✐ drawing tutorials & tips

quick tutorial on how I shade with solid black (a lot of people ask, hope this helps)

two (2) people asked how i did the matchbook thing so take this

this is just a simple idea but if you spend some more time you can get real krazy with it:

making fake prints is so fun please do it immediately free resources under cut xoxo

A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

HEY!! HI! No prob, I can at least tell you my thoughts on it.

My problem is that without structure I never know when to stop, so I try to keep my coloring method as simple as possible. Base color, one shadow, and a little highlight on whatever materials call for it. If it still needs something after that, MAYBE I can add more depth or some gradients. Super, super simple.

So it’s not about having any fancy brushes or tools, it’s about how you use it. Shadow isn’t just Something That Has To Be There. It’s how you make things POP. Every time I open up my linework in Photoshop I think “damn, this is really flat” and go searching for the bulgy bits that I can put big juicy shadows on.

I lllove drawing bulgy knuckles and knees specifically so I can shade them later. This also works for brows, noses, boobs, anything you can make stand out.

One mistake I see beginners make is always slotting shadows as far to the edge of a figure as possible, like they’re scared it’ll ruin their linework. On the contrary!!! Shadows can function like SECRET EXTRA LINEWORK! Here’s a bad example using my Zim sketches.

The tunic on the left is from someone who understands what light and shadow are in concept. The tunic on the right is like, “mark my words, THIS SHADOW IS GOING TO HELP ILLUSTRATE THE FORM.” It’s going to be big in order to suggest that Zim is leaning forward, therefore casting a shadow over his waist. It’s going to be a little funky, to point toward his butt and accent his bending motion. It’s even gonna have a little ripple at the bottom, to show that this is fabric being stretched across his thighs. Suddenly this piece has more texture, motion and maybe even narrative, all because of one dumb shadow!

Note that you don’t even have to make a complicated shadow! I almost shaded the ribbing on the tunic too, but that was already defined by the linework so that wasn’t necessary. Personally I think bigger, less-complicated shapes are better and easier to read. I try to eliminate or join together overcomplicated shadows so they can accentuate the lines instead of distracting from their message.

If you’re doing light correctly, you’re going to run into parts of a piece where you don’t need a highlight, midtone, and shadow, but rather just one of those! This is useful for pushing unimportant limbs away into darkness and whatnot.

And very rarely will shadow or highlight hit directly on the edge of a figure. (These instances create cast shadow or rim light, generally, and they look really cool when done right. Here’s an example of a time I used rim light kinda not-right, but to make sure you could make out where Fiend’s hands were on this dark background:

The white rim light is pretty dramatic, and I could have gone way further with this by making the other colors even darker! You can shade 95% of a goddamn face if you want to. Actually, do that sometime. It’s very scary but enlightening.)

OHO, AND REFLECTED LIGHT! When you shade using big shapes, you give yourself a lot of room to stick reflective light in there! I don’t use it a lot myself, but I know furry porn artists love it as a quick and easy way to make their speedpaint commissions look impressive. Sometimes a secondary light source can bring extra color and atmosphere to your shadows! (This is especially useful for showing your character hanging out around water, imo.) [source]

Aaaand overall just… don’t feel chained to making your shadows just darker versions of the base color. Try adding a blue or orange or purple tinge, try shading with straight-up red once or twice just to make something scary, NEVER USE PURE GREY EVER, JUST TRUST ME, and remember your light source yadda yadda but you knew that.

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

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

A long time ago an anon asked my thoughts about drawing backgrounds, so I finally got around to putting this together. It’s more prop-centric, but it still represents my philosophy to backgrounds. 

Cups are pretty easy, so I’ll just give some extremely simple tips! 

This is just a starting point. There are many different types and shapes of cups. Study some real life examples and try sketching them to get a true understanding. 

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

I know u probs weren’t looking for an essay but you’re getting one

This is a relatively basic tutorial. I hate doing backgrounds so i tend to keep them as simple as possible while still considering the impact they can make on an image.

The quickest and easiest way to do a background: get a photo off the web and blur it then use it for the background, or use it as a reference - depending on the detail you put into it you could blur it or leave it blurred (or partially blurred to add more depth). I find that you can make the bg pretty slap-dash if you’re gonna blur it because all anyone will see is vague shapes anyway (again, I hate doing backgrouds)

Vanishing points are a pain in the ass tbh. I’ve never been able to get to grips with them… but if I ever draw a room I usually look up “empty room” 

using one as a reference I was able to place furniture in it accordingly, giving my far better results than if I tried to do it without the room as a reference. Another good thing to use is sims. Decorate the room how you like, get the angle you want, then bam! you got yourself a fully customised reference.

Another thing to consider - which can turn a very simple bg into a nice complement to the image, is the rule of thirds.

The placement of points of interest within the image - or the placement of your character within onto the bg - makes a big difference. It’s not the most perfect example, but in the image above, the far corner of the room sits along the vertical line - which is also where I put the majority of the detail. this helps draw the eye to a certain point rather not know where to look. If I were to put a person in this image, I would probably put them sitting on the bed or standing in front of it, because that is about where the second vertical line sits.

There’s also the theory of diagonal lines in imagery that can make for a successful piece. Though I am unsure about how to use these effectively with characters within the image, I do know that placing bg objects that “point” to what you want people to look at can be remarkably effective.

Here is an example of how use of line can draw you to a point of interest - though not entirely accurate (because I didn’t draw the bg lines with this intention at the time) I did think about rule of thirds and how victor and yuris’ body positioning might help with visual aesthetics. I also deliberately placed a block of bright colour behind their heads as a further impact to draw the eye.

by Pedro Medeiros