ARTING

Some people asked me to do a tutorial on drawing rocks, and since I found myself drawing rocks a lot these days, I thought I would share some things that I do.

Note: I am not a professional artist nor have I received much professional instruction. I am self-learned and thus prone to error. If you see anything wrong with the above contents, feel free to point it out, and generally, take this whole thing with a grain of salt. You don’t have to draw rocks this way.

Veins everywhere?

gorgeous~

Skin patches? Birthmarks?

hella rad~

Scars? Stretch marks?

beautiful~

Freckles? Moles? Acne scars?

heckie yeah~

Large? Curvy?

lovely~

Small? Thin?

charming~

Missing a few pieces?

handsome as ever~

Feel like you just look weird?

make a little mitten shape, a bump for the big thumb muscle, a line for where you want to knuckles to be (and where the fingers end), and you can work out how the hand does hand things~

you can make them more simple or more real, however you want! hands are weird, so don’t worry if they keep looking wrong for a while, once you figure out what works for you, it’ll click. If you practice like 10 or-so basic hand shapes, you can make slight variations on all those, and 10 turns into 20 different hand poses~

I’ve never really wrote a tutorial before so apologies if this is bad

1. okay first thing I do is pick three colors, a mid, dark, and light. I like to check the colors in greyscale to make sure there’s enough contrast between each one.

I then plop down a blob of whatever my middle tone color is.

2. next, I take my dark color and just sort of randomly place it around. I try to make sure there’s a good amount of both the mid and dark tones spread throughout. I personally like to keep it kinda messy. I also have pen pressure on for both brush size and opacity, so I can have some blending action going on.

3. for the next step I do the exact same thing as before, except with the light color.

4. aight this is where we start adding details. see how you just have a bunch of colors and edges where two colors meet? use the eyedropper and go to an area where two colors meet, eyedrop a color, and then use that color to draw in your grass blades. I do this at every point where colors meet. should note I personally like to use a square brush, but you can really just use anything.

5. you can technically stop at the last step if you’re going for a more simple look, but to add more details I go to the “empty” areas of solid color and just draw in random strokes using a color nearby. it’s just a way to fill up the empty space.

6. basically more of the same idea of eyedropping and drawing. for more variety so things look interesting, I like to add random plant shapes.

7. and so the grass doesn’t look too plain, I add random dots of color and pretend it’s flowers and stuff.

A quick coloring practice tip I made for Patreon