A blog to help you improve your work of art

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

Beyond this, consider how these professions might vary depending on who the customers are - nobles, or lower class. Are they good at their job or just scraping by? Do they work with lots of other people or on their own? City or village?

For younger characters:

Apprentice to any of the above

Messenger/runner

Page/squire

Pickpocket

Shop assistant

Student

Looks after younger siblings

((long list, so it’s below the cut))

How to paint gold - tutorial by LenamoArt

Again this is my personal take on color! It really depends on the situation and what you personally value, and in the end practice is your best friend.

links:

genice’s color practices

color palette challenge (one iteration of it; there’s lot of people who made them)

(not mentioned, but helpful)

Patrick (H) Willems’s video essays on color in film; specifically his ones on

Wonder Woman and Marvel

I thought he had one on John Wick too but I can’t find it. If you like saturated colors though, check that movie out!!

I’ve got a few generators you can use.

Need some clothes?

Try Here Here or Here Definitely here Steam punk clothing Char Style preference Dress

Need an Appearance idea?

Humanoid generator? check Non-Humanoid? Got that too and this and maybe this Need Monsterpeople?  I’ve got you. Maybe you need Cats?

Need some details and shit like that?

Bam Backgrounds and stuff? yep Personality. you need that shit Need something fandom related? World-building? location? got ya City generator hell yeah make your own god damn laws Oh shit someone died Landscape. CHAR DEVELOP QUESTION GEN Profile Thingy Have some dates Quirks

You thought I was done? Nope. Motha. Fuckin. Names.

So many fuckin names MOTHERLOAD OF NAMES

Plant Names Magic Book title

Just search ur ass up some names man

Items. Yeah. You heard me.

Medicine? got it Items out the ass more items wow

Other shit.

Wow Yep Plots More writing stuff This site has everything so fucking go for it Need AUs? How the shit did these two meet? Fanfic plots. you bet your ass. (tag me in the shit u write i wanna see what you get) What does it do thing (you come up with a better name for this one. fuckin fight me.

Thanks! :) I presume the style you’re using drawing the head doesn’t fit the style for the rest of the body? It’s hard to tell something for sure because I haven’t seen your art but maybe this will help a bit:

Maybe you should practice drawing heads and bodies because the more you understand something the easier it is to bend it the way you want. Just focus on improving both. Though sometimes it’s better to do quick figure drawing and ignore the details, it’s seriously easier that way. Don’t pay so much attention to your style, study amatomy. Experiment ;)

So, you put your Windows computer to sleep for the night. You come back the next day all eager to wake it up and put it right to work on that thing you’ve been working on and ….

Oh no - you’ve seemed to have lost all pressure sensitivity and high resolution pen tracking! Well, you figure, why not go check the driver settings. Maybe it’s just groggy and needs a little morning reminder? You go to your Control Panel, click on Wacom Properties Configu—

Ah.

Now, you figure, all is lost and there’s only one thing left to do: save your work, close all your programs, and do a full system restart. What a fun time this is.

But HOLD ON! There’s another way! Try this out first before pulling the plug:

Open your Start menu (or press the Windows Key) and simply type “Services”. There will be an icon at the top of your list which appears to be two small gears with the name “Services.” Click that and look what happens next:

Scroll down the list and select “Wacom Professional Tablet Service” from the list of services and click the little “Restart” link in the column to the left. Now simply wait for the service to stop and start itself back up again!

If for some reason, clicking this little “Restart” button makes matters WORSE, the failsafe approach is the manual restart. Double click the “Wacom Professional Tablet” service and a window will pop up.

Manually stop the Wacom driver by clicking the Stop button. Wait for it to shut down, then start it back up again with the Start button once it becomes visible. Once restarted, click OK!

Test your Tablet now in Photoshop. You may have your pressure sensitivity fully restored!

IF NOT, simply close and reopen Photoshop, which will be nice and quick since it (and your work) are still loaded into recent memory. Yes, this isn’t IDEAL, but it surely beats having to close EVERYTHING and restart the whole computer. Especially if you were listening to a good tune at the time.

Now, providing you’ve done it correctly, (really now, how could you not,) you should find your Wacom’s pressure and tracking sensitivity fully restored! AND you’ll have access to the Tablet Properties config app once again!

Celebrations! For discovering such a wonderful little time saver.

:: ADDENDUM ::

As pointed out by Addleton there is a permanent fix for this issue by disabling the service called “TabletServicePen” if you’re using an Intuos/Bamboo or “Tablet PC Input Service” if you’re using a Cintiq.

As artists, we can often feel like we’ve plateaued on our progress because of lack of time, or resources. Not every artist has the time to go to art classes, and not every artist has the money to attend art-school and receive a proper critique. 

That’s why I’ve created this blog! Introducing the… 

The Redline Station is a blog that is dedicated to helping artists. If an artist is struggling with anatomy, or would like a critique on their art, they can submit the art using the SUBMIT YOUR ART button. Then, one of our moderator artists will pick up their piece and do a redline of it to help them better see the places that need fixing.

What’s a redline?

Good question!  A redline is when an artist will draw directly over a piece of art in order to show what the mistakes in anatomy are. By seeing the comparison of the art itself (at a lower opacity) and of the more accurate anatomical example, the artist can more quickly improve their drawing.

Our artists will take your submitted drawing and give you a redline. They will then post it to the blog alongside the original to help you compare the two and easily see what needs to be done. It’ll look somewhat like this!

Q: Can I submit anything? 

A: Yes! Any type of art, human or animal is okay! The only thing that’s not okay is gore and pornography. The posts will need to be PG-13. (Kissing and suggestive scenes are okay, however.)

Q: Will you redline if the drawing is in my style? 

A: Yes! Anime style, cartoony style drawings are also okay. The idea isn’t to fix the drawing to look more like ‘realism’, but to fix it to make it look more believable within the frame of style it’s already in.

Q: How many drawings can I submit for redlining?

A: For the time being, I’m the only one running the blog… In order to keep my sanity, I will accept only one submission per person and only keep submissions open for a limited time until I get more help. Which brings us to our next point… 

Do you want to help me?! GOOD! Then please read the next post. 

friday night tutorial time

this post is massive but i tried to cover both the conceptual and technical side, hopefully it’s somewhat coherent

continued under cut

My friends asked me for an tutorial

For Paint Tool Sai users. There should be plenty of guides on how clipper group, preverse opacity/opacity lock works so I won’t be adding them here.

As I do with most things, I draw hands from a series of gesture strokes that insinuate the pose and shape I want. Something I personally find very appealing about hands are all the joints, bends, and crooked bits so I start with those and build the rounder, meaty bits from there.

In the first two steps here if you just look at the individual strokes I’ve drawn, you can see they’re just some curves, really, that sketch out the shape of the hand, and I’m focusing on the joints and knuckles. (The fingertips in the second one are actually rly unnecessary and ugly to me haha – that’s usually the kind of thing I’d just throw down in step 3.)

And again below, just starting w/ some curves and squigglies to show the joints and knuckles:

These hands are by no means realistic or fully proportional but drawing’s supposed to be fun and these are really fun! I’m like, really not about that whole “draw a box and then the little tubes and those are the fingers” thing. It’s too technical and so much life gets lost when you sketch that way. Maybe it’s helpful for a pose you’re uncertain about but then just look at a photo or your own hand to see how things work, y’know?

Something else I’m really about is using shading and line to emphasize the bends and stuff even after I’ve got the hand down:

The first image here you can tell the fingers are bent, but they also look lumpy imo. To stylize further, I add some thin lines for the joints and fingernails, and then shade for some extra depth + to pronounce the foreshortening etc. (Fingers are so ugly from this angle! But we gotta draw them like this sometimes…)

Some examples where these extra lines assist in conveying the shape:

And shading:

(Bottom right is the same pose as a previous example which I didn’t realize till now sorry haha)

Some general tips:

- Use asymmetry!!! When the joints don’t line up exactly right, or you’ve drawn two hands doing the same thing but idk one’s curled a little bit more or the right pinky sticks out but the left doesn’t – these little touches make the drawing more dynamic, even if the general pose/concept is flat.

- Thumbs are really cool? They’re like trapezoidal. The same tapering thing kinda happens where the hand meets the wrist. A hand is like a big thumb

- Two things that a lot of beginner artists get wrong: which side the thumb is on (…always double-check…I still double-check sometimes too), and drawing the fingers straight instead of slightly bent when trying to draw a relaxed hand. Relaxed fingers curl! And this is much easier to draw imo than perfectly tense fingers

- Study your own hands and think about their shape. Part of developing a style + comfort with drawing a particular thing is how you choose to simplify the form thru line. I explained above that I focus on the joints and knuckles and seek to simplify those with curves and squiggles but maybe you’re more interested in a different aspect. (Like, you can see I don’t draw palms v much…that’s cuz I like knuckles haha)

Here’s an exercise! I cannot draw cars well. I don’t like drawing cars.