You may already be familiar with Frankentoon and his work, and you may already know we are big fans and have featured this studio and it’s founder many times before. So as you will expect, we’re super hyped that you can purchase one of his brush packs, Concept Master Vol.1: Nature, in the Affinity Store.
Concept Master Nature contains a handful of specialised brushes, which have been designed to be used together to create believable natural elements. With your purchase of the brushes you’ll also receive a handy Tips and Tricks eBook. Within this download you’ll receive numerous technique based tricks to help give your work that extra pizzazz.
To demonstrate some of the skills you could master here’s an excerpt of a few of the tips and tricks whilst celebrating the great four elements of Nature; Earth, Air, Water and Fire.
Earth: Designing ground
Earth is the element that we see as a constant in our day-to-day life, that said, it’s not always the easiest to recreate during our work. Frankentoon believes ground should not be something that is overlooked when designing backgrounds and environnment paintings. Ground can add a lot of depth to your scenes. Which is why these 8 non-grass based ground brushes are such a treat and combined they create effective results in an instant.
“Like other natural elements, the way you mix the ground brushes will give a different personality to each type of environment you’re creating. ”
Using a combination of these 8 brushes can be a hassle-free way of making realistic looking ground. Remember that no two strokes will ever be identical using these brushes, so keep experimenting—if something doesn’t have quite the desired effect simply undo and try again!
Air: Creating clouds
Painting clouds are probably one of the holy grails of environment design. Despite their undefinable shape, clouds are difficult to pull off correctly.
Imagine clouds as solid as objects too, as intangible as they are, clouds get also affected by light; so imagine clouds as small groups of boxes in different sizes piled up together. This way you’ll see how easy it is to find their volume and values.
Water: Using the water brushes
The set of four water brushes supplied in the pack can be used together to create a massive waterfall scene in literally minutes. Or they can be used separately to paint breaking waves, calm waters, splashes, pouring water and many more cool effects too. The below info-graphic demonstrates how you can combine and build each of the four water brushes to create a fantastic waterfall effect.
Fire: Creating & mixing fire
Creating fire with these brushes is super easy. Simply select the brush FT Nature - Fire (Step 1) and pick an orange colour. To lay down the primary structure draw some wavy strokes from top to bottom. Then, select the next brush on the list FT Nature - Fire (Step 2) and repeat with upward strokes, this time to smooth out and define its contours.
By now you’ll already have a pretty effective looking fire, to finish off the effect you’ll need to add the ember effect and simulate the base of the fire. To do so, use the FT Nature - Fire (Step 4) to paint small particles of burnout wood flowing with the wind and finally, select FT Nature - Fire (Step 3) to simulate the small pieces of firewood burning up from the ground.
The free Tips and Tricks eBook contains many more top tips. From techniques for using the stamps, to ways to build up the brushes to create textured greenery and rocks.
Buy this brush pack on the Affinity Store!
If you like what you see and you haven’t got your Frankentoon Nature brushes yet, they are now available to buy on the Affinity Store! These raster brushes are compatible with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer on both desktop and iPad. In Affinity Designer, these brushes will be accessible from the Pixel Persona only.
Please note: The included colour palette in the kit is for desktop versions only.
About the maker…
For more fantastic content from Enqrique you can visit Frankentoon’s marketplace for brush kits, texture packs and advanced illustration eBooks. With prices ranging from $1.99 to $11.99 it’s a great treasure trove of resources.
Alternatively, Frankentoon’s TOON LAB delivers free tutorials covering a range of techniques from quick complex masking and painting with textures, to emulating retro graphics and comic book illustration.