Other.

Thank you! There’s one thing about drawing portraits that I don’t think I’ve ever touched on, and it’s the technique of constraining features.  Basically, it becomes easier and more intuitive to rotate the face in 3D space once your mind grasps exactly where the features are located and, furthermore, where they can’t be located.  

I use a weird double trapezoid shape that I’ve depicted below in red to keep track of facial feature placement every single time I draw a face.  It follows the top of the eyebrows, touches the corner of the eye, traces down to the corner of the lips, and finally ends at the bottom of the lips.  

The shape of the constraint will change depending on the person’s features, and it works for every angle of the head.  For me it really internalized where each part of the face was, as well as where it started and ended. It kinda helps moderate your drawings; i.e., you’ll stop drawing features that are wildly misplaced or off-sized.  I don’t literally draw this shape out every time I draw a face, but I see it in my mind’s eye 100% of the time.

If you’re still learning proportions, a good exercise is to grab pictures of people and trace this shape over them (either digitally or with a marker or something) to get an idea of what realistic constraints looks like.  Then go back to studying faces, and constantly check your drawing by tracing along the eyebrows and down to the bottom of the lips to make sure that things aren’t off (e.g., the constraint isn’t terribly asymmetric).  It takes a while to get used to, but it might help you get a good feel for portraiture.  

There’s one other unrelated thing I like to do with faces, and if you’ve seen a lot of my pics you’ve already picked up on it.  If you kinda add some shading to the area on the cheek just below the eye and down to the nose, I think it adds a decent amount of depth to a face.  Don’t go overboard of course but there’s another little tip that could be of use.

Great Reference , a good hand how to draw is always needed ^_^  But, the thing is I MUST draw it for real :/

Fantastic hands references by the website Hong14cafe.

aaaaa i haven’t seen a post like this before so i figured i’d make my own? i hope a few people would find this useful cuz i don’t think everyone knows yet! anyway here we go:

Anything between 300-539 pixels width will be stretched to 540!

So 299 is the magic number to avoid tumblr blowing up your reaction images! What I also do is just set my canvas to 540 pixels and draw within that, if I think 299 pixels will be too small.

click the gear symbol at the top right of a text post and go down to html

this adds an option to the post editor in the gear menu to revert the images back to their sizes:

My first shot at creating a sort of tutorial/guide, telling how I do things. On this initial chapter we’re going over the handy matter of Hands. Not meaning to be an encyclopedic explanation, only showing my own methods and self-taught clues. Hoping somebody finds it useful! :3 I’ll do more if this one is received well. So let me know~

Mendeley is the greatest program ever

I want to weep with joy every time I use it

Just click a button when you pull up an article and it will automatically save it to your library

And cite it for you

And you can use it on your mobile devices

And it’s free

You can use it to highlight, write notes, mark up, etc. What I do is I highlight all the important jazz, use the comments to write notes on the document, and on the side bar, I write an annotated bib for it for future me. It save everything you write on it forever for you and you can put the articles in folders and organize it.

I know I’ve been basically acting as a clown with a sign outside the Manga Studio shop, but I do realize that some people are just too used to other programs to change now. And that’s fine, if you actually work better with it. But part of the reason I went over to Manga Studio, when I’ve tried Photoshop, SAI, Gimp, FireAlpaca, Sketchbook Pro, and Corel Painter… is because of the exceptional stabilizers and penstroke guides that let you make distinctive shapes, draw easily in perspective, and make it all look highly organic and professional.

Well… for those of you who want to stick with your other art programs… There is Lazy Nezumi Pro.

http://lazynezumi.tumblr.com/

I do not use it. But that’s only because I feel that Manga Studio can already do all this stuff. But I am exceedingly impressed with what LNP has created. They’ve created a program that brings stabilizers, perspective guides, pressure sensitivity editing, and much more to programs that don’t normally have them.

I will just let the images speak for themselves:

This is the exact reason I have strayed from Photoshop. Because of the lack of ARTIST tools, and the profound lack of stability.

Well, here it is. They fixed it. And it works with other programs too.

So… yeah. If you aren’t interested in Manga Studio, but you still want to improve your digital penstrokes, definitely check out the demo.

Lighting is often underestimated in illustration – a lot of illustrators and beginning artists look at it as a decorative element, or as purely a tool used to showcase the form. A lot of beginning artists are afraid of shading and of using harsh lights. But even with the lighting mastered, even with perfect rendering and good understanding of form in space an integral element of the light remains missing in their pieces. 

Look at the samples above: the same character’s head has been used in every thumbnail, and the only thing I have tweaked was the cropping and manner of light used on the features. Every single one of these frames tells a different story and gives off a different vibe simply by using light to focus on the features I want you to focus on.

Read how lighting can be used to enhance character, mood, and interaction within your pictures below the cut.

sorry for any grammar mistakes

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif: