Sideblog for Learning Art!

People often say to me: “You draw like some kind of inhuman machine.  If I eat your brain, will I gain your power?”  The answer is yes, but there is another way. The key to precise drawing is building up muscle memory so that your arm/hand/fingers do the things you want them to do when you want them to do them.  Teaching yourself to draw a straight line or to make sweet curves is just a matter of practice and there are some exercises you can do to help improve. If you’re going to be doodling in class or during meetings anyway, why not put that time to good use?

So my friend Night expressed a general desire for help with profiles, and I figured I’d go ahead and whip this up! I’m no anatomy master or anything, but this is stuff that helps me quite a bit, so I figured I’d share… even if I have no idea how helpful it actually is. Writing tutorials is hard! Ah well, I hope it can be of some use.

ahhh but there you go anon! I hope you find this tutorial useful ahah;; I find that observing real life (or just googling up faces and expressions) really help with understanding faces and how they do the thing. So keep on practicing!

Nsio explains: Dynamism by Nsio

Can’t remember where I found this, but from the watermark I can only assume the source is ImagineFX magazine, the September 2008 issue.   If this gets enough notes I’ll caption each photo with the text displayed in each page! (‘Tis a bit small. Curse you, tumblr, get some better zoom! <shakes fist>)

kissus

yeha

(EDIT: No, this is not a post about crotches & butts, but you’ll need to know how to draw those, too, if you’re drawing hands relaxed at one’s sides. Note that the big thumb knuckle generally falls at crotch-height. Note also that the palm rarely faces the thigh directly: the palm-side of a relaxed hand tends to angle *slightly* toward the back; the knuckle-side angles slightly forward. This reverses as the hands swing behind the walking figure. For more tips, visit me on Twitter: @Hamm_Tips)

This is for all the anon asks I’ve gotten over the past few weeks weeks. At some point I’ll do a guy version though a lot of the steps are the same. 

Well I’m not sure what expressive shapes mean but I can help a little bit with gestures. One of my few ah-ha moments when it came to art was when I started to move where the shoulders started and how to “peak” them.  Basically, think of peaking the same way as drawing narrow mountains the higher they get the more pointy they get.  I drew some examples for both. I hope they help and I wish you the best in making your own comics :) 

A Anon asked me for some pointers on how to draw in my style today. I didn’t really know how to write pointers so I thought I would attempt a very minimal tutorial.