Whoo,it’s almost 3 am and I should be in bed by now, long long ago. Anyhoo, I’m not dead! School, work, and life have gotten a death grip on me, but I found some time to do a tutorial that I think is well worth it. ^-^ I’ve seen a lot of potential in people who say they can’t draw, but with some practice, their works can grow ten fold! ^_^ Anyhow, with the release of Final Fantasy 13, I’ve had the urge to actually draw some of my characters in that awesome style. I’m going to do tutorials on the style that’s usually common with most Final Fantasy concept art.

With this tutorial, you will be able to poduc drawings that mimic the style of many game characters. I will be doing this in a few parts. First part is the outline, which is this part. Lets begin! Click to read more …

Tags: anime game manga final fantasy characters photoshop CS drawing illustration tutorial

Hello! Mari here passing through.

Spring break has come and gone! Luckily, I had time to whip up a tutorial. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to come up with something original, so I had found a piccy on the Interwebs, so I’m going to create my character, OC Solei’na Luna, using the reference:

Image courtesy of berlemu.deviantart.com/

Honey by BerleMu

As you can see, this is a really pretty picture. I love the shape of her face and the structure, however, I’m not a fan of the hair.

Although I am using the pose for the image I am about to create, I am changing the eyes, hair, adding clothes, and elfifying the ear. I’m going to make the lips smaller, too and change the arch of the eyebrows. The skin will also be darker in order for my character to appear “Drow” (although I don’t use grey tones, so we’ll see how that goes).

So, with that, shall we begin?

Click to read more …

Hello everyone. Whew, it’s good to be back.

So Tala, Alex, and I have been super busy with school and work (bummer, real life is getting in the way!). I’ve been trying to juggle a few jobs, and it’s been hard because one requires my undivided attention all the time. But, I think it’s getting better.

Trust me, we’re working really hard at trying to juggle everything. Once tax season is over though, we should be  okay. *Nod*

With that said, I’ve worked on a few new drawings that have minor coloring tutorials, so I hope to get those posted within the next few days. Here are the images: Click to read more …

Here’s another how to draw video for the visually-minded. Two much shorter videos this time with much of the redundant parts edited out so that you can really quickly get to the good stuff. This was a really experimental tutorial with a bunch of new techniques thrown in. I don’t usually draw this kind of stuff, but I had some visual images for different scenes. I hope you find these videos helpful in some way!

Tags: drawing, Photoshop, shading

I just discovered the power of youtube and desktop recording software

I love to write more than anything else in the world. But there are some things that you can’t really show with text and pictures. Also, some people just learn better with video. So to be helpful in that way, we’re going to be posting videos in some of our tutorials on how to draw and create other forms of art. Please comment and let us know what you think.

These tutorials were done using Photoshop CS2. Don’t worry, we’re getting a digital camera soon so that we can post video tutorials on how to draw traditionally.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Tags: Art Tutorial, Digital Art, Photoshop, realistic, shading, Tutorial, Tutorials

Currently, Sketching House only works on Firefox. When we were hacked a few weeks ago, the hacker messed with our coding, making the site basically unavailable on Internet Explorer. We will let you know when this issue is fixed.
In the meantime, we’ve updated the About Us and Art Gallery sections of our site. We also watermarked our images given a recent art theft that occurred. DISCLAIMER: If you want to use images from our website, please email us at sketchinghouseonline@gmail.com and ask for permission. Let us know where an image will be used and why. Additionally, please link back to Sketching House. These are the only rules.
More updates to come. Thank you for your patience.

Tags: Art Theft, Firefox, Internet Explorer problems, Updates

We are currently updating our database. During this time, some features may be down. Thank you for your patience.

Tags: Updates

Bonjour mes amies! C’est va?

First off, Alex and I apologize for being down for the time being. We forgot to update our publisher, so we were hacked. Alex contacted the wonderful support people at PowWeb for being amazingly awesome and rescuing the site. They truly are THE BEST! Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart! I say it again: YOU ARE THE BEST!

In other news, Sketching House is now on Facebook! Type in Sketching House in the search box, and become a fan!

It’s the wonderful and beautiful month of September! The color begins to fade from the trees, the air turns more crisp, children are back in school, and fall festivals are about to start! I can’t wait! With the fall festivals comes pumpkin roll, and with pumpkin roll comes a very happy Mari! I LOVE pumpkin roll! If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend that you do because you will NOT be disappointed!

Class started again today, and so far, I love the composition class. Tomorrow’s class I already know I will not like. *Yawn* But like you guys care, right?

In that case, how about a tutorial?

I just recently discovered how to create a wood texture in Photoshop, which is really neat and very simple too. So, if you want to create boxes and even trees, this is the tutorial for you. Click to read more …

Tags: Creating Texture in Photoshop, Layers in Photoshop, paint tutorial, Photoshop Filters, Photoshop Painting, Photoshop Shading, Photoshop textures, Photoshop Tutorials, Shading in Photoshop, Wood Texture in Photoshop

I’ve been practicing more intricate skin tones for the past week. If you spend your whole life looking at photographs, you might not realize how much color is on skin. Much of the color found in skin is not picked up by the camera, but you can put these colors in a painting. When setting out to create skin tones, most artists do not realize how many colors are in the skin. Besides the pigmentation, there’s redness in the cheeks, blue or green in the chin, sometimes yellow in the forehead and other colors that end up on the skin because of reflection and colored light.

Click to read more …

Tags: Blending, Color, coloring, darkness, eye, face, forehead, hair, high, highlights, iris, Lips, shading, strands, Tones

So you sorta have an idea of where the shading is supposed to go. But you’re wondering, what are the best ways to get the shading on to my character. Luckily there’s a ton of ways to shade a character and you can try out all of them until you find a method that’s right for you!

The technique you use is partially based off your tools of the trade. Thus, this guide is going to be categorized based on what tool you are planning on using. The only tool I haven’t used for shading is pen. Based on the guide found here, shading is done similar to with a pen, though you can’t really smudge pen or use some of the other neat techniques that you can use with pencils.

Click to read more …