CALL ME ROSE OwO

Today’s episode on the Powow Workshop (Formerly Stringbing Workshop), I introduce the animation breakdown, what it is, and how it can be used.

Please check out my patreon page and give it a support: https://www.patreon.com/StringBing

Gumroad (Buy exclusive tutorial material): https://gumroad.com/stringbing

Music: Boom de Boom - Aaron Lieberman FunkDown - MK2 Happy Mandolin - Media Right Productions

No one asked but here’s a brief tutorial on digital underpainting and how it can add some extra flavor to your art!

Applicable to traditional media as well.

Arlene Steinberg’s masterful color is an awesome book that shows you how to implement underpainting in colored pencil. Gary Greene also utilizes this technique.

hello!! thank you so much for liking my drawings, and for thinking they’re cute ;o; i use references most of the time — i feel that referring to life or pictures has helped me understand how to draw anatomy easier and quicker.

when it comes to starting a sketch, i think it’d be best to at least have an idea of what you’d like to have once you’re finished drawing. personally, i try to at least have some sense of direction for what i want to draw. usually my ideas are very vague, but at the same time oddly specific… if that makes sense. like for this picture the only thing in my head was “i want to draw tsukki pouting” so i spent some time thinking about what sorts of situations would allow me to draw that. i eventually went for a sort of back hug pose, but then decided that it would be unlikely for tsukki to be very physical, so i adjusted my sketch accordingly…

when it comes to anatomy and proportions — i’d recommend using references and guidelines, and practice! personally i only ever use two guidelines (an initial circle for the head shape and sometimes an added line for nose placement, and that.. triangle thing to determine how the shoulder-wrist-elbows align), my brother uses circular guides for all the joints in his drawings, and some other artists block out the anatomy in geometrical shapes first, etc etc… it usually depends on how precise you want to be, and what style you’re going for. if you have some free time, you can experiment and see what works for you!

HOWEVER, i feel like guidelines work best once you already have a good idea for how things work together. the body works as a whole and not as separate parts. while you might be able to draw an anatomically correct hand alone, if you draw it as part of a character then its position and angle might not be humanly possible if you take the rest of the pose into account. so i think it’d be good to also be mindful of the overall harmony (this is genuinely something i am still trying to learn myself haha). you can take your own pictures and try to trace over them too to give yourself a better idea and to be accustomed to how all the limbs work together.

Thank you!! I’m glad to hear that! ^o^ 

Hmm there’s no big secret to the way I colour. I just have pressure sensitivity on for my opacity and I avoid using absolute black. I don’t know how to explain my process very well, so here’s a speed paint of me colouring a pic of my OC (actual time was 14 minutes and 35 seconds):

I almost always start with the face first, usually the cheek area. The colour tone of the skin helps me decide what the colour palette for the rest of the drawing would be. I pick my colours manually in the beginning, but i do tweak them afterwards depending on how I see fit. Details on my brush settings are in my FAQ.

What kind of source material?  I’m not sure if you’re asking about art and the comic making process or historical references.As for layout…After I’ve written a first pass of dialogue for a given “chapter”, I start drawing thumbnails to work out how I’m going to portray all of the story content.  As I’m sketching, I’m mindful of things like communicating action clearly, staging and composition, avoiding confusing “camera angle” changes, and page flow (generally top left to lower right). I tend to do a lot of dialogue editing in tandem with this to get the words and images to work together as well as I can manage too.  The whole idea is to do a quick and dirty version of each page that you can experiment with, toss out or revise as needed before dedicating vast swathes of time and energy to pencils, colors and polish.I’m by no means masterful at layouts, but I feel I’ve improved a lot since I began.  As with most things, doing it is probably the most effective way to learn to do it.Below is a sample of the thumbnails I used as guide for the final art layout for all of the early pages of Volume 3. (I had cleaned these up to share with Patrons a while back, so this looks deceptively neat. My thumbnails are often even looser than this, covered in scribbled out panels, arrows rearranging the order of events, notes about dialogue changes and other such messiness).