Cre's Sai Tutorials

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These tutorials are intended for Paint Tool Sai. I'm not sure how relevant they are for any other drawing program. Just thought I'd point that out to begin with. Most of these are for drawing pets and NPCs for your site but you can also use them for things like items and world maps and such.

Index
Post One: Introduction
Post Two: Line Art
Post Three: Coloured Lines
Post Four: Shading
Post Five: Colour Change
Post Six: Transparency
Post Seven: Reserved
Post Eight: Reserved
Post Nine: Reserved
Post Ten: Reserved

Anyone can post now, feel free to ask if there's anything you need help with, unfortunately I don't really know any other programs but sai so please don't ask about adobe, coral or photoshop @_@

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POST TWO: LINES

  Spoiler: Page Stretch ahoy! 

Ok, once you have a sketch and are ready to line art it, simply go to the piece of paper with the calligraphy pen on it. It'll make you a new layer with different options for the pen and editing tools. Once you've done that, it should look like this:



It helps if you make the sketch layer a lower opacity, especially if you're doing your lines in the same colour as the image below.



Ok, the image above is the curve tool set to size three. The curve tool is useful for if you want to keep the line the same thickness all the way through, it's also good if you need to move your hand away during the stroke, because it puts down a point whenever you click, tap or put pressure on, which you can easily undo without loosing the whole line.



The image above this paragraph is set to pen tool and size three. This reacts to pressure, so if you go light it has a thin line, if you press down hard, it does a thick line. This is also good if you want nice clean sweeps.

If you mix both types together, you can get some really lovely results. The image below uses both of the above examples, if you look closely enough you should be able to tell which is which.

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POST THREE: COLOURED LINES

  Spoiler: Fancy, but still long. 

This trick can work on all layers, and not just the line art ones.

Click on the piece of paper, this should give you a new layer. Then tick in the clipping group. Make this ABOVE what you want to colour.



Then, on your new clipping layer, colour it in!



The above shows you how that works quite plainly, but you can do some real fancy and beaut stuff with it too. You can also use this to colour in really quick with the bucket too.



Swag.

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POST FOUR: Shading

  Spoiler: images are always big and chunky. 

If you're going to make an image smaller you should consider how the image is going to look when it's smaller, you lose a lot of detail unfortunately. I learnt this the hard way from making pets at DNAdopts.com . We shade in as if the light source was BEHIND the pet, so basically we colour in the middle. This technique can be used for the lighting as well.

I make a new folder to put all the shading in, because it can get messy if too much is going on.



The above image is coloured in with black, but since it's opacity 56 instead of 100 it looks a lot lighter. The opacity is good to fiddle around with because the shadows look more or less pronounced based on the colours underneath. Heck, you can even make a clipping layer on this one to change the colours to work better with the base colours if you want.



You might want to do more then one layer, for added depth. Below is a comparison for how I started doing them (shading according to the big picture) in respect to this shading technique (shading with a larger colour difference for the smaller image). Hopefully you can see which ones look better.

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POST FIVE: COLOUR CHANGE

  Spoiler: For when you want multiple colours of the same pet. 

First of all, you want to keep the different colours, seperate. By this I mean, have fur on one layer, hair on another, bands on one, eyes on the other, where ever the pet has different colours. Like so-



Once you've got that, you can save your first colour for that pet. Then, go back to the layer, now, you can always select the area again with your wand tool, or, you can make a new layer, clip it and bucket tool the colour there. The coloured lines tutorial has info on clipping groups if you don't know what I'm talking about.



And that's how you make new coloured pets without much effort. You can do a whole set in only a few more minutes then the original!

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POST SIX: TRANSPARENCY

  Spoiler: Showing you how to save your image so that it has a transparent background 

The first layer of Sai is always transparent, even if it looks like it's white. Ok, once you have your cute little hurriedly drawn butterfly, or whatever image you want to save-



It doesn't need to be flat either, you can even put a half opacity layer on, make it kind of look like a glow (with the airbrush tool)



All you need to do is go to file, save as and choose Png format.



From there choose 32bpp. Choosing 24 will save the image, but not as a transparent image.



The image should then save as transparent.



You can even have fun with the image below this by dragging it across your screen and seeing through it :3

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POST SEVEN RESERVED

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POST EIGHT Reserved

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POST NINE Reserved

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POST TEN Reserved

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NOW OPEN FOR REQUESTS OR REPLIES.

Anyone can post now :3