How I pratice drawing things, now in a tutorial form. The shrimp photo I used is here Show me your shrimps if you do this uvu
PS: lots of engrish because foreign
This is the best art advice ever and you should all listen to it because it’s basically what I’ve been telling people for years.
i was not expecting that to actually work
THIS.
This feels like one of those pieces of advice that are so brilliant that as soon as you have read it, it feels blindingly obvious.
GAH!!! I already fell behind in Inktober :’(((. My schedule’s getting busy again so I think that I might switch to the half-mile route (posting every other day) for the rest of the month??? I definitely want to continue the challenge but school is sucking all my time and energy which decreases art quality :((. I think half-mile is a better alternative for me at the moment.
This drawing was based off of the Day 3 prompt: Poison.
Drawn in Photoshop CC.
Inktober Day 2! I saw some Miraculous Ladybug season two sneak peeks floating around so I just had to draw Adrien with his cookie <3.
My take on today’s prompt: Swift. I’m going to be sticking loosely to the daily themes.
Also sorry for the long absence! School started again and I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my recent drawings :(((. But I really wanna take a stab at Inktober this year! Hopefully I can make it.
Drawn in Photoshop CC.
Inktober Day 1 complete!
My take on today’s prompt: Swift. I’m going to be sticking loosely to the daily themes.
Also sorry for the long absence! School started again and I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my recent drawings :(((. But I really wanna take a stab at Inktober this year! Hopefully I can make it.
post: beautiful piece of art. clearly work- and time-intensive. captivating and emotional and dynamic. stunning color pallet. evokative and nuanced. the result of long years of practice and study artist’s caption: intentionally misspelled meme
Anonymous; "I've been hesitant to send this but I think I have to tell you. I've given up all hope of ever becoming an artist because of you. I used to think I was good but my outlook on life has been getting worse, and it's at a point now where I can't see why I should go on. This is your fault. I worked so hard on my art, but it will never matter because you will always be better, more popular, and no one will know my name. I hope you remember next time you think you're great that you're not. I'm proof."
That’s funny, because when my 14 year old daughter gets frustrated with her art skills not being up to par with her imagination, I point @euclase ‘s art out to her and tell her this person had the same problem, and got better with practice. I tell her to draw anyway, even if it doesn’t look good, because you can always throw it out if you *really* don’t like it, and then you get to try again, and maybe this time will be the time it looks good to her.
And you know what? That’s what she does. She compares her art to her art, and sees that she’s getting better and looks at other people’s art and sees how far they’ve come over the years and knows she’ll be able to improve that much too.
I have an enormously slow learning curve. I never went to school. I was never art educated. I figured everything out on my own. Art was never an assignment or a job for me, so I never had incentive. I did whatever I wanted. I work at a snail’s pace. I have a full-time job that isn’t art.
So yeah, thirty years? That’s pretty dang good for skills that came entirely by trial and error. I’m proud of that.
But I know (and have tutored) artists who’ve gone from zip to realism in six months. I know artists right now who can show you their art from a year ago, who now HAVE CAREERS, and you won’t believe it’s the same artist.
It’s never too late to start. Fight me.
Top pic is from January this year, bottom pic is from literally yesterday.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
diskingoferebor; "How do you pick skin tones and make them look so nice and (for lack of a better word) luminous? Everyone I try to do skin tones in Photoshop the colors end up rather flat and very much fake looking and I can't figure out how to make it look nicer? (Also how do you do hair???? I can't figure that out either, I'd love some tips if you have any.)"
:
In my experience, when artists struggle with this, it’s because they aren’t using enough colors. A lot of beginning artists will pick a skintone and lighten or darken it because they think skintone + white = highlights and skintone + black = shadows.
This will make things look very dreary and flat because skin doesn’t do that. Skin is translucent and changes color with the light. It’s like an opal.
A good rule of thumb is to pick three distinct colors: one for highlights, midtones, and shadows. A pale yellow, a middle orange, and a deep red. Or something similar.
But I recommend going even further to break yourself of the habit. Use unexpected colors like blue, purple, and green. Use anything but a skintone. If you use outrageous colors, then you’ll stop being intimidated by them.
Here’s an old scribbly drawing where I used Sharpies in bright, bold colors and absolutely no browns or peaches at all:
alienhazy; "do you have any tips for how to paint smooth gradients? im working on a piece with a gradient background n im not sure what colours to choose or how to go about making it crisp n soft."
:
Are you working in Photoshop? You have a few options.
First, make sure your resolution is 300 dpi. Gradients work better big.
If you have a version of Photoshop later than CS5, then you have the option to turn on dithering in your layer style. Dithering will add noise to a gradient and help get rid of banding. You’ll find it in the layer window, under style, choose gradient overlay, and make sure the dither box is checked.
If you have CS5 or earlier, which is what I work with, then you have to play around a little more…
First, duplicate the gradient layer. Blur it until it looks smooth. Blurring a gradient is a quick and dirty way to soften it.
(I’m doing this on a drawing that’s already finished, which means I have to cut the gradient away from the figure. This is totally fine, but it isn’t always this tidy if you do it this way. So I’ve made two layers—one to blur, and one to cut out the blur again once I’m done.)
(Here, I’ve used the second layer to crop away the blur. And I made the blurred layer darker so you can see it better.)
So sometimes this is enough. You can blur away banding, and it will look great. But sometimes banding is stubborn, and no matter your resolution, it looks like shit, so you have to do your own dithering by adding noise…
Duplicate the gradient again so you have a couple layers to work with.
Now, add a bit of noise. You won’t need much. Keep it monochromatic.
Now, you can blur the noise a little bit to soften it. And turn down the opacity if you want. But that’s it!
If you want the drawing to look more uniform overall, you can put a separate noise layer over everything instead of just the background…
Set the layer to screen, and then blur/lower opacity to make it more subtle…
This technique is good for adding a bit of a vintage effect. Because you’re adding noise to the figure as well. It’s up to you what look you want.
But that’s it! You’re basically just blurring a gradient and adding a bit of noise to it to make it look more uniform.
I kind of like this darker color better dang Tom. 💛
I hope that’s not confusing. This is just how I do it. I achieve a lot of my glowy effects by blurring stuff out this way and playing with layers.
I wanted to give a few examples to illustrate what I was talking about in that reply. “Looks like the person” vs “feels like the person.”
First row: Compare the two Deans. The second is more successful because despite the lack of an entire face (!) it feels more like Dean. Certain features were highlighted that weren’t in the first sketch, which means that those features are what give Dean his “Dean-ness” and recognizability.
3rd row: The first and second Stiles sketch feel like Stiles. This is a progress drawing I never finished, but you can see how adding details in the third drawing started to drown out the “Stiles-ness” of him. The goal in portraits is not to stray too far from the feel of the subject because it means that much more work later. But you still have to draw them. And that can be scary—if you’ve ever drawn something, sometimes you get to a point where it looks good and you don’t want to ruin it. And you know if you start adding more detail, it’ll look worse.
3rd row: Same thing. It looks less like Dean with more detail. This struggle is totally common! That’s why consistency of detail is really important—consistency keeps things balanced so that a portrait’s identity isn’t lost.
4th row: Examples where context, costume, and body language add to the recognizability even though the faces have less detail. Part of learning to do portraits is learning to identify what gives a person their “personness” other than just the technical details of their face. Cartoonists, abstract artists, and caricature artists all rely on this stuff. There are many ways to make the person look like the person.
