I’ve seen some pretty poorly-corrected photos lately. I’m going to show you how to use the channel mixer tool to colour-correct your photos, since I find it gives the greatest level of control.

Here’s a my boyfriend holding up a bunch of fake Oscar trophies at an Oscars party we went to, because he’s awesome and also a lovable wiener:

You’ll notice that the photo’s quite yellow — and it shouldn’t be that yellow.

The thing about cameras is that although they pick up light and colour roughly the same as our eyes, they don’t have the internal colour-correction system that our brain provides. Just like how our eyes adjust for high and low levels of light, they also adjust for colour.

This is why your house might look dark and greenish the moment you step in after being out on a bright, sunny day, and it’s also why if you stare at a bright red spot for thirty seconds, then look at a blank wall, you’ll see a cyan “ghost image.” Your brain has been compensating for the intensity of the red by adding cyan.

Incandescent light is extremely yellow. It’s comfortable and warm in a house (this is why the new fluorescent eco-lights come in a tinted yellow variety), but looks terrible in a photograph. This is why proper colour adjustment is important — you want the photo to look the way it did to the photographer’s naked eye.
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The Skillful Huntsman

I first came across The Skillful Huntsman in my concept design class — it was one of the required textbooks for the class. And, wow, I wasn’t expecting it to be so inspiring. I bought it halfway through our first assignment, and ended up starting all over again once I realized how much my designs sucked. I was surprised at how much I learned.

The book itself takes a classic Grimm fairy tale and illustrates the entire process behind the character design, environments, buildings, monsters, and everything else that would need to be designed for a studio producing a movie or game or whatever.

It goes through thumbnails, different sketching methods, colouring methods, and there’s just a whole lot of information on how frustrated artists can get their ideas out of their head and onto paper.

In the Future…

A few months later, browsing at an art book store on Granville street, I came across another book by the school — In the Future. It’s pretty similar to The Skillful Huntsman, except it focuses on entertainment design for several well-known franchises (such as The Wizard of Oz). I love this book to death — in fact, I’m just about to go out and buy another one.*

I definitely recommend both of these books to anyone interested in costume design, film design, character design, environment design — anything.

*Okay, my original one got spilled on and it’s fused into a solid block of paper now. I’m buying a replacement.

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So I got a few emails from people asking for advice on what to buy if they want to do art.

Rather than linking them to one of my articles on people making stuff out of garbage, I decided to go through and pick out a bunch of my favourite art supplies, books, and software (as well as a whole bunch of products recommended by my friends/artsy guys).

So here is art crap by redmongoose.net. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers, tell your mother.

You’ll notice there’s no how to draw manga crap to be seen. I ended up having to suffix all my search queries with -manga. In fact:

<@Amika> i’m
<@Amika> looking for drawing pencils on amazon.com
<@Amika> this is what my search query ended up being
<@Amika> drawing pencil set -manga -staedtler -sharpie -crayola -book -prismacolor -eraser

But after a long and hard search, I came up with enough products I’d tried or had heard were awesome to fill up a little store.

Tips on buying art supplies!

It’s true that you get what you pay for — especially when it comes to chemical-based supplies like alcohol markers or oil paints. Cheap supplies will be laden with cheap filler, which will make the marker or paint or whatever difficult and unpredictable.

That being said, a pencil will always be a pencil, and charcoal will always be burned things. I would not spend my life savings on “super-pencils.”

Honestly? There’s a difference between a Dixon #2 pencil and a Faber-Castell B6 drawing pencil, yeah. But amongst drawing pencils, they’re all very similar quality-wise. It’s more a matter of what you feel comfortable with.

Also, I’m very partial to Strathmore when it comes to sketchbooks. This might have to do with the fact that my high school’s art class got only Strathmores to sell to the students (and when they ordered the wrong size once, I was allowed to take home as many as I wanted).

If you’ve got any helpful suggestions on things I should be adding to the store, taking out, staying away from (I want to hear terrible supply stories), or new categories I should be adding, tell me!

Today, Mistwalker released three new pieces of concept art for their in-development RPG, Last Story.

It’s enough to get me excited — so far all we know is that the game takes place on one Ruri island, and Last Story’s story will center around the island and the wealthy capital city.

The colours are all bright and warm; Mistwalker says they’re going for a more natural aesthetic (similar to Rune Factory for Wii). I haven’t seen many good RPGs for the Wii, so I can’t wait until they release some gameplay footage and screenshots.

Here’s to hoping the game stays more or less true to the concept art. I’m particularly adoring of the third image  below, showing the entire island.

Last Story is rumored to follow the style of both Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest (both led by Hironobu Sakaguchi), so it can be expected that the environments will be rich and colourful:

The game’s pretty well been hiding under the radar these past few months, and a release date is still TBA.

Looking at screenshots for old games always, always makes me want to play them!

I’ve played through Earthbound so many times, though, that I don’t get any satsifaction from it anymore — I’ll need to talk Kev into playing through it, so I can watch him. Seeing someone else playing a game I love for the first time is, in a lot of ways, even more fun than playing through it myself.

Here’s some of the original concept art from Earthbound:

The dungeon man!

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

A cartoonist living in Oregon, Mr. Annable is the creator of the Grickle and Further Grickle graphic novels. He also contributes and is the editor of the Hickee comic series from Alternative comics.