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!
I realize I wrote Motion Blur instead of Movable blur but you get the idea
A long time ago an anon asked my thoughts about drawing backgrounds, so I finally got around to putting this together. It’s more prop-centric, but it still represents my philosophy to backgrounds.
I’ll try to do something more about drawing actual background spaces in the future! Please let me know what you think, if anything is unclear, or if you have suggestions for other tutorials you might find helpful!
Another neat tutorial I thought might be interesting for people who follow this blog! 😀
I finally finished the thing! Here’s a short little tutorial on drawing curly hair. I hope that you guys find this helpful, and if you have any questions please ask!
Astronaut bird 