galoogamelady:

I don’t feel particularly great at drawing chain-mail either but there’s a technique I learned from a tutorial a bunch of years ago that I think makes a pretty good texture. It’s fast and the end result is cartoon-y enough to match a less photo-realistic style. I can’t for my life find the tutorial so I’ll recreate it here (using Photoshop):

1. Fill your canvas with black or white. Filter -> Render -> Clouds

2. Filter -> Filter Gallery -> Glass (under the Distort category)
Keep smoothness as low as possible, play with the other settings

3. Find a filter in Filter Gallery that you like and apply it. Combine them, if needed.

4. When applying texture to the drawing, use Edit->Transform->Warp to make it fit the shape you’re trying to convey

You can stack more filters on after the texture is placed or draw over it with a textured brush to make it look less uniform if that’s what you want. Add a shine to it with a big soft brush, colorize it, go crazy. I go with whatever looks best to me atm.

This is how I did Geralt’s armor too, though since I knew the final print will be smaller than 1.5″ I didn’t worry about details much. 

Hope that helps!

nim-lock:

Alrighty!

So to make a repeating pattern: 

1. Open a canvas and draw in the center WITHOUT touching any of the edges. 

2. [Below: Light cyan lines] Divide your canvas into four equal parts.

Make four guides framing the canvas, and two across the middle. 

For the ones in the middle, View > New Guide > Horizontal or Vertical for needed orientation > type in 50% to get the exact middle of your canvas. These are photoshop shortcuts, may be different on your programs. 

3. [Above: Yellow arrows] Make sure you have ‘Snap’ checked under View > Snap, then select each quarter of your piece > layer via cut > move diagonally to the other side.  

After you’re done moving things diagonally, you can either turn off Snap so your doodling won’t stick to the center lines, or toggle the guide visibility off (Ctrl+;). Merge the layers back together. 

4. Draw in the middle without touching the borders, color the entire thing if you plan on doing that.

5. Setting your image as a pattern After your image is done, merge all layers into one > select the entire canvas (Ctrl+A) > Edit > Define Pattern

Open a new canvas bigger than the one you made the pattern on, and paint bucket it in! (Instead of the Foreground button at the top when paint bucket is active, select Pattern then your pattern)

If you aren’t using a program that lets you define patterns, merge everything into one layer and duplicate & tile them manually. 

Cheers! 

kirszche:

it’s a mix of brushes in csp!
it’s mostly some preset sparkles in glow mode, random shines also in glow mode and the iridescent rainbow shines were done with a decoration brush called オパールグローリボンタイプ (opal glow ribbon type) from a set called オパールグローブラシ (opal glow brush) on a layer with lighten mode. these brushes are free and really good for that kind of effect.

if you don’t use csp, you can also get a similar effect by overlaying glows done with an airbrush type of tool. hope it helps!