Hello and welcome to my hastily thought out and poorly executed tutorial on how I make my mayhem. Be prepared; my techniques are probably not the most efficient or elegant. But they make things happen.
This tutorial was done using Photoshop CS6 on a Windows PC. Your software and computer will use its own set of hotkeys and commands, but hopefully what i demonstrate is clear enough for you to understand and replicate on your device.
So a pre-step I do with any skin is to re-arrange and organize the layers. I will pull the shadows layer off of the base mask and hide it. All my new layers i make while creating will be at the top of the stack, indicated by the ‘SKETCH’ layer there. I will turn down the opacity of the ink layer but not hide it completely.
I turn off all other layers on the base. You can delete them if you want, but occasionally I have found them useful when wanting to select only the wing area for something, etc.
Once our playground is prepped, its time to make magic. After sketching something I will line it out. Using a 3 - 4 px hard round brush I do those lines on a new layer, then hide the sketch.
Under the ink layer I make a new layer, this is what I will use to block out the non active area on the dragon. this should cover the entire outside of the object, while the inside remains blank/grey.
When you choose a location for your item on the dragon/dragon species: be mindful of the lineart and areas in deep shadow on normal dragons. Use this to your advantage.You can see how i did this with the dorsal fin on the wing arm, and the bottom part of the tail.
Next I do shading and highlights. the magic here is TRANSPARENCY. Transparency is your friend. Transparency lets you get away with things you normally cant. Making dragon objects is all about fooling the eye.
First thing I did was color in the white of the eye. I don’t want it bright white, but i could have it white if I want to since it does not have any restrictions. On here I dropped it to a 50% transparency.
Next I did our shadows in black. Shadows are always below the whiteout layer. Here you can tamper with volume with how sharp or blurred you make your shadows. I tried to use a fuzzy brush here to portray the ROUND. When done I set my shadows to 60% opacity. I should note that these numbers are not set. In fact they are different every time I do them. Adjust it based on the illusion you are going for, some require stronger layers than lighter.
It should be noted that black must ALWAYS have some transparency. This accommodates the no black rule, while achieving a similar effect.
Next is highlights, which are always above the lineart. For this critter I used two sets of highlights. The faint ones with a blurred brush to create the scale reflections and fin waves, and then a hard line around all the surfaces to help define our shape. It will help it stand out against the dragon and preserve that illusion. The soft highlights are at 60% and the hard at 80%, though since they are white the transparency is not required, but suggested.
Now that our detailing is done, we can make sure our black outline is also transparent. We first do this by ensuring there is nothing underneath it on any of our other layers we drew on. In this case, that would be the whiteout layer, the shadows, and the eye.
We do this by selecting all the pixels on the layer. Windows with CS6 does this with Ctrl+Click on the layer you want to get the selection from. I then go down the line on everything BELOW it, hitting delete to clear that selected area on those layers. If you want, you can use the eraser tool on the selection for the same effect.
Once complete, you can set your line art layer to 90%, allowing it to be safely transparent.
With our object complete, it is time to prep the ink and shadow layers. Its here that you want to return the opacity/visibility of your inks and shadows to 100%.
I always start with shadows first. How i deal with shadows is a case by case basis. Sometimes I will lighten the whole thing by locking the layer and using a lighter grey/cyan and calling it good. In this case, our fish is not badly affected by those shadows, so we will only worry about our whiteout area.
First, create a layer mask. In CS6 on windows, this is selecting the shadow layer, then click the new layer button while holding down Alt. this brings up a handy box. Check the box that says “Use previous layer to create clipping mask” then hit ok. Yay, now you can color the shadows how you want while keeping them in the right place.
Now that that’s done, go ahead and use the Ctrl + click to select all the pixels on the whiteout layer, and go back to the new layer we just made. I experiment with any of those lighter greys until I get a shadow I feel like i can get away with. It’s random what’s accepted, so just do a guesstimate. It’s easy to fix later if it gets declined.
Once that is done, go to the ink layer and do the same thing: Create your clipping mask, select all the pixels on the whiteout layer, and then color the line art a grey thats darker than the darkest shadows.
Our final bit of housekeeping with the line art is on our object’s highlights. Create a new clipping layer on the inks, under the one you just made. Then select all the pixels for all of your highlights you did for your object. this may take multiple selections, but they can still be dealt with on this one layer. After each selection (i had 2 here, my soft and hard highlights) I select a dark grey, and use a big hard round brush to just fill the full area. This gently lightens the lineart ever so slightly. Its subtle, but makes a difference.
After that, we are done with the art itself! Now to prep it for its transparency and we are good to go!
We are in the final stretch now. These last steps are complicated to explain, but are actually very fast to execute.
Here i tend to duplicate my skin folder in case i have to go back and fix a whoopsie. But i did that here, then hid that folder. I then merged my layers. I merged all the ink ones (Ctrl + E will merge all layers that are selected). I then merged the shadows. NOTE: IF YOU MERGE THE SHADOWS, MAKE SURE YOU SET THAT LAYER BACK TO MULTIPLY!
And finally, merge all the layers attached to the base, but DO NOT INCLUDE THE BASE. It should end up looking like my image above. 4 layers.
Next is the tricky part. Open up your accent folder. You can then click and drag that base layer and stick it to the bottom of your accent folder. This WILL MAKE YOUR SKIN EXPLODE. THIS IS OK. We will fix it, i promise.
In the same folder, grab the ink clip layer and drag it down so it sits above the base layer. Select the base and the ink clip, and Ctrl + E to merge those two bad boys together. This is what we will use to clean up our skin.
We are now going to use that merged layer in the accents folder we made. Ctrl + Click to select all the pixels in it. Then go into your menu (Select -> Select inverse) or use a hotkey to invert your selection. this changes the selection from being the dragon, to being everything OUTSIDE the dragon.
Once you have that, select your layer with the art on it, and clear/delete the selected area on that layer. What SHOULD happen is that everything is deleted, leaving a nice happy outline of a dragon. This is what i do for all my skins and has been approved multiple times. It is very accurate.
The final steps are here! The last thing to do is to make another clipping layer mask on your nice and pretty skin art. You will then drag your ink and shadow layers onto it, and wala! Your object is transparent while everything else has the proper line art and shadows.
From here you do your normal prep: Resize to 350px and save as a Png 24. I ALWAYS save the full size version of the file. So I will undo the size change after i saved my png.
Aaand thats it! congrats! You now have a dragon that is actually something else, and will use a dragon’s colors to do it! You can see below my “Tutorial Fish” that we made here and what it looks like. If enough people want it I’ll get it printed.
But otherwise… yeah! My deep secrets have now been revealed.
There are a lot of really dog shit things in the world of tech that can be solved with a bit of time, some stubborn googling and maybe some special hardware and piracy is only the tip of the iceberg.
Printers are notorious for claiming they’re out of ink when they haven’t come close to the suggested number of prints, and their cartridges literally still have ink in them. So after a bit of googling I found out how to ‘reset’ a cartridges automatic stopping system (its literally 1 physical wheel on the cartridge that you gotta turn back). The only downside is that I don’t get a digital ink monitor, but since it told me it was empty when still half full, I don’t mind.
Like, you can just jiggle with some shit and solve one of the biggest money making scams in the post-industrial world and I don’t think people realise its that easy.
Or, like, repairing your own technology. A few months ago, I swapped out my sister’s laptop screen. Did it myself, I removed maybe 4 screws, no vital parts were exposed and it cost me $40. I even got a choice of matte or glossy.
My point is, any walls that capitalist technology presents you with will be a false one. And one already broken by a dedicated community of interesting people working hard for free to break down that wall.
kids these days will be all “be gay do crime” and dont even know how to watch a cartoon without paying for it smh
IN FAIRNESS
piracy was definitely leagues easier a decade or so ago when thepiratebay was functional, megaupload was still running, and YouTube and Google made only the most cursory attempts to block copyright content. like let’s not pretend that the internet hasn’t got a lot more corporatised in the past decade or so. piracy is still possible and you can and should do it but it’s a LOT harder to do safely and reliably than it was.
^thank u
Sorry, this is all wrong.
1) ThePirateBay is still functional. (It’s not the same pirate bay that it was back in the day, but let’s not get into Theseus’ ship territory. It’s still here and it still works, that’s all that matters.) There are plenty of torrent sites around, more than there were 10 years ago – although overall traffic has plummeted. Now as then, it’s a whack-a-mole game.
2) Why was it “leagues easier” a decade ago? Some countries, not all (not north America, for example), now mandate ISP blocking of torrent sites, but this new complication can be bypassed with one (1) step: a google duckduckgo search for proxies. No government agency or ISP can possibly keep up with proxies, it’s yet another whack-a-mole game. So yes, it was technically easier before, but I don’t see “leagues” anywhere.
3) It was safer before? Are you shitting me? Have you lot forgotten that the legal departments of MPAA and RIAA sued torrent sharers (not even uploaders) and asked for millions of dollars for damages? AND GOT THEM? (By which I mean they didn’t actually get millions since the people they sued didn’t have any, but said people were convicted and ruined and that was the goal in the first place. It was a deeply amoral and cynical scare tactic.) Well they stopped doing that at some point, and focused on hunting P2P and torrent sites. Running a site is certainly less safe today. Using one, though? Depending on where you are, the ISP may be allowed to block you after repeated instances, and that’s it. You’re not getting in trouble with the law or into crippling debt. And either way there’s only a minuscule chance that any of this will come to pass, which becomes zero (0) with a VPN. (Safety of course depends on the country, and in some cases piracy is the least of your concerns. Let’s not get into that.)
4) Ten years ago there was no Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis was in its infancy. If today it’s harder to find PDFs on google, it is orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to find them elsewhere. People just have to unstick their minds from the notion that stuff is either on google or doesn’t exist at all. Geez.
5) P2P still exists. IRC (the sharing channels in particular, #bookz and the like) still exists. Torrenting functions like it always did. All these methods are exactly as easy to use as before, i.e. not necessarily a piece of cake, there’s a learning curve. But it’s the same learning curve it was 10 years ago.
6) So what have we lost? Only YouTube (meh, the film/tv quality was appalling anyway, and music is still there) and direct downloads (at least the permanent ones: there are plenty of them still around, but files expire and you need to keep track of what goes up when. So this goes beyond knowhow, it’s about internet communities. Let’s not get into that either, it’s a huge subject.) It’s a loss, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a terrible blow.
7) And in exchange for that loss, we got streaming sites. This is piracy, too, and it’s much much easier than torrents, and tons of people do it. Any “piracy has declined” narrative either implies that we’re excluding streaming from the discussion for some reason, or is flat out wrong. Ten years ago, grandpa couldn’t possibly torrent a film, and it’s debatable if he even knew how to open the file you helpfully sent him. Now, as long as someone has set up kodi or similar, grandpa can watch it on his tv and it just feels like cable.
8) On why torrents in particular have declined in recent years, see here. It’s a big subject and I didn’t cover all of it, but the main reason is that people had access to easier methods to get what they wanted (some legal and affordable, some illegal and free), so they didn’t need to learn how to torrent. Ergo, they never did. There’s more of course, and there’s definitely a cultural shift too, but that’s a very long story so let’s not get into it. The linked post also includes some thoughts on why torrents aren’t dead and doomed just yet, and ooh, I forgot a very important one: you can’t stream photoshop.
To summarise, internet piracy is NOT more difficult, unreliable, and unsafe today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For reasons why people (young or otherwise) seem less versed in it, please look elsewhere. I have thoughts on that too, but this is already a very long post, so I’ll just leave you with the best kind of thought. I’ll leave you with a doubt:
ARE people less versed in piracy? Are they really? Or is it simply that 20 years ago, internet users were computer geeks by definition, whereas now everyone’s online? Perhaps the percentage of skilled pirates in the general population remains more or less the same, and the only thing that’s dropped is the percentage of skilled pirates to total internet users. I can’t be sure without statistical evidence, but it’s a possibility.
You can literally google “watch _____ free online” and find most movies but the third result just download Adblock or popup blocker and you’re golden it truly couldn’t be easier
I’ve been meaning to make a piracy masterpost for awhile and what better time than now?
Materpost: A curated Githup tutorial of links to more torrent sites, software, VPNs, uBlock origin filters, ect. Basically everything you could ever want starting out. Do be warned though it doesn’t appear to have been updated in awhile so a few of the links are dead.
GAMES:
Vimm’s Roms: NES era->ps3 era roms and emulators to play them. Has user ratings on games. Cons: slow download speeds.
nsw2u: More switch roms. Check here if nxbrew doesn’t have the game you’re looking for.
Hshop:3ds games/updates/dlc. Very well organized and sorted by console region. Bonus ability to generate QR codes to scan with homebrew to begin download directly on your console.
Oldgamesdownload: Old 90’s-2000’s PC games and some gamecube games. Technically, all of the games here are abandon ware, meaning the original company/creator doesn’t sell nor make money from the games anymore period. If you’re into that.
Fitgirl repacks: Heavily compressed PC games, and other various consoles. Small downloads and faster speeds for the size of the games. Somewhat limited game selection.
Steam unlocked: Steam games with easy-to-use installers. Check here if fitgirl doesn’t have what you’re looking for.
Steam Underground: A user forum for piracy support, usually about installing cracked games. Does have some scattered PC game downloads.
Amiibo life: Amiibo bins, can be loaded with some homebrew to load in games without any external source, or, if you buy writable NFC cards, you can make your own free amiibos.
Books:
Library Genesis: a good all-in-one ebook finder. Has books, magazines, scientific papers, ect. Well organized and able to sort by Author, Genre, ect ect. Almost all books in .epub format
Calibre: Not piracy but a free software for reading said .epub files, and other ebook formats. Good for sorting your books.
Sci-Hub: Research papers, academic books, pdfs, ect. Helpful for collage students.
IT ebook: eBooks about learning programming languages.
getintopc: Wide selection of pc (mostly windows) software of all sorts, and different versions. Can personally vouch for the site, I’ve gotten Photoshop, Maya, and Sony Vegas from here over the years.
Other:
the eye: An archive of old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect. Cons: No search function and slightly hard to navigate.
1337x.to: Torrent site for movies, shows, games, comics, ect.
ngl, this song slaps way harder than it has any earthly right to
Story time: When I was at university in Japan I lived in an international dorm with all of the other foreign exchange students, and my best friend at the uni was a French girl who lived directly across the hall from me. Nausicaa, and we taught each other slang from our native languages.
One of the first things she taught me was to respond like this when someone’s looking for something, so like “où sont mes clés?” (where are my keys?) “dans ton cul” (in your ass), which can then be followed up with “comme ma bite” (like my dick)
Fast forward 8 years and Nausicaa comes to visit London from Lyon with her boyfriend, who I’ve never met before, and at one point he says “ou est mon tabac?” (where’s my tobacco?), and of course I say “dans ton cul”, and the boyfriend looks at me like “what the fuck English person” and then when the follow up of “comme ma bite” comes, he laughs so hard I think he’s gonna break a rib, and Nausicaa is just there with this shit eating grin and is like “I taught them that”
She told me later that day that of all the things she taught me and we learned together, she was so proud that saying “up your ass, like my dick” was what stuck
If I made this shit up for a cyberpunk novel, people would tell me to tone it down. Fed up with this gay earth.
they sold it to themselves, then gave it back to their original account after. Looking at the raft of logs people are posting about this, they took out huge amounts of loans to do it then paid them all back off.
