Trying to improve my fakes.

Prophet

New member
Okay, this isn't a fake, so don't pull out your rate pens. I've noticed that some of my artwork involving blood and other particles are too smudgy. Can someone please explain to me in little baby words how I can improve my blood effects. Something like Angel's rant on the color decreation. Thanks in advance.
 
Improve blood? Thats a tricky one... I can't really simplify it. I got some rough notes on blood I made myself. And some possible ideas I have from using Photoshop. Don't know if anything here is of any use, can't figure out a way to make it seem simplair then this.
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Okay these you do not need to know. These are just rough notes. These notes ight not ness. be true, I've only gathered these from my own observations.

-Blood on wall will always try to drip down, even when its
splattered all over the place.
-Blood does not always drip down in a straight line, it goes in the easiest route to the ground, so if theres a bump in the wall it will go around it not over it normally.
-Same rule applies on any surface,
-On the face(presuming your standing up), blood would normally drip normally around the cheek to under the chin. From there it will drip down the neck.
-A pool of blood lies flat on the ground. If you do a MK fataility it would be smudged left to right (or right to left).
-Unless you looking at the character from above, then it would spread away from the body in a circliaur appearance away from where it escaping from the body.
-If the wound is in the chest it will start a pool from there.
-The longer blood remains on the spot the dark it will get as it dries. Its normally dries a dark red with a slight brown tint.
-Thicker blood amounts are less transparent then light amounts of blood
-Blood on the outside of a pool of blood is normally darker then the center where it gathers as it tries to spread out.
-Drips of blood will be thickest and dry darkest at the bottom where the drop is falling and not in the trail left behind it.

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On smudging:

True MK style blood is not transparent, which is wrong. Blood is alway transpaprent, if only a little. If you know how to change the transpareacy of the layer you can do it that way. There is another way, using the paint brush tool. This can be better then just making the layer transparent as it allows you to build up levels of colour on one layer.

Also when you smudge, the best drawing heads are ones which are rough textured or dotty as they grab only small sections of the colour. This normally results in a better appereance for some reason.

If you find the smudge tool not good enough, there is another option. Go to Filter-> Blur and from then against the blurness of the layer in question. You might also want to play around with the filters cause there are some usful stuff in there. :)

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Colour adjustments:

To make anything look it was done 13 years or so ago, this is easy. Just go to Image-> Mode-> and index colours and change the number of colours (which on mine are set to 256) to 32 or whatever. It will recolour the whole picture to match the number of colours you have told it only to do.

But there is NO POINT in doing this if any part of your picture already is set to it. So if you want only one layer down this way, your going to have to cut and paste this layer into a new file and work from their. All layers are lost in this process. And to use the smudge tool you got to turn indexed colours off because it only allows these exact colours and smudge tool produces a lot more colours then these allow.

edit:

Oops. Almost forgot, when you set the number of colours don't forget to check the difher is set to diffusion and that the transparacy button is ticked.

You should play around with these the index colours setting anyway, you can give the imae some really retro looks with this thing. :)
 
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