Alright, on to the 1:6 ratio character. Hopefully this guide can be finished in one sitting. I have a few hours to write this how to draw tutorial. Alright! Let’s go!

To keep this all from getting boring, I’m shifting from a realistic cartoon style back to the manga style. I decided to draw my first faerie ever. I was thinking about what faeries usually represent to me when trying to figure out how to draw my new character.. My associations with faeries are: magic, sensuality, nature, childlikeness and cheerfulness. Most faeries I can think of are rather cheerful Tinkerbell-style pixies or the fuller, more sensual sylph type faeries. I went for the former in this case. I bought How To Draw Manga: Ultimate Manga Lessons Volume 6: Striking The Right Note. The book is basically on how different features and physical characteristics can be used to depict certain personality types. I wanted the character to be cheerful, so I followed the book and separated her bangs down the middle, which is supposed to make characters appear cheerful in manga.

Click to read more …

Many artists, when first learning how to draw, use head to body radios in order to determine how tall they will be making their character be. The chibi style uses a ratio of 1:2, 1:3, or 1:4. That means that a character with a ratio of 1:3 will have a body that is three heads long. To determine how tall the character will be, all the artist has to do is determine the approximate size of the head and then create a circle, which should be duplicated and stacked, one on top of the other. Then you just have to figure out how to draw the rest.

For this how to draw guide, I will use the 1:5 ratio. This is not a good ratio for drawing chibi but rather for drawing an adolescent or short adult. The following character will be drawn.

After that, I’ll be covering how all the other different ratios can be used. Of course, she doesn’t exactly have a 1:5 ratio, but when I originally drew her with a perfect 1:5 ratio, she looked really weird.

Click to read more …

Tags: artist, cartoon, cartooning, chibi, circles, Eyes, face, features, forehead, hair, Nose, Noses, strands

Hi! Sorry for the slow down in posting. School’s gotten kinda busy and Marisol and I are working hard to build a better website. We want to make it easier for users to communicate and we also noticed that the website is kinda hard to navigate. We want to everything categorized well so that people who want to learn more about fine art won’t get stuck sifting through tutorials on how to draw. But we haven’t forgotten about you! We’ve recently received a lot of feedback on the types of posts that our viewers would like to see more of. So far, we’ve heard that users want more:

• Anatomy tutorials
• Perspective tutorials
• Realistic art
• Painting
• Art analysis
• Commentary
• Fairies

Click to read more …

Hello everyone, Marisol and Alex here! How is everyone doing today? I think Alex and I are doing alright, we’ve just been really busy. Now, I’m sure you guys are reading this saying “huh? Alex and Marisol?” Yep, we’re both posting under the same blog today. Why, you may ask? Well, I will tell you.
A few weeks ago (it may have been a few months ago, I’m no longer sure), Alex and I devised a plan about how we can create a joint post. I came up with an analysis post where he and I look at one picture and we each come up with our own interpretations of the image. This is a bit of an experiment on the male and female perspectives of art, if there is such a thing, that is. Today, Alex and I will be analyzing  “Unrequited Love” by Deviant Art’s Elfdaughter (Averil White, who is also a new contributor to Sketching House, so please give her a warm welcome. Ms. White comes to us from the United Kingdom). So, without further ado, let the analysis begin! Click to read more …

Tags: Art Tutorial, artist, Averil White, blind art, blindness, color analysis, creating textures in art, darkness, Deviant Art Altura-Tears, Deviant Art Artists, Deviant Art Culturalrider, Deviant Art ElfDaughter, Disney, Disney's Cinderella, drawing textures, drawing tutorial, Dreams, Elfdaughter, emotive portraits, How to Analyze a Portrait, Perspective, Photo Analysis, princess crowns, royalty, Strathmore Drawing paper, tutorial for art, unrequited love, weddings, whiteness

I took a shot at drawing a character for a story I’ve been working on for awhile (months, years)? This isn’t really a tutorial but a record of the steps I took to draw her. This character is not done at all and she’s getting more folds and shading. I need to decide if I want to do cell shading again or try a harder type of shading.

I’m not even sure who this character will be but she’s temporarily named Angora. I might not even use her since I don’t hold on to characters unless they feel right. Maybe she needs some redesigning. Click to read more …

Tags: Alex, angle, artist, Artists, Blogs, blue, cartoon, cartooning, character, characters, clothes, clothing, Color, coloring, colors, dark, draw, drawing, drew, eye, Eyes, face, features, hair, lines, Lips, Love, manga, Marisol, Night, Nose, Noses, Plugs, proportion, proportions, real, Saw, school, shades, shading, side, sketch, sketching, Tutorial, Tutorials, Work, write, Writing

Perspective is one of the ultra-mega hurdles to overcome when learning how to draw. Where you put your vanishing point helps you figure out what the hallway will look like from the point-of-view. To give you an idea of how that works, draw a horizontal line across a page. Then put a vanishing point somewhere on that line. I put it in the middle because it’s easier to see the different varieties of vanishing points. From the vanishing point, you need to figure out where the front wall of your hallway should be. An interesting trick to know is that you can increase or shrink the size of the hallway by increasing or shrinking the back wall of the hallway. So let’s see how it works.

You can then put the front walls wherever you want. All these front walls are is boxes. Go you… you’re almost done with the basic structure of the hallway. Here I drew three boxes because I’m going to draw three hallways. I want to show you how a hallway is shaped in relationship to the vanishing point! Click to read more …

Perspective…

Not the easiest part of drawing. Last time I talked about horizon lines and the time before I talked about sliding dummies. So where to go next. Really, when figuring out perspective, I’ve really only seen artists use the same techniques over and over again. Vanishing points… guidelines… horizon lines…

As far as I know, these are the only really relevant tools when figuring out perspective. But the things that you can do with these tools is amazing and diverse. With stories, if you can’t figure out where to start, start at the beginning. But with perspective there’s really no beginning but instead a bunch of tips and tricks that artists have figured out. Well, we haven’t tried drawing buildings here so we might as well try to figure it out in this drawing tutorial.

The first part of drawing a building or a set of buildings is to figure out where the vanishing point is. The vanishing point is where the parallel lines of a drawing are supposed to converge. In the picture on the left you can sorta see the lines in the picture traveling towards a point in the center of the picture where they all come together and seem to vanish mysteriously. So when drawing this picture and the characters proportionately, you’d want to increase their size as you increase the width between the lines. Click to read more …

The horizon is not that hard to draw. At the very minimum, you can draw a horizontal line straight across the screen. But figuring out where you put the horizon line is important when figuring out where your character is on a plane. Imagine that the star of your show is standing on a beach and the cameraman is pointing a camera directly at her. Do you see a long stretch of land with your character standing at the tip-top of the horizon.

Do you see your character wandering up a large expanse of land.

Or are you staring at your character from the tip-top of a tree?

Regardless, the horizon will dramatically change the way you see the picture.

Tags: character, characters, draw, drawing, Drawings, figure, lines, picture, Star, Tree

Hmm, we haven’t had an art tutorial in awhile…

I’ve been working on a picture of four women. They’re all walking towards the point-of-view, which of course means that the ones closer to the camera must be larger than the ones farther away. I want this to look as proportionate as possible, so pow! I whipped out the sliding dummy.

You might be thinking “argh! Sliding dummies? What are you talking about?”

The sliding dummy is a nice tool that removes some of the pain of giving a character the right size in proportion to other characters on the page and the point-of-view (which is basically the lens of the imaginary camera that photographs the picture). When characters are walking in different directions, the sliding dummy makes it easier for the artist to figure out where the heads and bodies are supposed to go. If you are first learning how to use this awesome technique, I recommend you first draw a scene that has a back wall. Maybe its just me, but I find everything easier to visualize when there’s a flat wall to place the imaginary dummy up against. I have a picture that I might as well make an indoor picture. You can start with a character or a background first when drawing, but I mostly prefer a character because that’s usually the most important part of the picture for me. Click to read more …

Tags: Art, artist, drawing, figure, illustration, Perspective, proportion, Tutorial

School’s almost out and we all know you’re missing it already. So I decided to throw together a bunch of step-by-step tutorials on how to draw a bunch of school-related things. Explaining drawing step-by-step is really tricky so I made sure that I saved often when drawing so I could break each part down into as many steps as possible.

This guide is all about perspective, something an artist needs to know in order to draw crowds and settings. Follow this guide if you want to put your knowledge of perspective to the test. It took me forever to learn how to do perspective right and I owe everything I know about perspective to  Putting Things In Perspective. Even though this is a how-to-draw-manga book, this has definitely the most helpful book on perspective I’ve ever read, especially the parts on one and two-point perspective. Click to read more …

Tags: guidelines, Perspective, school, Tutorial