Just an Art Blog

Thanks and I'm glad you enjoy my work long enough to be following me for this long! I definitely love drawing a naked body that's for sure haha. In terms of tips for getting better there's a few things I can mention but it's going to fall broadly in the general answer of "study", because this is the most sure fire way to be able to understand what it is you're trying to emulate in your art. There are different ways to study, and they teach something slightly different. For example, doing studies from life (live drawing classes) help me understand movement in a way studying from a photograph cant, simply because you're seeing the same model in different poses in real time, you can see how the fat and muscle moves around as they shift to different positions. So they're not technically moving the whole time, but you're still seeing some movement there, and understanding what sticks to what while it rotates and bends. Studying from photographs can help give you time to do some real deep dives and investigate where different bones/muscles sit while someone is in a particular position. There's also the opportunity for understanding how shadows may be formed by the body as typically photographers are more conscious of how the subject may be lit than what may be available in a live drawing class. Beware though, as more things are photoshopped than you realise, not all photos represent reality. Especially glam and fashion photos. It doesn't mean its bad to want to have these effects on your work but just be conscious they might not always be anatomy accurate if that's what you're striving for. I sometimes make a conscious decision to go against what is anatomically correct for a certain effect myself. A book I have been recommending for years for anatomy is Dr. Paul RIcher's "Artistic Anatomy". It's great for understanding muscle structure intimately - it's designed specifically for artists, but with the idea of trying to stylise the diagrams as little as possible for the sake of understanding the human form. There's a lot of great info and detail in here, but beware, there is not a lot of variety in body structure (at least not in the edition I have which is missing female anatomy I think already so I'm not sure what else I don't have in here). So you'll be able to understand function a lot from here but you wont be able to learn a lot about fatter body types sadly.

Colour picking is probably the most difficult for me to explain easily, as I have spent a long time winging it, then studying it, then being really experimental with it. I could write a lot a lot about this but to spare making this post any longer I'll refer to another fun book just for getting started on some frequent and common terms called "Color and Light" by James Gurney.

I also love that he uses like, dinosaurs for everything in here lol. It's a great starting point that can give you some go to ideas that you can then experiment from there. It's not very authoritarian (or at least that's what I feel), and doesn't push anything forward as a hard and fast rule, just showing what affects some colour combinations might instil in someone.

As a whole, I've gotten better at painting digitally by studying traditional painting techniques. They theories are basically transferrable one to one with some few exceptions. I tend to blend my colours by simply using a soft round brush in Photoshop with a low opacity. Much the same way I would with a real canvas, with a large round brush and diluted colour. I hope this answers your questions in some way. I tried to be not too specific only because this answer would be at least another 30k words lol because this is something i think a lot about! I love technique! If I ever stream again, feel free to pop in and ask more questions where I might be able to show some stuff in real time! Not sure when that will happen though!

Calling all artists, animators, and fans of fun and useful pose references! In 2 weeks time I will be taking part in @adorkastock & Friends' MASSIVE Group Poses for Artists Shoot.

We've got a bunch of models of different sizes and shapes, more props than you can shake a stick at (including bows, a pole and a POOL), and two full days of shooting to get as many reference photos as we possibly can. It's gonna be awesome, and there will be some PHENOMENAL references coming out of this.

If you'd like to pre-order Photo packs, you have until the 25th October. Get them here:

In the meantime, as a taster, here are some of the photos from last time I collaborated with @null-entity (who's also part of this project!) Enjoy!