hackbentadventures:

Hello! 

You mean the hero mode art? Or the spriting? Or both?

I do everything on photoshop, so its kinda hard to translate if you don’t have the program. (you can download a copy for free if you look around tumblr, there’s links)

Note that I’ve been using photoshop for about 6-7 years now. So practice makes perfect, it really does. Every day of drawing/doing something makes you better at it.

There’s a really good spriting tutorial here by scourgecesting. If spriting turns out to be too hard for you, there’s some blogs out there who make sprites for you if you submit a drawing/description to them.

A really big resource for me has to be homestuckresource’s base masterlist for sprites, I made my own hair/horns, but I modified some bases to make my own outfits.

As for my hero mode art, it took me awhile to get the hang of things in photoshop. As you can see the prologue panels in my fanadventure aren’t exactly as quality as most recent pages. Keep in mind that you might wan to check out some tutorials for photoshop that show you how to use the pen tool before we begin.

So anyways let me just doodle something first.

Here’s a picture of Ollapa I sketched/ on a post-it note like 5 minutes ago. Scan it and open your photo on photoshop. :)

Hit: Layer>New>Group

Name that layer you fankid/trolls name.

Hit: Layer>New>Layer

Name that layer Head, always name layers, always. It keeps it organized. Here’s a tutorial explaining why layers and groups are important/what they do for your art. Read that and then move on. The group’s for your fankid/troll art only, anything else under it can be background stuff, anything over it is foreground stuff.

It’s always good to use the eyedropper to get accurate colors. I always make a layer outside of the group and paste in my sprite of my character to get colors from like a palette.

Anyways back to the head layer…

Get the Ellipse tool, making sure that on the top right, the middle box that had the pen inside the square is selectedand make a circle over your character’s head. If the circle is off for you, go use the pen tool to make its shape different. 

Hit: right click>fill>uncheck anti-alais>hit ok>hit “delete” on your keyboard once to get rid of the outline.

Congrats, you have made a head. :)

Click on your fantroll group>click where it says pass though/normal>set it to multiply

Set it back to “normal” when you’re done with your fantroll/don’t need to see the lineart anymore. Now you can see what you’re outlining exactly. It’s not exactly perfect, but you adjust/edit layers to make things look nice. If you need to, click on the fantroll group layer and change the opacity to make it more transparent so you can see.

Just use the pen tool and outline the rest of the stuff. Usually the group layer looks like this:

>Horns

>mouth

>teeth

>Bangs

>Eyebrows

>Pupils

>Eyes

>dark circles/eyebags

>black eye outline

>(eyelashes)

>Head

>symbol

>clothes

>sleeves

>arms

>hair

*NOTE: If you have a pen tablet, use that to outline with the lasso tool.As mentioned before in my process picture thing, UNCHECK ANTI-ALAIAS for all tools and set the eraser to “pencil” mode.

For small adjustments/fixes use the pencil tool.

What helps for eyes is duplicating layers, which can be accessed though right clicking.

None of my sketches look like the final result by the way, they serve as a base mostly to see where to put things. Here’s the final result after outlining/filling in with the pen tool, making eyes with the ellipse tool. I didn’t make his arms because I think with the knowledge of the pen tool and everything else makes this is easy.

Just read up on a lot of photoshop tutorials and they’ll help you in making hero mode stuff. The pen tool can be the most annoying thing in photoshop, but the things you can do with it are wonderful.

LAYERS ARE SO IMPORTANT. SO IMPORTANT. THEY ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND. USE THEM. :)

I really do hope this helps, send an ask if you have any questions.