Weekend Art Marathon

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. 

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. 

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

did you find the pic? here it is anyway

I tried to make it as simple as I could ; v ; Hope it helps!

So I actually find him a little easier to draw because of his distinct features! Here’s my old tutorial for studying faces which I’ll run through again with BC’s face.

Once you’ve set up as many lines as you need you can start analyzing shapes

He’s got really heavy brows that look like wierd trapezoids haha ;; and his eye shape is similar but with a curved underside

The bridge of his nose is pretty wide and about the same width all the way down. Ends in a V shape 

Really pronounced cupid’s bow. Pretty much looks like 2 triangles connected at a point

And yeah! Just put it all together.

 Steve… Why is he always like this-

Metal tutorial

Have you ever started drawing one-point perspective and then realized that even though you could draw the diagonals, you still had no idea where to place objects for relative size?

Welcome to my tutorial for drawing some very easy, flexible, and mathematically accurate perspective grids!

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I do with this.

So you’re just starting to draw your perspective grid on its own layer. You can change the transparency this way and draw things over it later. There’s the horizon line and the vanishing point in the middle.

But when you go in to draw your verticals and horiontals, what is this?? How do you break up the “hall” into even spacing? Just measuring equal sections won’t work.

Luckily there is a trick. Find the point that is ½ of the way to the center.

Then, imagining that point is the bottom of your page, find the halfway point to the center again. Keep repeating the process.

That’s right, each time it shrinks by ½. I call this the ½ perspective method, but if you guessed that it’s the Fibonacci sequence you’re absolutely right. I just didn’t want to say that in the title because the idea of math might scare off some people.

Anyway, use these points to place your verticals and horizontals.

Look at how even that is!

But!!! What if you want to space things a little more closely than that? Well guess what!! It works with literally any other fraction you can think of!

again simply measure the space between your last mark and the center.

What a finished grid in 1/3 perspective looks like!

And the kicker? You don’t even have to put the vanishing point in the center. You can put it anywhere else on the page and the same rules still apply!

See folks this is the sort of thing they should be teaching us in Drawing 1. But for some reason no??

Anyway, I recommend making a bunch of these in different spacings/angles/rotations whenever you’re bored and saving them so that you can just import them later when you need them.

I keep seeing the guide of clothing made by pittssmitts and while I love the way Mateo breaks everything down and makes excellent points and offer sincere outfit advice, I feel like his guide doesn’t really work for plus sized guys like me (I tried most of the outfits but I’m too round for them to work on me)

So I made this complementary advice to go with his guide, this one is all based on my personal experience shopping and passing in public, I’m a very closeted trans man (for safety reasons) But I still manage to pass really well!

Most strangers use the correct pronouns without me asking them to, and this all while going binderless into this savage cold world

You’ll need tape, scissors, knife, disposable chopsticks, empty aluminium can, stapler and ink.

Calligraphy Pen for Gothic: cut the aluminium into two pieces like above and tape it on chopstick, then Staple the aluminium.

Medium Point Calligraphy Pen: Fold a piece of aluminim, and cut it like picture above. Then tape it on chopstick.

Fine Point Calligraphy Pen: Fold a piece of aluminim, and cut it like picture above. Then tape it on chopstick.

Now enjoy it :)

This website lets you put in measurements (like weight and height) and shows you what a person with those measurements might look like!