thewishingrose

"Tutorial" on how to "draw" a blind OC.

My kofi

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general. Links below so that you can research and do a nuance. Ones that were directly mentioned are bolded.

The setting that prevents your work being used to train AI models is turned off by default! I had no idea about this until now! Artists, go to your settings, click “visibility”, and turn on this setting! Protect your work!

Go to your blog (you have to do this for each individual blog) and the visibility tab

It's this last option here

Bounce light is something I didn't cover but I adore it!

Changing her posture to something normal people do (bonus points for slouching/rounded shoulders, a common posture for tall and/or big chested women)

Making sure her outfit is appropriate for the situation (showing skin is not inherently sexualizing, lingerie armor or half-naked-in-the-snow probably is)

Making her torso/waist thicker, maybe even enough that all her organs would reasonably fit!

I just wanna clear something up about it

1)It is an undoubtedly bad drawing, yes, the rule of art is generally “it’s wrong if it looks wrong” and this clearly looks wrong 2) The person who did that draw-over doesn’t have a much better grasp of anatomy and, I’m going to assume, isn’t very familiar with what bodybuilders look like

The Liefeld drawing was referenced from this photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger;

this is a pretty common bodybuilding pose and photography technique, to do these slight upshots to emphasize the size of the chest as much as possible. You can find a million photos of even just Arnie striking this exact pose in different situations;

The thing about competitive bodybuilders is that their dimensions are so outside the realm of what the average person is accustomed to that they can look “out of proportion” in real life. Parts of the body that can’t change size like the head and hands appear comparatively small, and the girth of limbs can make them appear shorter than they really are

(In order these guys are Ronnie Coleman, Moustafa Ismail, Daniele Seccarecci, and Jay Cutler if you want a source) side note, comments about the body type being “unattractive” aren’t necessary in this conversation, bodybuilding on this scale is a form of body modification, akin to being heavily pierced or tattooed. In other words, they aren’t doing it for you.

The problem is, if you make art referencing a body type that appears out-of-proportion to the layman and don’t fudge the scale of individual elements to make it seem stylistically balanced, it will look wrong to the audience. You can show someone a tracing of a body like this and it will more than likely appear more “wrong” to them than a version taking artistic license to enlarge the hands and feet and enlongate the limbs to something the contextually feels correct.

Honestly, it is technically possibly to fit a fairly correctly proportioned human arm behind that shield;

The wrist on a human body is about even with the groin when the arm is out straight, there’s room to fit a limb that long behind the shield. But the arm looks incorrect for a number of reasons; The chest wouldn’t appear at that angle if his far arm wasn’t wrapped around to hold his wrist like it was in the reference, the shield obscures line of his spine which causes his midriff to look massively thick, hiding the forearm behind the shield emphasizes how comparatively short the limb would feel even if the proportions were perfectly accurate, and the star on the shield causes viewers to assume at a glance that his arm is bent (if you look at the shield assuming the first point clockwise from the top is the actual top of the star it looks more in-proportion, but you have to stop and think about it so the drawing has already failed)

If you were to dump the shield and put the arms in a position that matches the way the chest is flexed, it makes a lot more sense what he was going for;

Which honestly isn’t even outside the realm of what actual human bodies can potentially look like;

i might've answered this before i don't mind repeating myself

STEP 1: make sure you have good lighting!

take your photos next to a window on a bright day, not in direct sunlight because that can cause glare or over expose the image, but next to a window where the ambient light is even across your piece

taking pics on a rainy day or after the sun sets? no problem! all you need is bright ambient lighting, like what you'd find in a well lit bathroom, light that isn't shining directly on you, but reflecting off the walls, diffused and even

when taking your picture you wanna make sure there are no shadows, be it cast shadows from your hands, or shadows on one side of the page due to focused light

here's a side by side:

on the left side there's this gradient of value across the image because the light is just hitting the page from the top, and there's some visual striping caused by my lamp

on the right the image is evenly covered in light from a nearby window, so there is no gradient

of course the left image is exaggeratedly bad but if you photograph and edit with uneven light your end product will be passable, but not as great as it could be

here are some more examples post edit, notice the gradient across the drawing and the shadow on the bottom half

again not TERRIBLE but not ideal

STEP 2: photograph straight on, up close and crop tastefully!

when you're taking your picture stand up if you can, and i mean it, just get right on top of the piece and make sure your camera is parallel, because taking a pic at an angle can really distort the proportions of your drawing

also make sure you're fitting as much of the drawing into your picture as possible, you don't wanna lose quality unnecessarily by photographing from a distance

and when you crop, try and get out as much unnecessary space as you can, of course give the image breathing room, don't crop down to the edges of your image, but also try and cut out your thumbs or desk if you're going for that crisp professional look

all the rules in this section can be broken if it's done intentionally!

here are some examples of off angle/weirdly cropped drawings with my desk in the background but it's on purpose:

STEP 3: time to edit!

so this part is really going to depend on what software you personally use to edit and getting familiar with it, i use my phone's built in editor which is the google photos editor, ive used ios photo editing, ive used photoshop and procreate and most programs generally have the same couple of editing scales so im going to be general

FOR BLACK AND WHITE ART:

1. turn the saturation aaallllll the way down

we don't want the yellow of the pages or the warm light of your lamp or the blue tone of the sun on our white paper, unless you're going for a black and white in sepia sort of look, then edit to your discretion, but in general for black and white i eliminate all color

2. crank the brightness and contrast (highlights/white point/exposure/brilliance) UP and turn the black point/shadows DOWN

we want to create as much visual contrast as possible and make the darks REALLY dark and the brights REALLY bright, especially if you have a drawing that has very little midrange values, this worked well for my stamps, but for a pencil drawing you want to keep those details and middle values so the settings won't be as extreme

depending on what program you use the names and effects of each setting might be a little different, so fiddle around to find out what everything does!

here's a before and after

FOR COLOR ART:

1. increase saturation! (and vibrance on ios) depending on your piece and your camera and the medium and the lighting your image and its colors can come out a number of different ways, but usually cameras will not capture the vibrancy of real life colors. and personally i just like boosting them anyway :) i think it looks really nice!

2. turn the brightness and white values up, but not too much, we don't want to wash out any colors but if you have a white of the page we still want that to be bright white

3. turn the black point/shadows down just a little, we don't want to completely overpower the light and color values with darks and shadows, but we still don't want it to look washed out and dull

and lastly (for both B&W and color) fiddle with some other specialized settings! play with curves! or pop, or HDR or whatever other slider you have access to, figuring out what each does and which ones you like will help you get your final image closer to your tastes :)

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May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

a little informational guide on trying to find skintones from 3d refs :)

1) EXERCISE. stretch ur wrists, buy tiny weights to build strength in them, go on walks so ur legs don’t die from sitting all the time idk if ur only like 14 or something, start doing it nowwww

2) raise ur pen/brush sensitivities so u don’t have to press as hard on ur screens and lower ur stabilization if u hate lineart

3) It Is Always Okay To Pirate PDF Art Resources.

4) learn to love the process bc there will be often times where the end result drawing is not what u like and if ur only drawing for that end result you’ll go crazy. find a pen that Feels Good to use and makes u happy or something like that

5) don’t post on tiktok/reels if ur a beginner artist. they r mean over there in ways that is abnormal

6) tone curve + posterization can make ur colors real funky fun

7) don’t worry abt style consistency, that’ll develop naturally overtime