So I decided to share some of my Favourites that I use most often, or plan to. ^^

Free Photoshop Brushes – 500mL

This site has awesome, fun, unique and elegant brushes. A few I love: Art Nouveau, Victorian Ladies, Fabric, Vintage Toys. Just make sure to read the disclaimer/rules because the artist clearly went to a lot of work to create them! But they are so fun to play with and are good inspiration for creativity!

Obsidian Dawn Free Photoshop Brushes/Tutorials/Vectors/Etc.

Another site with a big collection of amazing stuff for photoshop. Again, check the rules for usage restrictions. Veryvery good Photoshop resource.

Colourization Tutorial (And Others)

This site has some helpful stuff on it. This tutorial here shows you a fast and easy way to colourize old black and white photos with great results.

Royalty-Free/Free Stock Photos

This is useful for photo manipulations, but each photographer has different rules so make sure you check their licensing info. There are quite a few royalty free images though!  I mainly use it for reference for drawing .

OneMotion – Flash Paint/Illustration Program

This is a fun, simple, but extremely useful little flash program that is especially great for those without access to Photoshop or another art program. It has opacity, flow, mask capability,brushes, and lots of other features that make it awesome for drawing and colouring.

iScribble – Draw & Chat

A fun little community where you can chat and draw with people and work on pieces together. It has layer function and you can submit/view others work.

Realistic Pencil Portrait Eyes

This a free online tutorial that helps teach you how to create a realistic, “wet” look for eyes. It’s very helpful and easy to understand!

Hello! I’m Snowwwhite, or at least that’s who I am here. I’m 20, female, and a student. With the coming of a new year, I’ve decided to try again to keep a blog and stick with it long enough to get a couple followers maybe and to find some others to read myself.

This is my current blog in which I hope to share some useful information, entertaining finds, and the odd recipe or pattern. My personal interests mainly consisting of arts, it will likely center around that, but the odd diversion might come up as well. I hope that I can share some useful tutorials, ideas, inspirations, and fun with anyone who happens to come by. ^_^

(Click for Full-Size)

This is a simple tutorial on how to isolate lines in photoshop. This is especially useful for anime style art when using lines that you are taking off a webpage (with permission from the line artist, of course!) or if you forget to do your lines on a transparent layer. I will try to over-simplify to make sure even semi-beginners (like myself!) can do it. The image shows the locations where to find tabs/buttons/etc that are mentioned.

1) Copy-paste your lines into a new layer.

2) Go to the Layer tab at the top, then to Layer Mask, then Reveal All.

3) With the ALT key held down, click on the Layer Mask thumbnail. This is in the little box that has Layers/Paths/etc.

4) Paste the lines onto this layer, then press CTRL-I to invert it to black and white.

5) Check your info panel to make sure there are no grey areas. (Or very little, though none is preferable!) If you see any grey areas, click Ctrl-L to get to the Levels panel and adjust the sliders until it looks all black and white and clean. You might have to play with this a bit to get it right.

6) Now click on your actual image (not the mask) and push CTRL-A to select the whole piece. Fill the layer with black. If you want thicker or darker lines, you can sometimes click fill several times.

If it looks messy or jagged, ALT-CTRL-Z (undo) until you get back to before this step and return to Step 5 and play with Levels.

7) Right click on the Mask thumbnail and select “Apply Mask”.

This should work! I have used this method with several different types of line-art and it has worked so far! It’s rather simple, but I find it very helpful to know.