Designing

When you receive your first colonist, you may be a bit lost when it comes to designing them. If you're new and unable to design your first colonist for whatever reason, you can request that an admin design your first colonist for you for free!

The design guide hub is useful, but this guide is visual. For the purposes of this design guide, I will design a new tsabhua Native. I'll also be using the Babybreath adult tsabhua lineart, which is free for anyone to use.

Our example will be Appaloosa black male tsabhua with ticking, blanket, and barring.

You are perfectly allowed to use your own lineart for your colonists! While you may want to design your colonist on one of the provided backgrounds, submitted designs must be transparent to use official background items. 

We now require images to fit into the ratio 61/40 (1.525) with ample padding around for use with our background image items. Standard dimensions are 1830px by 1200px (or scalable using that ratio, minimum of 1220px by 800px).

In the design guide hub, click on the link labeled tsabhua. If you're designing a belemoid or tark'ee, you will of course use those instead. Next, look to the right and see the list of Colours. Our Native is black, so we click on the word Black and see this colour palette pop up:

At this point, I like to gather all the guide images I might need to reference during the design process. I like to design in Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint and store the guide images in a folder so I can easily delete it when I'm finished. I use the colour-picker tool to grab a colour from the black range and then toss it on my design. I also tend to use a bright colour to start with, then fill it with an acceptable colour later on.

Don't be afraid to change your mind about colours as you go! This is where layering is super useful - I keep all of my markings on separate layers so that I can easily change them as I go.

I tend to prefer to do the big body markings first. My go-to for things like Blanket is the lasso tool - it makes really nice, crisp lines! Make sure you have anti-alias set to ON.

When markings allow for soft (or even hard) markings, I like to "feather out" markings a bit by lassoing around the edges of the markings, mimicking fur with the shaping, and then using a soft brush to erase or fill in areas. This is pretty similar to the "mapping" effect that white spotting genes can have!

Once I've finished with this, building up and erasing as I go, I pick a good colour. Markings have "free ranges" that you can pick from, depending on if the marking is lighter or darker than the base coat. I'm using a desaturated grey from near the middle-right of the dark free range.

For barring, I use the same bright-colour technique, but instead of using the lasso tool, I use a mostly-soft round brush and do little flicks across the body. For barring, these are usually little trails. Depending on my mood or how I feel the design is progressing, sometimes I'll enable this little icon that I don't have an actual name for.

As you can see below, I took my advice from earlier about changing colours. As always, you should stick to the palettes or near them.

When I start with Appaloosa, I fill a layer with a white selected from the white range. I've maneuvered a few layers around so that the mane is below the appaloosa layer but the skin, claws, eyes, and teeth are above it.

Then, I start erasing using the lasso tool plus a soft brush for feathering edges. I will sometimes lower the opacity of the white so that I can see the markings below and I can decide what I'd like to show and what will stay hidden. This is probably the most time-intensive part of the designing process for me.

Once I've gotten to a good point, I switch over to doing the Ticking. I tend to duplicate the white layer or tick using a mask, so that if I don't like how something is turning out I can go back without too much harm done. This is done in a similar fashion to barring, except using smaller strokes and without the icon I mentioned above enabled.

I like to manually add mapping by lowering the opacity and brushing over the ticking and appaloosa edges again. Mapping is not required, I just like to do it. I think it adds a nice, softer feel. :)

By now, the design is mostly complete. There are some areas I'm not so satisfied with, so I'll go back and edit them, but for the most part it's looking pretty good!

I like to do a few more small things. Barring is one of the few genes (along with Stripe) that can be visible faintly through white spotting genes. To do this, I move the barring layer above the Appaloosa layer and selecting the opaque regions of the appaloosa layer (you can do this by holding CTRL and clicking on the thumbnail of the layer.) Then I paint the barring (with its transparency locked) a cream colour. I don't want it to be too noticible, but I did like what I did on the hands specifically.

Skin, Claws, and Horns

At this point, I like to go back in and set my colours for skin, claws, and horns. For this design in particular, I like the darkness, so I'll leave it the same colour as blanket. Remember that claws and skin have to be darker than the fur they touch - however! You can have paler lunulae, which are the pale half-circles on human fingernails. You can see an example in the image below.

This is not at all required, but I like to colour the lines. Remember, if you do colour the lines, they shouldn't be too visually different from the colour family they're on and they should always be significantly darker than the fur they're on! In other words, no white outlines on black fur and nothing like bright blue lines on a red colonist.

A little thing I like to do is when the lines shift from white spotting to a much darker colour, I add a bit of a more saturated middle-ground colour between them, to assist with the fading. For this native, I used some brown.

The design is done! Go ahead and save, then send in a design update request. Make sure your file is below 1 MB in size otherwise the upload will yell at you.