drawer 🛋️

Quick little video tutorial! This is a method I use to block in shapes when I’m fighting the urge to polish my lineart at an early stage, especially in rough concept art that doesn’t actually need polished lineart.

I group two layers in photoshop—a rough sketch, and a flat color—and then carve out the negative space by painting into a mask on the group, instead of filling in the positive shapes. From there I can start painting and adding shading into that group, knowing that I’ve already locked down a good initial silhouette for the object/character:

It feels like oil painting, and I end up finding silhouettes/shapes in a way I wouldn’t if I was obsessively cleaning up the linework first. Digital art has a tendency to veer towards cleanliness/polish, so I love finding little opportunities for happy accidents and a bit of mess!

I used it on my unicorn piece last month, for instance, which I think would have lost a lot of its dynamism and charm if I had worried too much about doing a full ink pass:

hey these are some tips for some of the little details in drawing fat folks that some people might not know!

everyone has fat on their bodies so its a worthwhile skill to have, but most art tutorials leave it out. heres some other good tips from artists!!

A resource I suggest is fatphotoref. You can also look at fat positive blogs for tons of photos and drawings that can help you learn how fat bodies look in different poses. Tags you can search on this blog include fat art, fatshion, fat athletes, and fat masc. Those tags are probably the best if you're wanting to use fatphobiabusters for pictures to help you learn how to draw fat people. Another tip I have heard a fat artist mention before is if you are fat yourself, use yourself as a reference photo. I hope this helps!