'teens have generally taken a hit-or-miss approach to 'jakking. They have a good understanding of what makes a soyjak a soyjak, but I feel they are pretty directionless in the images they trace and styling beyond the basics. Most new gems are born out of mountains of brim by sheer chance. After a few years on the site, I've decided to take a critical look at 'jakking. I hope this information to be useful to nuteens and oldGODs alike.
THE TRINITY OF 'JAKKING:I believe what makes a good soyjak can be boiled down to 3 main properties: Essence, necessity, and versatility.
Essence:OldGODs have decent grasp on the essence of soy, but here's a refresher and some less well known stuff. A 'jak should have the following qualities in this order of importance, but even gems can make minor deviations:
1) No antialiasing. Use a 100% hardness brush, no interpolation when scaling, and export as a png. An antialiased 'jak cannot be easily edited and is doomed to be coal. 2) Stubble and glasses, no ears. Head hair should be used extremely sparingly, if not exclusively for edits. 'plier is an example of where it can work, but avoid it.
3) Resolution and line thickness that is close in proportion to soyak. Despite what retards will tell you, a slight change in line thickness is ok for certain things, as seen in the original soyak, but you should never go beyond one or 2 pixels of variation. Glasses should generally be made with the brush size of the trace outline with multiple passes for thickening and shaping. Brows depend on the style but should almost never be made with a thicker brush. Use a single standard thickness line or add shaping as with feral-like brows. Stubble can be a slightly lower thickness if you want a 'plier-like look. Experiment.
4) 'Jaks are not made by drawfags by design. Use a mouse and a drawing program like MSPaint (the original), Paint.NET, or GIMP if you are a tech autist. You do not want line smoothing or other raisin that comes with modern programs. Be coarse. Don't make outlines, eyes, noses, glasses, etc be overly smooth and rounded. 'Jaks are not supposed to be incredibly refined. They resemble an impromptu sketch.
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