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Hey! Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t really had time to do the tutorial for you! But, I did one today. It’s kinda messy and not 100% anatomically perfect (I do several flaws myself) but I think I made some good points!

Arms:

Arms cannot be done without shoulders, so that’s why I will include them here. To know how one body part works, you need to understand the other parts too. I suggest drawing a stick figure, as shown above. Do it with shoulders and everything - don’t care about anatomy. Really, don’t - go mad! You can figure out how to deal with the anatomy AFTER you have figured how to draw the body freely.

I imagine most body parts to be shaped as tear drops, as shown above; especially the arms and legs. Draw them above the stick figure - don’t be afraid to overlap the teardrops. In fact, I suggest it! The best way to understand anatomy is to think of it as shapes and doll-parts.

After you’ve figured that out, do several, VERY tiny, small doodles like these. Go crazy - don’t bother with anatomy just yet. Do them also very quickly and so small you can’t think of the details. Just keep doing this until you sorta understand how arms work. 

Here is a doodle of a “real” arm, and as you can see, how it’s shaped it resembles the teardrops above. A general rule is to constantly draw the body in curves - male AND female. NEVER draw a single line straight.

I mentioned before I thought it was important to include shoulders/other body parts to understand another. This is why. The body basically has a “flow” when you move. The red lines clearly shows the flow. This is also how you can create a dynamic pose: think of the flow. The muscles are formed that way to be able to function. Which reminds me, buy some good anatomy books. And I’m talking about more or less MEDICAL anatomy books - you think you won’t need it - but trust me, it’s more useful than you can imagine. I do NOT suggest buying “stylistic” anatomy books, like Christopher Hart (ugh NO), for example, as these can mislead you. Medical anatomy books CANNOT because they MUST be right.

And for the last part, here’s some “do’s” and “don’ts”. It’s important to remember the muscles between the neck and shoulders. Many, especially when drawing females, forget this. It’s true the most visible it is - the more muscular you will look. But even the most petite people have these. Your neck literally would not function if you didn’t have these supporters. Then, the arms below is just to show why it’s important to draw the body with curves. Many have probably heard “straight lines for males” which is a complete lie. They will look stiff and unnatural. Curves can both empathize muscles AND fat. Heck, even your bones aren’t straight.

Legs:

Legs certainly are the hardest. There’s a good reason for this; because they’re one of our most strongest muscles, and they are more or less dominating when it comes to poses (together with the spine). However, just like with the arms, draw a stick figure. I won’t suggest drawing them completely straight, as you can see here, as it will add weight. Do teardrops shapes. As for the hips - think of them as panties or briefs. This is not a MUST; but it will help; I think!

And just like the arms, do small doodles. Don’t be serious, play around until you get the idea.

As you can see, these legs easily can be turned into teardrops even when they’re detailed like this.

Now, what makes legs/hips interesting is that the way fat gathers there. Although not a must, seeing as we’re all different, females tend to get more fat there than men. Usually, however, it’s not at the SIDE of the hips, but at the thighs, calves and the “love handles”. (Excuse my english, aaah…) Women also tend to have bigger hips, but again, it’s not a must. It’s not uncommon to have small hips, either; or big hips for men, etc.

Of course, the legs too follow the “flow”!

Something worth noting is the “Standing point” The standing point is basically a straight line, and the further away you are from the line; the more unbalanced you are. To create a dynamic pose you should avoid that line as much as possible. However, if you want to look balanced/realistic, have the one leg stand there for support. The leg to the left is balanced, as you can see one of the legs is taking all the weight; with other words, it’s the support leg-making it balanced. The legs to the right, however, are likely to fall over if she keeps standing like that! edit: <- that explanation was horrible. Hope you still get it.

Now for some more do’s and don’ts. I already mentioned the barbie legs, invisible heels and micro-mini crotch in my previous tutorial, but these two are different. I see this mistake a lot; when you sit down, your thighs will become wider because you’re pressing all the fat to the sides. Now, this also depends on how you’re positioning your legs. How much it widens depends on how much fat you have in the first place; but it will always be there.

And then there’s this awkward “thigh gap”. Before I get any haters telling me how I “thin shame”, please, take a seat and read this. Good? Good. How much space you actually have between your thighs depends fully on how you’re standing, bending, angle, body type and everything else. However, the one to the left? Not likely.

Hands:

- Okay, I’m getting really lazy now; so I’ll be quick. Draw a rectangle. Sorta like this; it doesn’t have to be exactly like this - since hands can be shaped VERY differently. Just compare to your friends.

- Draw a little triangle attached to it.

- Now, the fingers! How long they should be and etc doesn’t really matter either. But if you’re unsure, draw them as tear drops, too.

- Now, flesh out the fingers! Starting to look like a hand, sort of.

- Then draw the details and fix things you didn’t like. I really don’t like the way this is drawn but I’m just tired right now.

Just like the legs/arms, practice by doing that simple figure really quickly.

Feet:

Okay, I’m getting really lazy. Plus, feet are SUPER HARD- I’m just going to say this: think of them as triangles. Overlap them; think of it as 3D!

Practice practice practice! And medical anatomy books. And photo references. And real-life references!

Hope this helped! \o/ As I said, I’m nowhere near perfect but, ahh, I tried.

A growing collection of animated Pixel Art Tutorials by Pedro Medeiros (@saint11) of Studio Miniboss (they previously worked on TowerFall and are currently working on Celeste and Skytorn)

All +40 Pixel Art Tutorials can be found on blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart (10 Pixel Art Tutorials are posted below)

a very, very basic image guide on how your portfolio should be presented or appear, whether you’re in fine arts, graphic design or illustration, illustrated by yours truly

(hi!! apologies for the late reply. i hope this can still be of some help to you despite that!)

i think that’s a feeling every artist struggles with at some point. you love art, you love making art, and it’s immensely frustrating when that suddenly doesn’t work out despite all the effort you’ve been putting in. and then you start to lose motivation, question yourself and everything you’re doing, and it’s a vicious cycle that’s really hard to break out of. so what can we do?

well, here’s a thing. let’s call it the productivity branch.

i feel like my own creative cycles are very seasonal. not in the sense that my creativity depends on the season, but rather that my creativity itself goes through different seasons.

spring: new ideas, motivation, productivity still low 

summer: lots of ideas and very productive

autumn: still productive drawing leftover ideas, but new ideas are harder to come by. and then 

winter: nothing. art-block. lack of ideas, everything-sucks-syndrome, no motivation, the creative part of my brain is basically hibernating

that’s you up there. you’re in a creative winter right now. and without any inspiration or motivation it’ll be hard to find a way to cross that gap over to a new spring (pls bear with the cheesy analogies). and if your cut yourself off from inspirational influence you might start to think that, hey, this isn’t so bad. i mean, who needs spring right? just means you have to do things. be active. yikes. winter’s pretty chill. haha. 

but don’t do that. it’ll come around and bite you at some point, because that lack of motivation and activity might start to seep into other parts of your life, not just the creative one, and you don’t want that.

so! when you don’t have ideas and motivation to create, then don’t create. but instead make an effort to inspire yourself. inspiration entails motivation (and vice versa).

read books, short stories, poems, science articles, anything

go on walks, explore your surroundings, if affordable maybe even go somewhere farther away

let people tell you stories

listen to new music

try things you haven’t done before (deliberately break old habits)

go through other people’s inspiration blogs

collaborate with a friend

get really invested in something, talk to others about it

watch movies, animated shorts, documentaries 

or speedpaintings and art tutorials

try different techniques, or new brushes

look at art that’s so inspiring that you can’t believe you’re still just sitting there not drawing anything yourself

and most importantly, be receptive. take in the world around you, rearrange it in your head, and draw whatever you end up with. that’s the core of what creativity is

think about what you want to achieve. make your friends smile? draw something really cool you can print out and hang up in your room? touch people’s hearts? deliver a message? whatever it is, and however small or inconsequential it might seem, keep it in mind. it’s your light at the end of the tunnel.

if want to keep drawing for the sake of muscle memory while you’re still looking for your inspiration: 

illustrate your daily activities

draw a random shape or find one in a photo (clouds are ideal for this) and turn it into a character or object

pick different pictures and combine elements from each of them into one drawing

do plain ol’ studies 

basically don’t try to come up with things completely from scratch. find something to work with and go from there. that will save you the mentally draining task of coming up with a subject, so you can start actively drawing right away

if you still can’t make yourself pick up a pen, make a schedule. train your brain to turn its creative gears at a specific time of the day, make that a habit. do it for pavlov

approach drawing with the awareness that what you create might suck, especially when you’re out of practice, but this doesn’t mean that it will always suck, and it doesn’t mean you suck. if you learn to dissociate your current creative achievements from your worth as a person and your future potential you will get back to work a lot easier, improve faster, and be more resistant to setbacks. 

find something that makes it worth the effort of working through the frustration. 

Join our coffee adventure!-  Or at least check out more Art Goodies here:

I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

BRUSHES

Pencil I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. Ink Pen Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Round Brush The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without. Flat Brush A brush tool set to flat bristle (try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.

Watercolor Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects. Cloud Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

TEXTURE OVERLAY

To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!

Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!

Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.

Hope that helps!

After much ado, I’ve rummaged around in my program folders and found an image in SAI’s elemap folder called Flat Bristle.bmp that you should be able to just grab and use! I edited this link into my original post as well, but it’s gotten so many reblogs I don’t know how helpful that will end up being…

In any case, I’ve also taken the liberty of zipping all of my blotmap, brushtex, elemap, and papertex folders and hosting the file on my site just in case whatever borked version of SAI people are encountering are missing all this basic stuff. There’s not a lot in there, but the settings in the original post don’t make any sense if you don’t have them!

You can download the zip file here.

Happy painting!

a series of composition tips i’d been sharing on twitter!

and since some people had asked, i’ve put up a pdf version of this on gumroad along with a layered psd of one of the example images too

i mostly got better at drawing hands by just practicing how to draw them a lot!what i would do is draw a pose or two over and over again (maybe at slightly different angles and stuff) first with reference, and then draw them again without looking at anything to see how much i can draw from my mind, and then go back and forth between the two until i get enough of a “feel” to draw a certain pose decently without relying on reference. i think after a while you kind of develop patterns in the way you draw hands and from there it becomes easier to draw different hand poses and stuff from scratch

to make the hands you draw look less awkward/stiff, i think it helps to focus more on the overall flow of the composition and silhouette of the hand rather than getting all the details in and anatomy right and stuff in the initial stages

when drawing hands in perspective i think it helps to visualize them as 3d shapes

to get the foreshortening right (aside from using perspective guides and whatnot) i like to just draw the hand first, and then eyeball the perspective and adjust its size and position until it looks right

(select with lasso tool > ctrl+t to transform +right click for more transform options)

another thing i do is take reference pictures with my ipod (any camera works tbh. i just find using a mobile device to be more convenient)by holding the camera close to my hand i can get a really exaggerated perspective like this:

it’s nice because i can get the ref for the exact pose and angle i’m looking for without having to do a lot of internet fishing

1) perspective

try to keep the perspective of your character consistent to the perspective of the background!

visualizing things in boxes help

be mindful of the surface planes in the environment (good indicator of the perspective you should be using on your character, helps with determining the angle/placement of your character)

2) lighting/ color

make note of the light source! what direction is it coming from? is there one? are there multiple? how intense is the bounce light? (this helps determine the way you shade your character)

make note of the type of light source. is it really strong bright light? is it a cloudy day? (eg. shadows are harder and have higher contrast in strong bright light, whereas on cloudy days the lighting is more soft and ambient)

being mindful of the light source and content of the background helps determine the way you color your character (eg. the lighting in this image is kind of overcast, and there’s a lot of warm greens, so i used warmer hues on the character)

giving your character a cast shadow (when applicable) helps ground them into their environment

making the value range (the range of grays) similar to that of the background helps

at the same time though , making the value/hue range of the character too similar to the background can make them hard to see against it. to make them pop out more you just have to make them lighter/darker/warmer/cooler/etc. to contrast against the background (eg. i kept the value range of the character a bit lighter so there’s some contrast between them and the background)

3) layering

overlapping and underlapping parts of the background with the character helps incorporate them into their environment and creates depth

the next level of that would be to have the character interact with the environment (eg. can be as simple as making them pick a flower or as complex as drawing them tangled in vines)

(before/after)

i think it really helps to be mindful of composition and perspective!(this tutorial explains it really well imo)

all the things about light and colors and shadows etc applies to the stuff in the environment you’re drawing too (just on a different scale) so i think it’s good to also keep that in mind when you draw

as for mountains and stuff (i think this kind of applies to most things) i usually just try to break things down into geometric shapes and work with those as a base

adding in things like birds and trees and clouds and characters and stuff helps give the environment scale i think (smaller details make things look bigger/bigger details make things look smaller)

and using reference for the textures and lighting and colors etc is definitely really helpful as well

i think if you can nail the composition and lighting and colors tho things should look ok! having good perspective and rendering definitely improves your art by a lot but imo if you can get the first three things you’re basically good to go

Get some extra classes with the 11-page Clean up your Acting supplement~

This tutorial is about acting for comics! It’s not a subject people talk about a lot, at least compared to art and writing, but I’d argue that great character acting is one of the reasons we fall in love with fictional characters… and horrible character acting is why we stop believing in the characters, the story, and possibly the creator?? Fortunately, learning to spot bad acting is an easy way to correct it in your own work.

I was maybe a little snarkier in this tut than I needed to, but we’re friends here, I don’t need to pretend with you that I love every work equally. What I really do love tho, is when people learn to turn their criticism into corrections, which is the whole point of making and sharing these tuts! I hope you enjoy it :] You can also check out a bunch of human, monster, and alien crab acting in my own comics The Meek and Mare Internum.

My recent tutorials on Tumblr:

coloring with masks

writing for webcomics

researching for comics

All of my tutorials are released in lower-res format to the public 6 months after publication at the Shingworks Patreon. You can access the full tutorial archive, as well as nearly 1.5 years worth of bonus content, by becoming a Patron :] The recent tutorial is about Worldbuilding, so feel free to stop by~

One of the big tells for me that a cartoonist is a novice is when they rely too heavily on manga/anime exaggerated expressions - we see this A LOT with first-time webcomics. Even if you love manga and want to create works with that visual language, notice how those exaggerated expressions are most effectively used to enhance a moment. They aren’t there to handle the bulk of the acting or to carry a scene. If you use them constantly for every expression, it becomes visually exhausting (and reads disingenuous), and also you have nowhere left to go if you want to use a goofy expression as a visual punch.

Anywho, I back Der-shing on patreon and she always has good and insightful tips from a valid perspective with lots of experience!

THANK YOU!<3333333VERY MUCH!!!<3333333

Since 2014 I had been working as a storyboard artist/ writer (with @yesthisisaaron as my partner) on @chgreenblatt‘s wonderful show “Harvey Beaks” at Nickelodeon (I’m still here, now I’m working on something ~~secret~~~!….ish. Secret-ish). Aaron and I would get a 3-5 page episode outline from one of the writers, then we would collaborate on writing the dialogue and drawing the storyboard, and we get it done in about 5 weeks. Here’s an example of some of my boards from the episode “Foofee” 

Since we worked on a board driven show (vs a script driven show) Aaron and I also wrote most of the jokes and even designed characters sometimes. The biggest aspects of the job on any kind of storyboard I’d say is to draw clearly and expressively, though. Yes staging is important, composition is important, but a storyboard artist needs to make people care. If you want to pursue story, try to make every single drawing say something.

Like, look at this guy. What’s he about? What is he thinking? He’s frowning so he’s sad I guess?? I don’t know. I don’t care about this guy!

Now this dude, here’s a broken man. Why’s he sad? What’s in the photo he’s looking at? I want to know! GUESS I’LL HAVE TO KEEP WATCHING HIM TO FIND OUT!

Not to say that every character in every panel you draw needs to be super duper expressive and loud, though. A lot of the times it’s just a matter of asking yourself “What am I trying to say here, and how can I say it a little more interestingly?” There’s lots of tutorials out there teaching animating and storyboarding principles like line of action and clear silhouette and those are all really helpful for achieving the goal of ultimately just making the most entertaining version of a drawing you can make, whether it’s a storyboard or anything really. 

Sorry, I didn’t really intend for this to turn into a half-baked tutorial, haha. And I just realized those drawings are sad so here’s a little happy guy (or is he?)

Hi! This video is a colecction of links to all the lessons I’ve done on character design. This has months and months of lessons for you to choose. Most of the links have compilations of various lessons on a subject, so if you want you can look at other, shorter lessons on the channel.

If you like my channel, then I recommend Easy Things To Draw! https://www.youtube.com/user/EasyThingsToDraw101 . Enrique works as a Stereo Artist for films like transformers and shares with me the passion for helping other people learn art on the web! Check him out!

Thanks for watching this video and remember to Subscribe for the best drawing lessons, tutorials and videos on How to draw eyes, head, the human body and more! All using Photoshop, Manga Studio, Sketchbook Pro and more!

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