As artists, we can often feel like we’ve plateaued on our progress because of lack of time, or resources. Not every artist has the time to go to art classes, and not every artist has the money to attend art-school and receive a proper critique.
That’s why I’ve created this blog! Introducing the…
The Redline Station is a blog that is dedicated to helping artists. If an artist is struggling with anatomy, or would like a critique on their art, they can submit the art using the SUBMIT YOUR ART button. Then, one of our moderator artists will pick up their piece and do a redline of it to help them better see the places that need fixing.
What’s a redline?
Good question!
A redline is when an artist will draw directly over a piece of art in order to show what the mistakes in anatomy are. By seeing the comparison of the art itself (at a lower opacity) and of the more accurate anatomical example, the artist can more quickly improve their drawing.
Our artists will take your submitted drawing and give you a redline. They will then post it to the blog alongside the original to help you compare the two and easily see what needs to be done. It’ll look somewhat like this!
Q: Can I submit anything?
A: Yes! Any type of art, human or animal is okay! The only thing that’s not okay is gore and pornography. The posts will need to be PG-13. (Kissing and suggestive scenes are okay, however.)
Q: Will you redline if the drawing is in my style?
A: Yes! Anime style, cartoony style drawings are also okay. The idea isn’t to fix the drawing to look more like ‘realism’, but to fix it to make it look more believable within the frame of style it’s already in.
Q: How many drawings can I submit for redlining?
A: For the time being, I’m the only one running the blog… In order to keep my sanity, I will accept only one submission per person and only keep submissions open for a limited time until I get more help. Which brings us to our next point…
apparently ppl don’t know about waifu2x??? despite its… concerning name it’s literally the most convenient website i’ve ever come across as an artist
it allows you to resize artwork without it becoming pixellated. this is a MASSIVE help if you, for example, make lineart too small or something. it works best with things that 1. have no textures 2. have smooth lines 3. have cel shading, but it still works really damn well for things that don’t fit that profile
here’s an example:
normal size
2x in paint
2x in waifu2x
so like, there’s that. go wild
Original:
Photoshop scaled:
Waifu2x scaled:
It’s legit!! Tell your friends!
waifu2x-multi is the newer version. It allows for rescaling multiple pictures at a time and to scale them up to 10x the original size.
It looks like tumblr now automatically converts png files to jpg – if you have a fairly “clean”/simple digital art style that gets wrecked by jpg artifacts, you’ll want to put transparency somewhere in the image – tumblr will leave pngs with transparency alone (a single pixel border of transparency around the image works and is pretty non-intrusive).
Incidentally twitter has done this for a while, the same method of fixing it works there.
I’ve been doing this on twitter for months now; literally just adding a tiny border of transparent pixels is enough. .jpg does not support transparency, so adding it to the image forces Tumblr to maintain the .png file in order to maintain the transparency.