This thread is meant to help users create art suggestions for the game, I specialize in base and mane creation but aspects of this guide are sure to help with any form of art suggestion you might have. If you have any questions or ideas of what to be added onto this, comment!


Programs

Personally, I use FireAlpaca for any of my arting needs. I have used it for years and have no complaints on it, but the site artists use Photoshop (I'm not quite sure what version otherwise I'd link the download) and GIMP. There's also Medibang and Paint tool Sai (I can't find a reliable download page for this and I don't want to infect you guys with viruses, so GL). You WILL need some form of an art program to create an art suggestion so you can properly edit images and create bases or art suggestions. I will try and make this tutorial versatile for all art programs but they all function differently in some aspects so if you have any questions comment below. Keep in mind I do work on Fire Alpaca mainly, so I will use terminology specific to Fire Alpaca and some tools might be named differently.

Linearts
So to get started you definitely want some lineart to work off of, whether it be a custom décor suggestion or a base suggestion. Xylax provided some psds of some bases, which beginners might want to stick to using if they are new to any art program. You can find those linearts
here. You can find the rest of the linearts here. I use the age specific file and delete the unwanted files (like the backgrounds) for stuff like base or mark suggestions. Of course if you dont want to work on top of the cream color so you can just change the saturation and brightness of the pose in your art program to make it white. That's how I go about it at least. I'm sure other programs have easier ways around that. After you turned it white you have your basic lineart, for base suggestions or marking suggestions. If you're looking to do custom décor I'd stick with the age specific download the way it is and draw create a new layer to sketch away.

Creating the Bases
Now that you have access to all these lines, and if you downloaded them via this link they might look a little...creamy and you have craploads of layers. I would single out a pose you'd like to transform into a base, as I like to put it. I'll call it the base because this is the most basic thing you would need, a whitened version of the poses and lines. It makes your job easier in the long run.

So I would delete those extra layers, such as the basic Lioden background and that weird all white one. Single in on a specific pose that you want from that set and delete all of the other ones.



You'll be left with your specific pose, in an ugly cream version which will definitely skew your intended colors. That is when I would find your filter tab, in FireAlpaca its in the top few tabs. Hit Hue, and a box will show up with slide bars. To make it white, you just drag your saturation to the lowest setting and move saturation up so that it looks more white than gray while still maintaining the shadows and lines. You can adjust ANY layer coloring with this Filter > Hue > Adjust tool, if you miscolored something you can get it super close with this or you can create recolors with this tool.



At this point I would save this entire thing as its own file on your computer as an mdp, or a psd. That way you can access this point again with ease and avoid doing those first steps for this particular lineart. I personally like to name my files the pose and add it to a lineart folder on my laptop so that I have access to the library of linearts. Your preference though, but this step makes everything much easier.

If you want another lineart you just repeat this process and you'll be left with the same blank lines.


Layers
This is gonna be a really complicated step, and it depends really on what you want to do with the lineart that you just whitened and created for suggestions or you might've just skipped that step entirely for Custom Decors. This might be a little confusing as well and I'll try to separate and explain each way the best I can.

Okay for either a base/marking suggestion or a custom decor you would need to create a new layer, the reason being is that if you color on that layer, you wont be able to keep the lines and you'll just color over it. So to create a new layer you're gonna want to play around with your program until you find it. There's usually a layers box on most programs and it'll be around there. Creating a new layer and drawing on it would be the final step for most custom decor creators, and they can continue from here on their own.



Now you may be wondering why your lines still cover up the original lineart. Well, you need to change the layer type, so on Fire Alpaca its called "Blending" and you want to change that to "Multiply"





Now you're dealing with those pesky lines outside of the base when you color or draw on the lineart, they can be annoying as hell when you're done making a base suggestion and then you have to slowly clean up what you colored outside of the lines with the eraser. There is an easy tool for that on Fire Alpaca, but unforunately I think it's a little more complicated on GIMP. On Fire Alpaca all you do is hit that little checkbox called "Clipping"



Markings
I have had a lot of people ask me how to do marking mockups and how to apply markings to the bases they have created so here we go!

This link: https://static.lioden.com/images/dynamic/lioness/kind//markings/underwhite4.png

is your holy grail. This will pull up any marking, base, eye color, and the likes in any pose.

To start kind in the link, is your pose, you can change it to evil, snarky, good, kind, jolly, or neutral. This will be the pose that your markings/base/eyes will appear in.

Markings is what youre searching for, it can be changed between markings, eyes, bases, skin, and etc.

Underwhite4 would be the specific thing you're searching for, so the specific mark or the specific eye color or skin color, or a the bases name.



Here's an example to help you understand!

Lets say you want a gilded evil lioness base, you would type:
https://static.lioden.com/images/dynamic/lioness/evil//bases/gilded.png


After you've pulled up the specific image you want then you can just right click and save. I keep all my markings, bases, and eyes in separate folders so its easier to look for them.

Then you would go to your art program, open up whatever you want the marks on. For me itll just be a blank jolly pose lioness. Then you go to "File" and open as layer. This will open up your image into a layer on top of the image you opened up previously.



Youll get something kind of like this, where the marks overlay the lineart. I would just hit multiply in your layers to get that lineart to show up again.



Now that's how you apply markings but a lot of people request how to make markings and recolor them. Ill keep using nimravus marks as an example.

Open up the marking you want to edit first, then make a new layer on top of it.



As always when you draw over it they wont stay in the original lineart. You can easily solve that by clipping the layer to the original image, and just recolor over it.



Once youre done just save that as a png so you have the original transparent version and you can put it on any base following the steps with just applying regular lioden markings to bases.







If you have any questions, comments, or want a deeper explanation please feel free to comment below and I'll explain and try to help you the best I can.