ArtRage Tutorials and Resources

1. I am not affiliated with Ambient Design, nor is this an offical page.

2. The art linked on this page belongs to the respective artists. It may be free to take, but most of it will not be. You check with the artist first.
(For some free wallpapers check out my Places to find me lens).

The art actually on this page is all mine. If you wish to use it for something *ask first* - I do not allow commercial use, but will probably be happy other things.

3. Reading this page signifies agreement and acceptance with my status as ruler of the world. I will expect your tribute after the beep.

4. I DO accept bribery and other monetary expressions of appreciation

From Liz Harvey on the ArtRage Forums come these very, very good points. I have only included the first sentence of each paragraph, so if they interest you, follow the link at the end.

Tip 1: Learn the Importance of the Sketch
Sketching is one of those things that every artist MUST do and do often. Sketches don't have to be perfect, nor do you have to show them to anyone.

Tip 2: Draw, Draw and Draw Some More!
This is a similar tip to the first but what I mean by this is draw anything that comes to mind or visually interests you.

Tip 3: Build a Reference Library
This is a great tip that I learned from years back. As you begin to fill sketch books with illustrations of ideas and reference material, you should build up that stack of books with more books.

Tip 4: Explore Different Mediums
This is when you take an idea from sketch to final painting. Exploring other methods of creating that end piece can really yield some unexpected results and challenge you to push yourself further into new situations.

Tip 5: Learn Some Colour Theory (At Least)
This is a big one. Colour theory is a massive, massive subject and I can't do it justice here. What I would strongly suggest is investing time and money in a good colour theory book and learn from that.

Tip 6: Play With Perspective
Now, by this I don't mean completely bend the fabric of reality or attempt to mimic the works of M C Esher (but looking at his work couldn't hurt).

Tip 7: Hunt Down Your Artistic Weaknesses & Destroy Them!
I was told this by an incredibly exceptional artist called Chet Zar. This tip is something you should approach regularly and be really tough and honest with your self.

Tip 8: Ask For Help & Critiques
I heard this one from numerous sources and I have to say that this is something you don't have to do all the time.

Tip 9: Develop an Original Style
Ah, a real tough one this as developing your own style takes time and experimentation.

Tip 10: Learn to Accept Failure as a Positive Thing.
Possibly one of the most important lessons an artist (or almost any professional) can learn.

Read the full post here

Linearts and Sketches

It may be that you wish to colour someone else's drawing, or your own that you have drawn by hand and scanned in, or lost the PTG file of, or drew in another program.
A lineart is basically a very tidy sketch! Or rather, it is a black and white drawing with no coloured areas, only lines. A lot of people on DeviantART allow artists to download and practice on their drawings, and others enjoy collaborating.
Most professional comics, manga and other forms of graphic novel are now created this way (specifically inkers and colourists).

Transparency or not?
Option 1. Transparent - Black lines and no background (will probably appear as cels).
Option 2. Not Transparent - black lines on a white background, which will hide anything underneath.

Supported ArtRage file types
(Quick list: ArtRage can export and import JPEG, PNG, PSD, GIF, BMP and TIFF )

Option 1: Transparent
If you are drawing a sketch directly in ArtRage then the layer is already transparent, or you can edit the canvas settings to make it transparent.

If your lineart already contains transparency (commonest being a PNG or PSD) or you are able to edit it in GIMP; Paint.NET; Photoshop; or another program easily, then all you need to do is import it into ArtRage. You CAN carefully erase sections of white, but this usually is neither quick nor easy.

Option 2: Not Transparent
This section assumes:
1. You have the full version
2. You can import your sketch or lineart into ArtRage
3. It's black and white (while you can work around colours, that's a whole different kettle of fish and not the same as simply colouring in a lineart or sketch)

1. Add another layer and move your lineart up/import image to layer (so it isn't the bottom one - you can easily move layers around by dragging them)

2a. If it's a transparent png that's easy (you can try editing it to remove the white in another program if you're any good at that :shrug: I'm not >.> )

2b. Edit layer (the little arrow) > Blend (click 'normal' in the field/box) > select mode

As a lineart is just black and white, there is more than one setting that will work

So, tint or shadow are easiest (black stays solid and white vanishes)

2c. The white overlay will interfere with the lighting effect - this means it will hide a lot of the textures and the metallic effects, so if you want these, you'll have to paint over the lineart and change the PAINTED layer to 'Tint' (of course, then you have to be very careful not to go over the edges, as it will 'tint' the other layers as well.

If you are interested in drawing a lineart...
This section reviews a handy application for creating non-wobbly lines as you draw

Another aspect of ArtRage is the option to create your own colour palettes, stencils and background canvases - such as the ones provided by other people below - and add them to the options provided.

In the ArtRage system folder are Colour and Stencil folders for you to save your files into.
Colours need to be in .col format

Stencils can be either .jpg or .png

Simly save or copy your stencil or colour files into these folders. (NB i think this is slightly different for Macs)

What is negative space?

Negative space is the area around, under, over and beside the subjects and objects of a painting. It is the balance and the breathing space, it cradles the subject and dramatizes it. It gives the viewer somewhere to rest, without leaving your art behind.

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,
but the empty space between them
is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space between it
is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the house
The Uses of Not - Lao Tse

For example:

in this photograph, the subject is obviously the silhouette, while the negative space is the view into the aquarium

Here, the negative space is the entire photo, shaped around the figure to create the silhouette, which is the subject.

Negative spaces can be used to create optical illusions, when the subject and the space are so well balanced that the viewer cannot decide which to focus on.




Big White Cat, Small Black Cat Art Print
Buy at AllPosters.com

Negative space is a result of your choice of composition, how you crop, and the colour balances in your image. As a rule, an equal balance of negative space and 'busy' areas are considered good in a piece of art.

Negative space can be a central part of a painting, and play an important role in the overall composition. It's very obvious in these examples, which are mostly negative space, with the actual subject being quite small.


This has a strong impact by balancing the single line or point of interest, creating an interesting composition around a small, yet still dominant, subject. It creates a sense of openness and emptiness, with the birds(s) or figure to draw the eye, and the flow of the composition and line of sight created by the lines of the branches breaking across the sky .
Or alternatively, as in the first photograph of the fish, adding to the appeal of the subject through an interesting background.

However, make sure it isn't wasted space, in which there's no actual point to the emptiness, rendering the picture boring, and a waste of the viewer's time in paying attention to the entire picture.
For example...


In both these images, the subject is not strong enough to stand out against the large amount of negative space around it, and the blank areas have become the subject. Ideally, the dominant area should actually be interesting!
While the first photograph of the turtle could work, if the lighting and detail were better, the subject of the second does not interact with the empty areas or balance them at all. Here, the composition is entirely wrong. I would have been better served with a more subtle composition...

"Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form"... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission."
The Art of Looking Sideways. by Alan Fletcher

Portraits and single subject paintings use negative space to frame the figure or still life subject, allowing it to stand out clearly. Utilise the rule of thirds, and do not place your subject exactly in the centre for a more interesting painting...

• In Japanese Ma means a space, or pause, between two structural elements.

Here is a fantastic example of a picture that is almost entirely negative space, by the artist MichelineKanzy







• Negative space on Wikipedia
  Negative space, in art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, and not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space is occasionally used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image.


• Enhancing Your Art with Negative Space
  As a designer and artist, it's easy to concentrate and attach ourselves to the main objects of our work - So easy in fact, that we can easily forget about a part of our work equally important: The Negative Space.
  Negative Space is the space between an object, around an object, but is not part of the actual object itself.


• 
  Negative Space - Art History; About.com
  Negative space is a compositional tool used in both two- and three-dimensional work. The simplest way to describe it is as: "space where other things are not present."

Black and White Cats Art Print
Buy at AllPosters.com

Why do you need reference images?

The picture on the right was drawn without a reference image, except memory and my hand. However, it needs references for the face, the posture, the hand, the arm, the butterflies... if I want to finish it properly.

Most of you have never stood with a tiger breathing into your face, watching the whiskers twitch, or felt the tremor of a soft mouse, with its heart jumping in your hand, or watched the sliding light along the side of a thrashing fish....
Many of you may have never held human bones, and few people pull off a butterfly's wing to see how it fits, and they can't pick a celandine and carry it with them as a memory of the colours.

So what do you do when you need to know how an eye looks from the side, how a hand holds a fish hook, what muscles are where? How do you discover how many different blues swim in the ocean?

You can't do it all, and if you can, you can't remember it exactly. You can make it up, but there are always details lost, and lost again, until you only have the shade of the original. How many of you REALLY know what a paw looks like?

Many of these things, you can find in real life - some you can draw from, there and then. Mirrors for eyes, zoos and pets (if you can keep them still!) The view from your window. The lines of your bookshelf can become the perspective of your dusty western street and the curve of the lamp the stretch of a dragons neck.

Your own hand, clenched or twisted or curving. Your eye, looking back from the bright falsity of the mirror, your foot - toes stretched out before you. A friend, or family member, people passing by... drawing from real life is the best option, where possible - photographs can be distorted (lighting, editing, focus, the slight curve of the lens), and other people's pictures will never, never be perfectly accurate. Once you have ALL the fur, all the angles, all the original, then you can choose what to draw, what is necessary, what simply doesn't matter to your picture.
But sometimes? You need a photograph.

Reference photographs and ArtRage

Of course, the ability to import a reference picture, or trace over one, in ArtRage, are very useful additions, (meaning you can constantly refer to the image without moving your head around, or changing windows).
Simply find the required image and add it, as described previously, using 'Add reference image' or 'add tracing image'.
Alternatively, you can refer to physical photos, and illustrations in books (a lot of books are very valuable resources, especially nature books which are by their ... ugh, nature, full of pictures of animals. You can even scan these in, or take a photograph of the photograph. Which leads me to my next point...

Reference photographs and copyright
EVERY picture you find, in a book, in Google Image Search, on art sites - every picture was taken by someone else.
This means you need to check if they have rules about use, and - if you actually publish it in any way, credit your sources. Most images will be fine for personal reference, it's when you start trying to use the images you paint, that you have to start paying attention to copyright.

Good places to look
Anywhere using a Creative Commons license. This is designed to allow sharing between users.

ART sites with stock and free to use reference images. For example, the Stock section of DeviantART. But again, the artist has chosen to allow that picture to be stock, make sure they haven't kept restrictions.
Common ones are: no prints (commercial use); no use off DeviantART (if put up online); no gore or sexual use, for some artists.
ALWAYS credit them; and let them know you used it - so they can keep track of who uses them and what is used, as well as a way of thanking them. I know that I am always delighted to hear that someone has used some of my stock.

Stock sites. (You can pay to download specific photos on places like iPhoto and Shutterfly - but again, check the rules of use, and you shouldn't have to resort to this, unless you're after something specific or exclusive)

Avoiding Copyright Issues Entirely
Of course, if you have access to a (digital) camera, you can easily take your own photographs.

Cons
You are limited by your own skill, and your available subject matter. You will also have to pay in time and effort, to take an dedit the phtoos, and possibly for the cost of a camera.

Pros
No copyright worries - the picture is YOURS.
You can choose the exact pose you want, or subject, or angle, and redo it if that isn't quite right.
You might enjoy it! Photography is also a valid art form, even for ArtRage painters
And finally, YOU can offer it as stock in your turn.

Some quick camera tips
DPI on cameras - commonly around 6-8 megapixels per inch now. This is how many dots are fitted into an inch (and translates directly to pixel size in cameras).
The dots printed in 2 are 1/2 the size of 1.
This means that 6 is 1/6 better than 5 , and 9 is 1/9 better than 8 .
As you can see, the higher the DPI, the smaller the increase (and the bigger the filesize). I would not worry overmuch about anything over 7 megapixels.

Zoom
You want the best manual zoom you can get. This is the physical movement of the lens. DIGITAL zoom is simply stretching out the image, and identical to what you can do yourself when cropping it on your computer.


To demonstrate:
Compare the original image from the beginning of this section - - to te painting below painting, in which I used a reference for the face.

Contents
Autumn Serenity Picture Walk-through
Water Tutorial
Cloud Tutorial
Grids and ArtRage - basic drawing Tutorial
Buy Apples Picture Walk-through
Glazing Effects Tutorial
Abstract Picture Walk-through
Experiment in DP Picture Walk-through
Mah Munkeh Picture Walk-through
Portrait Sketch Picture Walk-through - sketching, shading and crosshatching
Colouring Tutorial - layers, paintbrush, colours





Autumn Serenity tutorial from FafnirMcCloud on DeviantART




Artrage Water tutorial from Ruthlessmoons on DeviantART




Artrage Cloud tutorial from Ruthlessmoons on DeviantART
* I learnt that you can blend using a brush with zero loading (which makes sense, actually) from this tutorial. It works as you would expect a soft brush to - part way between the 'flat' and the 'saoft' palette knives in smoothness and CPU intensity




Tutorial - Grids and ArtRage from Bolsterstone on DeviantART




How I made BUY APLES by Awesomeoclock on DeviantART



ArtRage Glazing 101
"With this tutorial I hope to offer a technique that effectively simulates traditional oil glazing using the tools in ArtRage 2.2:"
Go to Fashmir's Art Journal for a walk-through tutorial on painting glazing effects
*In ArtRage 2.2



Abstract Tutorial - BalenStyle by Balen13 on DeviantART *note: this is in the slightly older version 2.2



Experiment in DP by Nishad2m8 on DeviantART *note: this is ArtRage AND Photoshop - ArtRage is used for the sketching and base colour

Mah Munkeh ArtRage tutorial
A walk through of sketching and painting an image, covering paper settings, sketches, layers, paint and lighting.
Go to Fashmir's Art Journal for a walk-through tutorial on creating a painting




How To Make A Portrait Sketch by Emenemsbis on DeviantART


Colouring Tutorial by ~kujaku-chan on deviantartART

From Bolsterstone on DeviantART



From Chibixestella on DeviantART

The Official ArtRage Tutorial page

An Overview of the available tutorials

Quick Start: A quick start tutorial for ArtRage 2 that gets you right in to the basic features of ArtRage 2 such as painting, using tracing images, and layers to create a painting of a rose. Downloadable file in zip format. This tutorial requires ArtRage 2 Full Edition.

Macaw: Waheed Nasir takes you step by step through the process he followed to use ArtRage in his painting 'Macaw'. This tutorial contains techniques that can be used with any version of ArtRage.

Cartoon Tutorial: An animated tutorial in which Hans Deconinck shows off some of the features of ArtRage 2 and steps you through creating a cartoon face. This tutorial will requires ArtRage 2 Full Edition, and a Flash player for your web browser.

ArtRage Tutorial: Nick Harris shows a number of advanced techniques he uses in ArtRage. You can see more of Nick's work at his website www.nickillus.co.uk. Click the thumbnail to view the tutorial ( requires a pdf file reader ).

Step By Step: ArtRage user Judith Tramayne takes you on a step by step tour through ArtRage with this series of videos that shows what pretty much everything in the application does and what you can expect to find as you paint. This is a particularly great guide if you're new to the product and are a bit nervous about getting started! This tutorial requires ArtRage 2.5 Full Edition and a Flash player for your web browser.

Yet more ArtRage tutorials, collected and indexed in the ArtRage Forums by Hannzz




ARTRAGE VIDEOS
JUDITH TRAMAYNE : VIDEO BASICS OF ARTRAGE
JUDITH TRAMAYNE: you tube videos for making email cards
YOU TUBE ARTRAGE
MISTERPAINT: video tutorial on painting hair
MISTERPAINT Painting a portrait with feltpen
MISTERPAINT : Photomontage with ArtRage

ARTRAGE TUTORIALS


khalid Ipda : painting a waterfall
Hanzz : Caricature oil painting
Mister Paint : Drawing a manga head (with movie file!)
Dali : Portrait painting tutorial
Cedric Trojani : Eraser as drawing tool
Calzgal :A toady tutorial on color blocking
Gzairborne : making a pencil sketch from a colored image
Bumble : Bumble Sky
Fashmir : Sunflower Technique
Fashmir : Watercolor brief
Sweedie : Blending tips
Hanzz : Stencil fun
Erwinsoo : Portraiture, blending and general techniques
Djmez: Tree tutorial
KFC : a new effect
Heiki: making a postcard
Creationsings: Wax seal
Furrtrap: Mix palettes
Hanzz : Layer modes
Sweedie : adding scratches and dirt
Andyrage : Perspective with rulers
Pai: Sparkling stars
DAkey : AR color palette picker
Sweedie : Painting clouds
Cym : Basic painting tutorial
Ginem_Ginem: Tips and tricks
Sweedie : painting sky
Bumble : Fur painting
Erwinsoo : steps to painting a boat at sunset
Enchanter : Fire explosion and importing textures
Charlie : Stencils as masks
Fasmir : glitter tool
Enchanter : Blending thick and thin
Cthorpe : Multi color rubbing
Daverage : tips for basic glitter
AgedP: Bob ross canvasses
Heikki : Thick layers
Fashmir : Custom papers
Hanzz : caricature making
Heikki : Bubble tracing
Alanti : paintbox palettes
Sweedie : Golden section
Andyrage : blend mode button tip.
Nakedfanatic : Creating textures
Levent Surberk : painting an orange with AR pastels
Levent Surberk : painting an eye
Frenchy Pilou : Text 3D
Free2 : Grain as hair
Sweedie : colouring a black and white photo
Fashmir : Glazing technique
Heikki : tracing image, wave to mountain
Agedp: art pen
Dakey : palette stuff
Aged P : liquid black and white
Maror :

Maror : VR panoramaVR panorama
Dakey : Extracting a clean palette from an image
Charlie : Wax scraping
Sweedie : colourizing a scanned drawing
Nelgred : quick portrait tutorial
Jiilin : Impasto + glaze
Hypnomedy : gradient color picker
Sosuke : step by step portrait from photo
Sethren : painting clouds
Sosuke ; steps to making a portrait from a photo
Andyrage : Messing with paper
Enchanter : How to use paletteknife for blending
Andyrage : Drybrushing
Sweedie : paint roll gradient
Tinzo : Make a colorpalette with an image
Tinzo : Painting a seascape
Tinzo : Tree tutorial
hanzz : peter graves caricature
Peter pinckney : Painting a seascape
combined autors : help with inking in artrage
Artnuovo : making ArtRage quilt
Emenemsbis : Crosshatching a portrait
MisterPaint : making an old photo
Sweedie : quick skies
Shirly : Painting roses
Dali : Portrait tutorial, Billie Piper
MisterPaint : fantasy painting tutorial
Peter Pinckney: painting rocks
Thyra : Painting hair with the feltpen
Rozalek : How to paint spots
Nickilius : How to make a stencil from a photo?
Nickillius :creation of a stunning artwork in ArtRage
Damasocl : watercolor / acuarela
Tigwa : canvas and opacity changes
Someonesane : how to paint polished metal ?
Jacktar : Great step by step to a seascape
Khalid Ipda : How to paint water reflections
Peter Pinckney : Painting Clouds
Mister paint : African Portrait
Khalid Ipda : painting water tutorial
Ico Dy : Watercolour effect
Ico dy : making a star shower
Someonesane : turning a picture into sepia tones
MisterPaint : adding an oil paint effect