Just Some Stuff

These are what I currently have up and this is the link to get these on basically anything they have available https://www.redbubble.com/people/ThePromisedEden/shop?asc=u&ref=account-nav-dropdown

Due to a request, I have added a side view to the anatomy framework reference!

For the full res, PSD version that you can open in Krita, PS, or whatever, please check out https://bmc.xyz/l/artanatomy!

Hope this helps!!

Thanks for reading! If this post helped, please consider reblogging it or sharing it with your friends! ❤️

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

As heavily (really heavily) requested, I now bring to you all a tutorial on drawing kinky coily curly beautiful hair. I personally don’t think there is any one way to draw natural hair, but for the tutorial below I use a custom made brush pack. Any square pastel brush will work wonders for you though! Unlike the last tutorial there won’t be do’s and don’ts but I will again start off with this warning. 

If you have a character who is canonically black and wears wears their hair unprocessed and you choose to only draw them with straight hair instead thats #wrong. Let black hair be represented unstraightened.

OK NOW LETS GET INTO IT

First thing is first. You have to understand the basic shape of all curly hair. 

Curly hair has a corkscrew shape called a Helix.  What changes the look and overall denseness of the hair is how tight the helix shape of the hair is. The looser the curls the longer and more more S shaped the hair will be.The tighter the curls the shorter and coarser the hair will be in appearance. This is why black people with tighter curls appear to have shorter hair before they stretch out their coils. This is called shrinkage. 

The hair types can be kind of tricky to navigate if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. They range from 1-4 depending on who you ask. For this tutorial we’re only going to be paying attention to these six as they are the predominant hair types in the black community. The further down the scale you go the less S shaped the hair will be when stretched. 

3A hair is the loosest of the curly bunch.  It comes in a few variations and can even look like straight up ringlets depending on the person.  Ringlets are sometimes most apparent at the end of the hair. 3A hair has a really noticeable S shape and spiral pattern. This hair isn’t really textured it’s quite smooth in comparison but I love texture so :/

3B and 3C can sometimes overlap on the same head. It all depends on the person and other factors like whether or not they styled their hair. 3B hair is looser than 3C with the curls being around the size of a thin marker. This hair is very springy,voluminous,and dense. 3C hair is also called coily curly because of how tight the curls are. This is the densest and coarsest of the 3 category but it also has the most volume. 

To draw this hair use square pastel brushes or any square textured brush you may already have. Use a hard round brush to really define the ends and to draw fly aways. 

Even though this curly hair is so tightly packed it doesn’t hang straight down from the head. The curls push each other outwards and thats what gives the hair a big appearance. This leaves a lot of room for extra shadows and pockets of space you don’t  see with straight hair. So jot that down

Now we are getting into the coily and kinky hair types. This hair is very fine and is sometimes composed of multiple thin strands curling around each other to form one coil. It’s also dense! 4A hair is distinguishable from 4B because of its distinct S shape. 4B hair has a unique angled zig zag pattern. Both these hair types can be wiry and are less defined than other curl patterns. (Styling makes these curls pop severely tho)

4C is kinda new, but old to everyone who has this hair type. What’s fun and gorgeous about this hair type is that it can be wiry, coarse, dense, soft, fine or thin. Like 4B hair this hair type is very packed and less defined. Like all the other hair types this hair can be stretched and straightened. The amount of heat and method of styling will vary the results but a gentle styling of the hair will still leave it fluffy and textured. (But v much stretched.)  

For this kind of hair I love using really rough edged round brushes on a medium opacity. This gives the hair a soft finished look. 

Fun fact: the afro textures are so dense they hold shapes easily. This makes for some real interesting styling potential wink wonk

So the most fun part is coloring everything in. My favorite way to color is shown here and will be explained more in a Youtube video! 

1. ) Block in the shape of the hair with a solid color. Start off with your shadows first and keep them close to the face. 

2.Add your mid-tone second. Leave the edges and tops of the hair free for your lightest colors. 

3. Depending on the hair type you are drawing you can go in with a lighter color to add the highlights of curls. This will really make them pop but this isn’t necessary. If you are like me you really just focus on how the outline of the hair looks. 

4. On the outer edges of the hair I use the lowest opacity and lightest colors. For me this helps create a wispy and coiled look at the ends which is what I personally like on afros the most. Feel free to not do that. If you are not doing an Afro you can use a hard round brush to draw in defined s curls and coils at the ends. 

Remember fly aways are your friends. Not all black people just walk around rocking afros so learn to draw other natural styles. The hairline is usually solid for 4 type textures but you can add baby hairs if the hair is styled.

Listen up you fucks because I’m not wasting thousands of dollars on an art degree to watch y’all fuck up basic color theory.

Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors

If you’re using p i g m e n t.

Do you hear me? When you’re using traditional media, fucking actual goddamn paint, Bob Ross style, your primary colors are!

When you use paint, your primary colors are red yellow and blue and don’t forget it.

NOW THAT CHANGES COMPLETELY WHEN YOU GO FUCKING DIGITAL.

THE DIGITAL PRIMARY COLORS ARE RED BLUE AND GREEN IF AND ONLY IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO STAY DIGITAL, ON THE SCREEN, AND NEVER LEAVE THE SCREEN, AND OF COURSE IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO BE PRINTED. ON A PRINTER. WITH INK. THEN. AND O N L Y  T H E N.

ARE YOUR PRIMARY COLORS.

CYAN. 

MAGENTA.

AND YELLOW.

So say it with me folks!

Red yellow and blue, are the primary colors for traditional pigment that’s mostly used in paints and shit. You use red yellow and blue when you’re painting traditionally, Bob Ross style. 

Red blue and green is light, which is what you’re painting with when you pick up your tablet and go digital.

CMYK is ink, and ink only. You could use cyan, magenta, and yellow as your primary colors in paint if you wanted to be a complete dick, but they’re not your primary colors unless your work is going to be printed using. i n k. The only time they could be considered the primary colors in a traditional medium is if you’re using ink.

Is my icon. I painted this using RED. GREEN. AND BLUE. AS MY PRIMARY COLORS and they turned out fine. Of course, I used the finger smudge tool first and then the color mixing tool and then the blur tool, but hey what do I know.

Clearly using the blur tool only doesn’t cut it.

“Oh but Leo!” You say. “You used cyan and magenta in that color wheel!”

Well bitch guess what.

this is the digital color wheel. I’d say I mimicked that pretty well, don’t you think?

Oh and one other thing, notice how Blue and Yellow are directly opposite each other on this color wheel? That’s because we’re dealing with light, and with light, yellow and blue are complimentary colors.

Which is why when you mix them, it looks like this:

Which is a pretty neutral gray tone: They cancel each other out on the rgb color wheel when you mix them together.

BUT WITH PIGMENT THE PLACEMENT IS DIFFERENT

If you’ll notice, yellow and violet are now opposite each other, meaning they’re complimentary colors and if you mix  them, they’ll make a neutral gray.

But if you mix yellow and blue, same colors as before, YOU GET THIS:

Now keep in mind that the person in the video uses a darker blue, so they get a darker green, but the point is that it doesn’t make that neutral gray.

Now what happens when we mix yellow and violet paint?

Ah yes, you get a bunch of muted colors the more evenly you mix them.

What happens when you mix yellow light and purple light?

The reason the primary colors for light are so dramatically different from the primary colors for paint and ink is because your eye only receives combinations of red light, blue light, and green light. Our eyes do not have a sensor (cone cell) for yellow light. So when we paint with light, red green and blue are our primary colors. Because of our eyes.

Furthermore, paint primary colors are colors that cannot be created by mixing other colors together. For paint, they are red yellow and blue, because you cannot mix orange and green to get yellow. Mixing orange and purple paint does not make red. And mixing green and purple paint does not make blue.

Mixing blue and green paints will make cyan. Mixing red and blue paints will make magenta.

That’s why cyan and magenta aren’t primary paint colors.

However, you can’t mix yellow and blue ink and get cyan. You can’t mix red and blue ink to get magenta.

And that’s why cyan and magenta are the primary ink colors.

Brighter and stronger paints are created through tints and shades, through a thorough understanding of color theory and a few quality paint recipes. Not by bullshit posts on tumblr designed to mislead you.

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.