sub tool group → [Darker pencil]

I use it on parts where I don’t want to mix colors, or where I want to draw sharper lines than the [Oil paint flat brush].

 

■ Soft

[Airbrush] tool → [Soft]

I use it to blur sections and make gradients.

 

[3] Texture Brushes

The texture brushes used here were made by importing an image material and setting them up so they could be used in brush strokes.

I prepared two types of brushes; brushes that use materials as paper textures, and brushes that use materials as brush tip shapes.

 

■ Brush_custom01

This brush was used on the dragon’s skin details and roughly textured sections.

 

The material is used as a paper texture. To apply a paper texture to a brush, set [Texture] from the [Tool Property] palette (the [Sub Tool Detail] palette if there is no option). The texture’s scale can be adjusted with the [Scale ratio].

 

[POINT]

The [Sub Tool Detail] palette, where you can set detailed sub tool settings, can be displayed by clicking the bottom right tool icon of the [Tool Property] palette, or by selecting [Sub Tool Detail] from the palette display in the upper [Window] menu.

 

■ Fire_brush

This was mainly used for the dragon’s breath.

 

By using textures like the above as brush tip shapes, materials can be used like a stamp.

 

Clicking the [Tool Property] palette’s [Source setting] button (in the [Sub Tool Detail] palette if not displayed) in [Direction] will display the [Direction Effect source settings]. This brush has changed the settings for [Input affecting to Direction] set to [Direction of pen], making the brush tip face the tablet’s pen tilt direction.

[Direction of pen] will only be applied when using a tablet with tilt-sensitivity.

 

For details on how to create brushes, refer to the TIPS below.

 

[4] Selecting/making colors

When choosing which colors to use in illustrations, think of the surrounding light source colors and the motif’s local color.

In this piece, I made a color set based on the colors of the light source, which are effected by the surrounding flames (red) and the dragon’s breath (blue shades), while the dragon’s colors are muted.

 

 

 

■ How to make color sets

 

(1) The main colors are first selected from the [Color Wheel] palette, and later fine tuned.

(2) While only the adjusted colors are painted with the [Oil paint flat brush] initially, colors that are mixed well are added to the [Color set palette] using the eyedropper tool.

(3) Based on the palette, the piece is detailed and more colors are added to the palette when necessary.

 

At a certain point, it becomes more frequent to select colors from the canvas.

 

[5] Checking shortcuts

Shortcut keys can be checked and adjusted by opening the [File] menu → [Shortcut Settings].

Although the [Pencil] tool’s shortcut is initially bound to the [P] key, I have changed it to [V], as the initial position was too far away from other frequently used keys such as the [Ctrl] + [z] (undo) shortcut. Due to keyboard layouts, it also helps that this places the [Pencil] next to the frequently used [B] key (hotkey for [Brush], [Airbrush]).

Similarly, this piece’s custom brush “brush _custom01” was assigned to the [V] key.

 

We will go into “Sketching” in the next chapter.

 

[Artist profile] 電鬼(denki)

I mainly draw illustrations for TCGs and books. Previous TCG works include: Z/X, LUCK AND LOGIC, LOV, and Last Chronicle, among others. Some of my favorite motifs are girls, backgrounds, machines and monsters.