My Art Blog

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

IT EVEN HIGHLIGHTS THE ULNA BONE  

Arm view: Red = Deltoids (all three heads are in one color) Blue = Latissimus Dorsi Green = Biceps Brachii Yellow = Triceps Brachii

Forearm: Red = One of the wrist flexors Blue = Brachioradialis

Back view, left side: Red = Deltoids (all three heads are in one color) Blue = Latissimus Dorsi Green = Infraspinatus, Teres Minor, Teres Major Yellow = Trapezius (all groups one color)

senshi stock

croquis cafe

line-of-action.com

quickposes.com

posemaniacs

clip studio paint models

pexels.com

sketchdaily

eggazyoutatsu atarichan drawer

designdoll

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Yesstyle.com

Found some hands tutorial by me

Again, there isn’t a “right” way to do mouth charts (because some of the best comic effects come from really goofy, unrealistic, or overly detailed mouths) but if I had to guess I would assume this style of mouths came from thinking of the characters as static illustrations before considering what they would look like animated. When you look at a Family guy illustration (such as the ones used in marketing and merchandising), they don’t put any teeth in the mouths

So (and again, this is just an assumption) I think what happened was they decided they liked the imagery of smiling toothless Peter and decided to preserve it by only adding teeth when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, that makes for distracting speech animation. They probably don’t think many people care that much (which I’m sure they don’t) and have decided it’s more important to make sure he looks as much like the stationary model they decided they liked as possible at all times (this is also the reason you don’t see the same deformation and antics that you used to in shows like the Simpsons).

I think the thing to remember about teeth is that only the lower ones will (realistically) move in your skull. Obviously cartoons aren’t bound to realism and there are plenty of situations where you could throw that rule out the window, but for the sake of learning the rules before you break them; Upper Teeth Are Rooted In Place.

(these are kind of scribbly but I guess they communicate the point)

People have all sorts of different mouths, some people primarily show their upper teeth, some people primarily show their lower teeth, some people are really toothy and show both sets, some are really tight-lipped and you almost never see their teeth at all (there’s a great bit on this in the Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams), but the difference will always be in how the skin wraps around the skull. The lower jaw moves independently of the skull, fleshy parts of the mouth can move independently of the skull and lower jaw alike, but the upper teeth remain anchored.

There are a lot of different ways you can go about doing a basic mouth chart for a character. Almost any animation book worth it’s salt will outline the shapes you’ll need to start with (like this page from Preston Blair)

I’ve worked on shows that had cycles of everything from ten (the absolute minimum that will hit all the phonemes) to twenty mouths for each emotion. Here’s a (somewhat lopsided) chart I made for Blue with 36 frames (18 happy, 18 sad/neutral)

You can get by with one mouth per phoneme, but you can run into problems easing in and out of vowels that way (for example the “sh” that leads into “shoot” is not the same shape as the “sh” that leads into “sheet”) I usually figure out my chosen pallet of mouth shapes, so to speak, like this;

INB just indicates where I would add mouths to ease from one shape into another, how many you add depends on how smooth you want it to be. It gives you something a little like this;

I just kind of slapped this together in an hour or two a while back to test out the mouth, but it looks a little like this when you actually use it to animate with

*starts sweating*

make a 3D model

When i know that i’m looking at a figure or an environment that i will draw a lot more and very regularly in the future, i make a 3D model. 

But most of the time i don’t use the model. It’s best to use it in specific situations, like when you are trying to get the hang of the design (the end goal of that is being able to draw it from memory alone with ease). Or when you make a reference sheet, because the accuracy should be top notch there. Just sculpting a model of it alone helps, because the knowledge you gain from sculpting the design will carry over to 2D, whether you like it or not, you really have no say in it, fortunately. :p

draw, fail, delete, draw, fail, delete, draw, fail, delete, until success 

In contrast with that, i don’t have a model for most of my designs, including these two. Most of the time what i like to do i’d call “brute-forcing” accuracy. That is… drawing it and deleting it over and over and over again, without help, until it looks right. I like to think of it as making my brain’s 3D software stronger.

observe & learn & memorize & draw relevant real life things 

Drawing from life/photo is to train your brain software too. You basically suggest to it, for example “this shading is correct in these lighting conditions on this material, code it into System32”. By this, while drawing from memory/imagination, you relegated the task of accurate shading to your subconscious and you can spend your active concentration on better things. 

(this example image is more like a joke, but if i ever draw Pegasus in a catbread pose again, i will have a better idea of what to do and what not to do - and i will certainly not be drawing him like this next time i use this pose)

construct and transform the figure using basic shapes

You can also use that tecnique everyone keeps recommending for everything that is basically “break the figure down into simple shapes like cylinders, orbs, cones, squares, etc and transform those shapes”. E.g.: don’t think of it as a bird’s wing, think of it as a sheet of paper. If the base shape looks ok after you draw it from a different angle, it will also look ok after you put the details back on it. Probably. Art is an art, not a science. The reason everybody keeps recommending this technique is because it’s really effective, when done right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical) - and train your brain to make use of this thing too. 

(like this but with more effort)

get intimately familiar with your design

Practice/repetition/familiarity can’t (or maybe shouldn’t) be skipped, needless to say. If you already drew pigeon wings 4999 different ways, the 5000th will not be as hard to draw as if you have only drawn pigeon wings 50 times before. 

Also pays off to get familiar with your creature’s range of motions, behaviors, relative sizes of bodyparts, etc. Every new pose and angle for every different design you draw is more or less like uncharted land.

if it looks wrong, it isn’t necessarily wrong

Maybe this is a very niche scenario, i don’t know, but sometimes when one design looks terrible/wrong from another angle it’s because that is how it looks from another angle. It tends to happen when i couldn’t predict that the design will not look good from any other angle, or when my brain gets stuck on a belief (e.g. when i was like 8, i thought that bones can’t have a bent shape because they are rigid so if they bent they would break. I drew very… very straight limbs for a while). This is another reason for me to make a 3D model. It’s good for troubleshooting. 

embrace the struggle

Dude, you think I don’t use references?

Reference is one of the most valuable tools you can use as an artist.

My biggest tip for drawing poses is never forsake the time to look up reference. Even if it doesn’t turn out 100% like you wanted, you taking the time to study WILL come in handy and will make a difference in your art. The only time I don’t end up using reference is because I have a pretty clear idea in my head of what I want to draw–usually thanks to having used reference to draw something similar at some point in time LOL.

Don’t forget to just take time to just doodle poses for practice. Posemaniacs is a great resource for practicing full body poses. When I’m in a mood, I’ll do a warm up sketch or two, and then dive into doing a bunch of short 60-90 second sketches. The time limit forces you to stop worrying about accuracy so much and focus on getting the general flow and feel of the pose down.

☆ a long time ago someone asked me for a tutorial on how I draw cats, so here it is. “How to Draw a Cat: By someone that is not qualified to teach you how to draw a cat.”

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!

if you have an ipod or iphone or ipad or whatever then Please download the app “Make a Pose”

it gives you a lil figure like this

and you can make them do whatever you want!! Like

Took me about 1.4 minutes to make this sad little guy it’s Really easy to get the hang of

they Happy

you can change the camera angle so easy too so you can get perspective + foreshortening reference

THIS IS ALL FREE TOO but if you pay $2 you unlock the ability to have two figures onscreen at the same time so you can make COUPLE POSES

AND YOU CAN CHANGE THE LIGHTING,

you can also make rooms and place some objects or characters like so:

YOU WANT A CHARACTER W/ A BIGGER CHEST? HERE THEY ARE

YOU WANT A FRICKIN HORSE?

NEIGH NEIGH MOTHER FUCKER

SenshiStock’s gallery consists of millions of pictures that are free to use as reference.