u/Jaxter-In-Box

I just wanted to share how this game made me enjoy art again. I've been an artist for a long time and most of my life I've had fun creating my artworks.

I think it was about a year ago that I started doing commissions again because I had a lot of fun when I did commissions about 5 years ago. For some reason I had a completely different experience than I've had in the past.

When I started these commissions again it felt like nobody appreciated my art anymore. I would spend hours on these realism pet portraits only for people to complain about the price. Most of my interactions with people who wanted my art were people asking if they could get a pet portrait for $20, scammers, or telling me why they couldn't afford my commissions and that they wanted free art.

When I did get customers some of them were very rude or had unreasonable requests. I would finish a sketch and didn't chicken scratch at all. Then later in the art work when I showed them my progress again they would want me to change the size of eyes or the shape of the nose, which is much more difficult than it would've been if they brought it up when I showed them the sketch.

Sometimes I'd get very far into an artwork and my customer would decide they didn't want it anymore and ask for a full refund. The last customer I had told me everything looked great throughout the art process until I finished it. they said that it didn't look anything like they wanted and that they would like a full refund. They argued about it with me so much when I said that I wouldn't give them a refund. After that I didn't make a lot of art anymore.

Now playing this game with all the customization features I'm having so much fun making art for me. I like seeing my mii's interact with my custom treasures and wear my custom clothes. It's so nice to enjoy art again.

Somebody asked for help designing an outfit with a prosthetic leg. I posted it in the comments of my last post, but I thought that it might as well be its own post. I'm going to tell y'all the process I went through for the prosthetic leg part of the design. If the terms I'm using for the brush settings don't make sense then feel free to take a look at the posts I've made regarding the brush settings. I'm planning on making a post soon that's a guide on all the important art mechanics in this game.

For the prosthetic part I pretty much used darken with a dark blue for the shading and lighten with a light green for the highlights. I used those two settings for the majority of the design. Remember to put a base color down first before you start shading it.

I first shaded the horizontal lines with darken and then with the base color I colored over the lines twice with the overlay setting. After that I just shaded everything with the brush settings I mentioned and then without any brush settings I added a little bit of black and white to push the values.

I find that when I'm trying to make metallic objects it helps to get as much contrast as I can and I usually have the shading look more cell shaded than I would normally do in my artworks.

It helps to select the area of the prosthetic, copy it, flip it the other way, and position it so that it's on the other side. Much less work that way.

I saw a wonderful wheelchair dress idea the other day that

u/Appropriate-Heart632 made. I just had to recreate it. Unfortunately the proportions are weird because I haven't quite figured out the clothes proportions in the palette house yet.

I'm planning on making more wheelchair dress designs with different clothes and wheelchair options. I made some mistakes so I'm going to fix a few things later today.

There were a few people in my last post who had some questions about the brush settings. I decided that I'm going to make three tutorials for each brush setting, starting with overlay. I've written a number on each of these screenshots to help organize the post.

1. Before I dive into this I'm first going to explain what a brush setting does. When I say brush setting, I'm talking about the three check options underneath the Blending category when you go to the brush menu. For any of those three brush settings to work you need to have paint already underneath the spot you are using that brush setting on. The brush setting changes how the color you're using reacts to the color your painting on.

The best way I can explain overlay is to imagine that you just finished a painting. You then add water to some green paint so that you can thin it out and you then paint a layer of it over your painting. You'd get a green tint throughout the painting, but the values in that artwork mostly stay the same.

2. This is one of the ways you can use overlay. First I put the two colors side by side, then using those same colors I was able to make them look like they were blended together. To do this I used the green color with the overlay setting on and I drew some layers of that on the red paint next to the green. the closer I got to the green color, the more layers of green I drew onto it. I repeated this with the red paint and was able to get this effect.

3. For these next two examples we're going to use Flubber. Let's imagine that Flubber fell in a bowl of blue soda. How would we make him all blue while keeping the values the same? This is where overlay comes in handy. I painted over Flubber using overlay and was able to turn him blue. The more times you paint over something with overlay, the closer that color will get to the color you're painting with.

4. Now let's try something different. Let's say that Flubber stepped in a puddle of blue soda. How would we make only his leg blue while keeping the same values? For this example I used overlay to paint over his leg with blue.

In order to blend the blue color with the green on his body I used the eye dropper tool to get the exact colors of the paint on the edge of the blue leg and I then used the overlay setting to paint the part of the edge where that color I copied was. I copied the colors at a few different points on the edge of the leg and used the overlay setting to blend it together.

I hope this tutorial helps. It would've been easier to explain if I used a video, but I wouldn't know how to do that. I tried to describe what I was doing the best I could. Let me know if anything doesn't make sense so that I can try to edit it and fix it.

I'm baffled by how many people hate the drawing experience in Living the dream. Obviously it's nowhere near as good as clip studio paint, but this game is the first time I've been able to draw something in a video game and not feel limited by the constraints of the drawing features.

The thing that amazes me the most is that there are no layers and yet I can still have a relaxing drawing session in this game. I don't know about y'all, but every other video game that had a drawing gimmick was so disappointing that I found myself not wanting to draw. I assumed this game would be no different.

I realized that this wasn't like the other video games when someone was playing the Demo and they showed the alpha lock along with the darken, lighten, and overlay brush settings. As a long time digital artist, if I were going to pick only three brush settings, I'd choose those three every time.

The fact that the switch can be played handheld makes the experience even better. I don't even have a stylus yet and I am still having so much fun drawing. I have some off brand joy cons that are much better than the Nintendo brand joy cons, so that makes the handheld experience smoother.

Having the joy cons actually makes one point perspective easier than most digital art programs I've used. It really surprised me how much I use the joy cons for details and perspective.

I could go on and on about how amazing the digital art program on this game is compared to other games, but this is already a long post and I don't want to make it even longer.