Jasper draws

Colour Painting Tips by slawekfedorczuk

SIMPLIFYING the TORSO!

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Here is a (somewhat) tutorial i made, hopefully it can be of help to any of you

tbh idk what im doing 90% of the time this was really hard to make

Tut below!

Rock Painting Tutorial 2.0 by thiennh2

First: First of all, establish the very basic shape by using isometric guide

Secondly: Cut a few edge on the main shapes into some minor shape and edge around it.

Thirdly: using hard brush to create edges Fourth: go deep inside and work on those extra details on edges of the rock by using round hard brush and brush by Mr–Jack. Remember: Blocking in value first before go into details of edge Fifth: Choose focal areas by lasso tools and using color dodge to add highlight Sixth: Using Ctrl + U to create basic color

Everyone says NEVER TRACE!! THAT'S ART THEFT! Ok but we can do a little crime in the name of Learning.

Trace to learn, not to earn.

I like to take my own photos, but you can study whatever you want. Link back to original photos, and don't post copied artwork unless the artist is dead, cool with it, or both.

As always with learning, start every sketch with the intent to throw it away (trash for paper, quitting without saving for digital) This takes the pressure off and lets you make Bad Art, which is very important.

So let's make Bad Art of a Deer because I happen to have one handy

Start with a photo of your subject in a nice/neutral pose with all four feet visible. (so not like me)

Freehand copy it. Try not to stylize, focusing instead of matching proportions and pose. Don't get too detailed!

It's ok if your art looks terrible and has broken legs. I've drawn LOTS of deer so I have a leg up. Everyone's art sucks in their own eyes and here's where mine went wrong:

Either lasso-distort (recommended for beginners) or redraw a copy of your first sketch with your reference behind it (scaled to match the main body of your sketch)

Put the original and modified sketches together and compare the differences. Write it down if you want. This shows you where your eyes saw things the wrong size, so you can correct for that next time.

After learning about both deer and yourself, try freehand copying again.

Marvel at your newfound knowledge and skill!

but there's always room for improvement

You can stop here and move on to your real drawing, Or do another freehand-fix-compare cycle. I actually overcorrected my "draws heads too big" and veered into "heads too small."

Another note on tracing: Learning HOW to trace is more important than anything you could learn By tracing. Draw the Anatomy, not the outline. In real life, things don't have outlines, they have bones.

These are from the same shoot which is extra useful for consistency. The lines are minimal and follow where the animals joints are, and only important parts are drawn.

You won't know what Important Parts means right off the bat, which is where in-depth study comes in. You need to do learn the hard parts to do the easy parts right.

"Study the anatomy study the anatomy" but they never tell you HOW. It's not "read a book," It's more like flailing around wildly and crashing your browser from too many tabs.

This is going to be about How to Make a bones and muscle chart. Because even if your art sucks, you learn so much more by doing than by seeing.

References I gathered: X X X X X X X X

Get Set up. Get a photo, like above, but it doesn't have to be the same photo. And now... gather reference.

We'll start with bones. Search up "[animal] skeleton" and get photos or super scientific illustration. Add in things like "top view" to spice it up.

Next, search "[animal] skeleton sketchfab." This pulls up 3D models that you can rotate in your browser. Remember that these are art and the anatomy is only as good as the artist, so pick a good one.

Time for bone!

The spine is the most important, and in a lot of animals it will surprise you. Draw it in over your photo and then add spikes because skeletons are punk. These are not scientific and I didn't count them because their number doesn't matter to art. So you better be referencing from scientists and not me!

The rest of the bones and some notes. These are my notes to myself about things I want to remember. My personal discoveries in anatomy that made my art better. You can make the same notes but also make sure you have your own thoughts on there as well. that's how you help yourself the best. Be as detailed or vague as you want.

Same deal with muscle. Here are my personal notes to myself. Label stuff that is important to you. I actually grouped a bunch of muscles together based on what is visible from the outside. Muscles are way more complicated than this, but Baby's First Anatomy Chart gets to be simple.

This is good enough for me because I have intimate knowledge of the other muscles working under and over these ones. Feel free to add as many or as few muscles as you like. You chart your own course.

This is very VERY much not an anatomical chart. I'm sure there's nerds out there pulling their hair out looking at this. But listen, it works for art!

And you know the wildest part about this?

I don't need to look at it to use it. The act of making your own anatomy chart puts that knowledge in your brain. Like how you can make "cheat sheets" even for tests that don't allow them - the act of making the sheet helps you remember what you struggle with most.

And after all that complexity? Your simplification will be based on Real Knowledge and you'll put those random circles in the right spots.

Look at all this hard work you've done. Eventually this will be second nature to you.

I put together some photo packs and uploaded them to my gumroad. You can use them and this guide to study! So far there's only a Doe and a Fawn pack, but if I get sales I will put in the effort to do more for deer, horses, cats, birds, and anything else I can point my camera at.

Doe Pack

MARBLING TEXTURE PACK

“Notes on skirts and pants”

Colour Tips by yuming_art

Equiping an armor tutorial

This is the next priority species for the site, chosen by our Patreon supporters.

One of these wolves has three legs, so there's a bunch of photos of her adaptive run / walk cycles in this photoset.

As always, more photos on the Repository page:

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use these and all photos in the repository as references, including works that will/may be sold.

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations

I wrote a whole reply and it got completely eaten! No draft or anything! Nightmare.

I'm skimming the basics you already know (read more, write more, stop waiting for inspiration, skimp on speech tags and use said as often as possible when you have to, spend as much time editing as writing) to give you an abridged version of advice I'm obsessed with that I call Total the Car. (I didn't coin this idea, but I may be the only one who ever talks about it. Forgive me if you've heard this lecture before.)

This advice references Ryan North's excellent Tumblr blog, BttF, on which he did a page by page reading of the novelization of Back to the Future. Ryan North is a very funny guy, and so it's an entertaining read, but it is also educational. Back to the Future is one of the tightest screenplays ever written, and the novel is a strange, meandering mess, made more so by the idiosyncrasies of its author and the likely fact that it was based on an earlier draft of the a screenplay. This allows us to compare and contrast the two works.

Early on in the story, Biff Tannen wrecks George's car. In the novelization, Gipe calls the car "nearly totaled," which causes Ryan to melt down; why nearly total the car? What value does the car have not being utterly totaled? The state of the car is mostly irrelevant. "Total the car!" Ryan says, on his blog. "You're the writer! You have the power! Total the car!"

I love this advice. I think writers often get bogged down in details like this; we're married to realism, or some research we did, or we think that going that far will be "too much," and so we rob our scenes of their own power. The phrase "nearly totaled" is not only weaker - it lacks the emotional gut punch - but it also raises questions where there should be none.

I think, when making a choice like this in writing, you should always err on the side of totaling the car. Kill the survivors. Burn the house to the ground. Make it harder on yourself. On your characters.

Stories don't happen in the almosts. They exist in the things that happen, the things that can't be undone. I love forcing people to go through a piece and circle every "almost" and "nearly" and "started to," and force them to write the piece that would have happened if there had been less restraint.

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

The perspective examples I showed above look complicated, but the underlying technique is very simple. You just keep splitting the rectangle until it's divided up evenly as many times as you need it to be.

For drawing references