Hello all,

I recently got inspired to give making my own custom overlay a shot, problem is I'm not very familiar with using a tablet yet. My biggest challenge was in trying to make something 200x200 that still looked clear/good, and that felt like it fit with the Subeta art style.
This was today's effort. [img align=center]https://i.imgur.com/HRychPG.gif[/img] I feel like I need to improve the linework, but I'm afraid it'll compromise some of the more subtle shading. Does anyone have any advice as to how I might improve on creating a piece that fits the constraints of the custom overlay?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Custom overlays don't have to fit a set style, just meet the rules here, so that's your choice style wise. Refining the line work sounds like a plan (personal instinct would be to focus on line weight, which should enhance this shading style, rather than distract) but for a new tablet user it's pretty decent.

As for making things look good at a reduced size, I feel your pain.

Don't know what program you're using but I use Photoshop CS6 and/or PaintToolSAI 2 and they both have a feature where you can pop out a new duplicate windows of your art and set it to whatever zoom you want. This is crazy useful. If you set it to 50% (for a 400x400 canvas) or 25% (800x800px), for example, you can see in real time what this will look like at 200x200 (I float the 200x200 window in the corner of the main canvas' window).

In my case the tendency to try and detail everything to death means making sure to use larger brushes (sometimes setting a minimum size to avoid unintentionally using light pressure for smaller work) to try and avoid ending up with muddy areas because there's too much in one area that then merges at a smaller size and/or weird spidery pixelated lines.

In short: Floating zoomed out views are lifesavers, use bigger brushes than you'd think, don't make any details too small (literally squint at the image, see if it's still identifiable without fine details) and use contrast to your advantage.

Thank you so much! I'll try that out :)

You're welcome, good luck with your future overlays.

One thing I forgot to mention was when you want to resize make a merged/flattened copy of your image to do the resizing on. It can make a big difference to the quality. At least once it's taken me ages to try and work out why something looked awful when resizing, only for it to be resolved by trying the flattened image trick.