3 AJ Art Tips: Saving, Erasing, and Creating Tones!

Hey Jammers! I'm gonna try to make this a quick post– the shelf in my room fell off my cursed wall for the third freaking time so I need to figure out how to nail it back up (:

So, I'm the kind of person who waits until the last minute to do things, but I was so excited about AJC's den item contest that I decided to get my design in early. It also didn't say when the due date for the contest would be, so I wanted to have a better chance by getting it in soon...

I'm a verrrrryyy slow worker with my art, so I spent a good 10 hours doing my best to perfect my design. As for what it was– I'll show you after the winners are announced! 

Because Animal Jam's painting tool isn't always the easiest to work with, I wanted to write this post to share a few quick tips that I think are good to know c:

Tip #1 – Keep saving your work as you make progress.

Because the Art Studio's Undo button can only take you back one paint-stroke, it's good to save your art every 5 or 10 minutes as you make progress. That way, if your computer crashes or you make an accidental paint stroke you can't undo, you can just click 'Load' and go back to one of your saves.

On the right is an example of my AJ Art Saves folder– "wip" stands for WithIn Progress. For the den item contest, I saved my work a total of 41 times! It sounds like a lot, but it really helped me add extra details without worrying about doing anything irreversible. 

Tip #2 – Pick a background color to be your "eraser" color.

This one is pretty simple, so you may be doing this already– if you're drawing something in the foreground (example: an item) and you don't already have a background in mind, choose a background color and paint it over things you want to erase.

Tip #3 – How to create tones.

Now here is a very specific trick you most likely don't know yet: how to create tones!

Did you know you can't actually get every single color from the Art Studio's color palette alone?

Because each rainbow color fades into black, you can get dark colors called shades– meaning, a color mixed with black. The dark purple shade on the left is a shade of red. Because each rainbow color also fades into white, you can also create light colors called tints– the pink on the right is a tint of red.

However, because the greys get their own separate section of the palette, you can't get tones– colors mixed with grey. The default panda color is an example of a tone:

So if you'd want to use this color in the AJ paint studio, how might you do it?

I'll tell ya!

So, let's say you want to draw the panda above with its exact default color, or at least as close as you can get. 

Before you start your drawing, do this:

Make your canvas a medium grey, and put a small dab of your ideal color's hue at the very bottom with your paintbrush. A hue is like the true underlying color before it's mixed with grey, white, or black to become the tone you're looking for.

You can play around the find the hue, OR you can use an online tool to help give you a sense of what it is. 

I used this tool. As you can see, I ended up darkening the pink I used in the Art Studio a bit more, but you could still basically get the color you need if you used the hue this site gives you.

After you've found the hue, use the biggest size of the smudge tool and smudge from the very top of the hue upwards, going side-to-side zigzag but not up-and-down:

As you can see, I'm not blending that pink hue into the grey, but using only the tiniest bit of it to make the default panda's specific tone.

From there, ignore the rest of the pink hue and smudge from the murky tone that you've begun to create. Keep dragging that tone until it creates a sizable blob.

At this point, you should use Tip #2 and use the medium-grey background color to erase the bright pink spot along with the bottom-most part of the tone blob:

This is important so your tone doesn't pick up any lighter colors.

And then, just keep smudging that dark tone until it fills as much of the canvas as you want. For this tutorial, I'll just keep going until it fills the entire canvas.

Ta-da! Now you have your tone– a color mixed with grey that you can't select from the color palette. 

To make a panda, you could do something like this:

(For this tutorial I'm just drawing the head because I'm lazy)

You could draw the lines, and then use the fill tool to make the white parts white, leaving the rest:

And when you're ready, you can use the fill tool (along with the paintbrush tool) to change the background color:

There you go! Now you can use darker tones in your Masterpieces that you couldn't use otherwise C:

Well... as is what always happens, this has been the exact opposite of a quick post. I started at 1:10 and now it's 4:04. Dang.

But anyway, I hope you enjoyed these AJ painting tips! Feel free to share any tricks and tips you use when you use the Art Studio ^-^

See you in Jamaa~