Mostly An Ref Blog.

small tutorial/warmup exercise i did some time ago.

Being a mainly traditional artist myself it always irks me a little when I see sketches or even full illustrations being posted without any proper editing, making for a terrible presentation of an otherwise great piece. 

So here are my tips for making your art not look shit in just a few easy steps. 

You don´t need a fancy scanner for this, but if you have a digital camera at home I´d recommed you to use that instead of your smartphone. (However smartphone photos are also okay! Use whatever you have on hand)

Take a photo of your piece during the day in ambient lighting and try to make the paper lie as flat as possible. Avoid direct sunlight and artificial light as both will lower the quality of the picture. The inital photo will look something like this:

Not exactly breath-taking, huh? but don´t worry, we´ll get this prettied up. 

Open the photo on your computer and turn + crop it 

For the following editing I use Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is legally available as a free download, so there really is no reason not to get it. It comes with everything you´ll need for the edit.

(Unfortunately I have it set to German but I did my best to make my steps understandable)

Now, let´s get on with the edit! Select “Image” (Bild) in the top bar, go to “Adjustments” and first of all set the “Saturation” to zero (if you have a black and white drawing)

After that, pick “Brightness and Contrast” (also found in “Image” –> “Adjustments”) to brighten up your piece some more

Aleardy much better, hm? But as you can see, the bottom-left corner of the image is quite a lot brighter than the upper-right one, which prevents you from getting an even result. 

Thankfully, this problem is easy to fix.

This way you can even out the brightness of the overall piece and finally use the “Brightness” and “Contrast” sliders one last time to get a clean result

This is already pretty good, but if you want to go the extra mile, you can use the eraser tool as well as filters (such as the liquify tool and sharpness) to remove little sketchy lines or fix small mistakes (classic example: adjust the position of the eyes to make them look more symmetrical)

And that´s it! With just about 5 - 10 minutes of editing you can get your drawing to look clean and presentable! (Coloured illustrations are usually easier to edit, just play around with “Brightness”, “Contrast”, “Color Balance” and “Saturation” until you manage to emulate the original look of the piece.)

hello strawpage anon my sketches literally look like this im not sure i can help you😭😭😭

but alr lol. as you can PROBABLY tell just by looking at these its mostly breaking the body down into shapes. Most artists tell you to draw boxes or whatever the fuck but we're not made of boxes we're made of stupid ovals and cirkels and rounded trapezoids and whatever tf. heres a basic runthrough

i just found this white guy on my pinterest and i think he's cool so let's try to draw him.

if i roughly trace guidelines over him, these are my shapes I end up with. For instance, for the torso i use this weird, curved trapezoid with a thing sticking out shape. Whether you're drawing a man or a woman the chest will protrude, and for women drawing the protrusion also helps me estimate where to place the breasts.

mostly what simplifying the form down like this does for me is it makes humans a LOT easier to imagine in perspective. if I want to draw the body in perspective, it's much easier to rearrange these basic shapes and work from there rather than trying to start with details

similarly, if i wanna draw this guy, it's much easier for me to construct him and redraw from the shapes that i see (especially when NOT tracing over the image, starting off with just shapes helps me nail a pose down pretty much 100% of the time, because i can easily move them around and i can easily get ratios and proportions correct). With a bit of studying the human body and a bit of anatomical knowledge (cant escape this one no matter how bad you wanna), i can easily draw the rest of his body from here within just a couple minutes

otherwise, a big thing i see people making mistakes in is proportions!! Keep in mind simple things like: eyes should be approximately the length of one eye apart from each other; upper arms and forearms (and upper legs and lower legs) are roughly the same length; the waist is the center of the body, dividing you into two equal halves that should be approximately the same length; your hands reach your mid-thigh when your arms are down; your hands are the same size as your face; etc, etc. Use references to practice this stuff! It probably sounds tiring as hell, but when I'm drawing i'm constantly thinking things like "oh, collarbones are this far apart and attach to here" or "shoulders protrude slightly, let me draw a line for that" or "the jaw should be lower, since this character has their mouth open" etcetera enzovoort enzovoort. Ultimate price to pay in order to understand anatomy

Keep in mind to draw organic shapes for the body, if not in your sketch/guidelines then at least in your final render. Depending on your style strong, sharp lines can look really good!! but regardless dynamicism is important, and these styles are typically harder to execute because they're working with stiff shapes. If you're drawing a form of semirealism/stylised realism, where i consider my own art to lie, then these rounded, soft shapes for the body are important.

i personally take note of naturally forming curves on the body and exaggerate them for the sake of stylisation, like this for the arms

or like this for the legs

(i also do this for the torso in order to make the pose more dynamic, which is harder to see with the finished piece through his clothes, but easier to see in my original sketch. The waist is an easy way to make a pose look more dynamic, and therefore a good target for stylisation)

I hit 1k subscribers right in time for my fourth tutorial! 🎉🎉 Thank you so much for your support in my other tutorials it really means a lot! I'll soon post a giveaway to celebrate all this so keep an eye out if you're interested!👀

I know my science sides been kinda dead but I was getting so frustrated trying to differentiate all artistes 'avians'

...that's it, please use freely and don't feel the need to credit me, JUST USE.

It'll be fun to see artist's look at their avian OCS and go *That's you bud! See?*

I'll be so honest, There's no one way to draw tfa bodies, they're all so different than each other, but this is my best attempt at explaining

Key things:

Exaggerate! make them shapes either BIG or small, no inbetween

Keep it simple! Everyone's just a bunch of shapes at the end of the day