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.

Draw 6 circles. One of the circles will be roughly the size of the character’s head.

How to Draw the Face

To draw the eyes, draw ovals that are longer on the upward and downward parts of the eyes. Draw a horizontal line that cuts off the oval at the bottom, making that part of the oval flat. Within these ovals, draw lines that travel horizontally across the middle of these ovals and curve sharply downward. Above these ovals, draw horizontal lines that curve upwards. These are eyes that are opened very wide, showing plenty of excitement.

For the eyebrows, draw lines above the eyes that travel horizontally and curve upwards. Use somewhat darker lines.

In between the eyes, draw a few lines that travel downwards and curve to the right or to the left to indicate the bridge of the nose. Towards the middle of the face, draw a line that slants downwards and to the left and then slants upwards a little bit upward and to the left.

Draw two curving lines that meet above the face. These curving lines curve upwards and away from each other. This will form the top of the head. For the mouth, draw a slightly curving horizontally line that curves upwards. Draw two slanting lines that travel downwards and towards each other, meeting and connecting. Below this, draw a horizontal line that curves downward.

To the right and the left of the eyes, draw two lines that travel vertically and curve outwards away from the eyes. These form the ears and you can add extra lines to make the ears more detailed.

With the hair, you can get as creative as you want. For this character’s cheerful bangs, the easiest way to draw them is to draw lines that curve away from the center of the forehead, with every two lines connecting to each other. You can vary the size and curvyness of the lines and you can throw some straight triangles in if you want. You can also have some bangs resting together in clumps. Have fun.

The lower parts of the hair vary depending on the type of hair the character has and the length of the hair. Also, things added to the hair can change the hair, like with this character’s hair barettes, which cause the hair to artificially clump together. This hair wants to curl at the end, causing yet more curves. But the curves are not hanging loosely and are instead clumped together because the barettes are forcing the hair together again, just has the hair is close together by the bangs.

How to Draw the Body

Near the chin, draw two curving lines that curve towards each other. These lines will travel downward, forming the neck. As these lines curve more outward, they will start to slant downward and away from each other while curving downwards and towards each other.

From this point, come up with an outfit. I tried to come up with a kinda assymetrical cut that seemed more nature-like for me.

Decide how much skin you would like to show, but try to keep the character’s personality in mind. I wanted this character to be free-spirited but not sexualized in any significant way. This outfit seemed like a nice and cool summer outfit.

Draw the arms by drawing two lines divided into two sections that curve away from each other slightly (or more greatly if the character is bigger). Decide whether or not each finger is straight or bent. Straight fingers are slightly curving lines that are connected by a perpendicular curving line that curves away from the rest of the lines (the tip of the finger). Bent fingers are two sets of curving lines that come together at whatever angle you want (I’m really, really, really sorry if this is too much of an oversimplification and this website needs to create a really detailed guide on how to draw hands). For the pants/skirt, decide whether or not you want this piece of clothing to connect to the shirt. The clothes will wrap around the waste and hang from the hips. Skirts hang mostly loosely, while pants hang away from the legs depending on how tight they are.

Draw two curving lines underneath the skirt. These lines will grow closer together as they arrive at the feet. If the foot is facing directly at the camera, all that is needed is a rounded out bottom with a curving line above it that indicates the shoe. You can repeat this for the other leg or draw the one leg behind the other leg. If you decide to turn the shoe to the side, you will have to decide how exactly you want the shoe to look.

How to Draw the Wings

For the dragonfly wings (butterfly wings are possible too), draw curving lines that curve away from each other and grow wider apart as the lines travel farther and farther away from the faerie’s body.

How to Color

Find skin tone for the character. Then color the non-clothed parts of the character with that skin color. If you’re using a graphics program and you have a picture that has a color that you like, you can upload that picture and then use the eyedropper tool to select the color.

Choose colors for your character’s clothes, hair and eyes. If you can’t pick colors that work together well, use something like the color scheme generator.

That’s it for this tutorial. The next one, I’ll be covering the 1:7 ratio character and eventually the 1:8 character ratio.

Alex

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.

How to Draw the First Circle

Draw five circles that are the same size and stack on top of each other. On the top circle, draw two horizontal lines that curve slightly upwards. These lines will represent the eyebrows. Draw two lines that slant upwards and towards each other, with their opposite ends touching the eyebrows.

For the eyes, draw lines that travel horizontally and curve upwards. Each of these lines travel downwards and wrap around at the points of the lines that are the farthest away from each other, forming almost half circles. The half circles form full polygons by forming points as the open ends of the half-circles close. Within these closed polygons, draw curving horizontal lines that curve upwards. These lines are near the top of the polygons. This will separate these eyes into two different sections. In the lower section of each eye, draw a vertical line and have that line curve to the right.

Noses are very tricky organs to learn how to draw. Some cartoon artists completely omit the nose or try to draw minimalistic elements of the nose, since the nose is difficult to draw attractively. I try to draw the areas that are the most shaded. Also, I read that with characters with some ethnic backgrounds, the nose needs to be more emphasized. For this face, most of the shading will be on the left side. So draw two vertical lines that curve to the right slightly. For the nose, draw a vertical line that curves to the left. When you reach the bottom of this line, have the line travel horizontally to the right while durving upwards. Reverse the direction of the curve where you want the middle of the nose to be and then reverse the curve again. Finish the other side of the nose with a line that travels horizontally and curves to the right.

Draw two curving horizontal lines that connect together. These lines will curve upwards. Then draw one horizontal line that curves downwards. These lines will connect at the ends, forming a polygon. In the middle of this polygon, draw a horizontal line that curves downwards slightly.

Ears can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. Gosh, you don’t even have to draw them. In this case, I’m just going to draw a simple curve.

Since the head is tilted a bit to the right, the shape of the edge of the face will look different for each side. One side will be a gradually curving line where the line curves downwards and to the right. On the right side, draw a line that travels upwards while curving somewhat downward. At some point, this line will curve sharply outwards before returning to the path where it was originally traveling. This is the cheekbone, a feature that some people have more pronounced than others.

To draw the hair on the forehead, draw two waving lines that are close together, eventually meeting at one point.

To the right of the strand you just drew, draw several curving lines that travel to the right and curve downwards and to the left.

On the other side of the head, draw a similar strand of hair that consists of two lines that wave and connect together.

At some point on the strand of hair, draw a line that travels downwards with the line curving downwards and to the right.

Attached to the curving line, draw another strand that curves downwards around the ear. Again, this is two lines that connect together at a point.

Draw a line that travels upwards and waves. This waving can be slight or pronounced.

On the right side of the head, draw several more strands that are clumped on top of each other.

Finally draw the top of the head. Do not draw a perfect curve unless you are drawing a cartoonish character. Most people have imperfectly shaped heads and the top of the hair often consists of different clumps, which will cause the hair to not be perfectly symmetrical.

Draw lines that connect to the bottom of the head. Since the head is turned a particular way, the part of the neck that is farther away from the direction that the head is turned will appear more curving, while the other side of the neck will appear slightly closer to the center of the head.

In the next post, I will draw out the rest of the body as it covers the rest of the circles. In that post or the post afterwards, I will add color and shading. Then I’ll be drawing the 1:6, 1:7 and 1:8 ratios. If you would like any particular characters drawn using these ratios, email me at sketchinghouse@gmail.com. I’m going to try to talk Marisol into doing a how to draw chibi characters, since I have no experience drawing those types of characters at all.

See y’all next week,

Alex

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

I didn’t forget how to draw tutorials. Today I threw together a tutorial on how to draw forks in the road. This how to draw tutorial will use the really tricky vanishing points. I know, it might seem like a lot at first. But if you take everything step-by-step, you will be able to create images that are 3D and have the right proportions.

Start off by drawing a horizontal line. This will be your horizon line, which is basically the point where you would see the sky meeting the ground if it weren’t for all the objects in the distance.

Find the center of the horizontal line and mark that with a dot. That will be the vanishing point, which is the point where all lines on your page inevitably converge. This makes the semi-mystical goal of drawing in correct proportions all the more achievable.

Draw two slanting lines that start on the vanishing point and extend downwards and away from each other. Then move along your horizon line to the right and choose a spot for another vanishing point. Draw two diagonal lines that extend from this new vanishing point to the lines that you just drew.

Choose a vanishing point on the horizon line that rests somewhere on the left side of horizon line. Draw two diagonal lines that extend and touch the diagonal line closest to them. Make these lines somewhat wider spaced. Then, start drawing vertical lines. In this shot, the camera is perfectly upright. So all vertical lines will be perfectly straight rather than slanting in a certain direction. Of course, for the horizontal lines, there will be a different story.

You can continue to get more creative here. When you’re drawing a bunch of buildings that are neatly aligned on a road, most of the horizontal lines will follow the vanishing point. That means that all the lines that make up the bottom and top parts of the buildings will be able to extend all the way to the vanishing point. This is great, since you can have lines that are in perfect proportion by just having them travel to and from the vanishing point. However, when you’re drawing a fork in the road, some buildings won’t perfectly follow this plan. The bottom parts of these buildings will follow the roads that they are next to. I don’t know any tricks for those buildings, so I had to eyeball them. If I ever do learn a trick, I’ll put it in a post for sure.

Draw lines that extend from the left vanishing point in order to set up the rooftops of the buildings in the background.

Draw the vertical lines for these buildings travelling directly downward.

Erase the guidelines and start adding any details you want.

Yours truly,

Alex

elfdaughter.deviantart.com/"

“UNREQUITED LOVE” ~ Elfdaughter
Marisol’s Take

When I was searching for an image to analyze, I came across “Unrequited Love.” From the moment I laid eyes upon this image, I was blown away! The softness of the edges and the clarity of the textures really make this piece appealing to the eye. The light, shadows, and colors included in this piece draw me in, and it is hard to avoid not looking at this image. The negative space and the pure whiteness really does draw my eye to the center of the piece where I can’t help but notice the shimmering tears streaming down the girl’s face. My heart instantly breaks because there is so much in this piece and there are many different interpretations to be found.
On Elfdaughter’s image description, she states that “[s]ometimes, not even the princess gets her prince…” Given the luxurious textures, fancy decor, and the tell-tale crown, one can interpret this young lady as being a princess. The man in the image even has princely clothes, so this is most likely the predominant interpretation. Adding the title of the piece into the mix, it is clear that the woman in the image loved this man with all her heart, but he did not feel the same. In a way, her shoelessness could also remind one of Cinderella, except in this story, there is no happy ending.
Another interpretation that one may arrive at is that this woman was a bride in waiting and that the man in the portrait was her intended husband. Apparently, he left her at the altar and she is distraught over this fact. The small bouquet of flowers leads one to believe that she was a bride. The fallen petals could serve as an indication of frustration, meaning that the woman could have thrown her bouquet, making the petals fall, or she could have plucked the petals off in a “he loves me, loves me not” fashion. The last petal: “he loves me not.” Her wrinkled, shortened dress looks as disheveled as her feelings.
There are other symbols that need to looked at in “Unrequited Love.” Notice how the majority of the image is done in white. Whiteness is a sign of purity and innocence. This woman is probably pure and chaste and someone of great integrity. Looking at her, one feels as if she saved herself for this man: a dream now unrealized. As for innocence, she probably didn’t do anything to cause this man to leave, instead, she was a victim to his heartless game. Furthermore, the man in the portrait is wearing black, a sign of impurity and evil. Based on the portrait as a whole, it is clear that this man was impure of heart if he was capable of hurting this girl.
Looking at the flowers, one may be able to dig deeper into the portrait. Metaphorically, flowers are symbols of human nature and emotion. Roses are a sign of love and devotion, whereas the color purple is a sign of the unattainable, enchantment, and impossibility. With the aforementioned considered, the woman’s love and devotion is unreturnable by her male counterpart, so she was blinded by love’s enchantment; the fact that the man left her also screams that a “happily ever after” is unattainable. Furthermore, the woman’s eyeshadow is purple, indicating that she may have fell for him “at first sight” and she was disillusioned by his falsified devotion. It is possible that in the back of her mind, she knew that he did not love her the way she needed him to, which is why parting is even more bittersweet…

Alex’s Take

I see that the love interest is not in the scene but is only in a photograph. The character is feeling distance and loneliness, maybe even hopelessness. The model feels more than longing. She feels despair and holds weakly on to the furry blanket.

If looked at in a certain way, it almost seems like she’s holding on to a small cliff and trying to pull herself up to her love interest. The cliff also almost looks snowy, which brings to mind coldness. The model does not receive any warmth from the figure since her feelings are not reciprocated.

White also creates blankness. The model’s mind is like a blank piece of paper with only her love interest, herself and the rose petals on her mind. The picture frame is very decorative, which might symbolize how she idealizes him. But the picture frame lacks bright colors, reminding me of a faded photograph.

She lays almost as if broken and tossed crumpled up in a corner. The rose petals are not bright, which could symbolize cheerfulness and romance. Instead, they symbolize faded memories of a hope for love that once existed but is now fading.

The only part that I couldn’t figure out any meaning for was the tiara, which brings to mind princess and prom. The tiara might represent her special and beautiful heart that she could have offered to her love interest in that she still has. But I feel that the tiara interpretation is a stretch.

Incredibly expressive and emotive picture!

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.

My story takes place in a setting inspired by pre-history Philippines. I’d draw her wearing the clothes that people wore during that time frame, but they mostly wore nothing. That reminds me of a museum exhibit I saw of Native Americans. Some of the figurines of the Native Americans were completely nude. That was so weird since I was shielded from all nudity as a kid and then I’m exposed to a culture that sometimes runs around naked. I guess I learned from that how values can be way different from culture to culture.

You might think “hey, she doesn’t look Filipino.” Well, actually she’s Negrito. From the research I did, Negritos settled in the Phillippines before the Austronesians, an indigenous group from what is now called Taiwan.

That is the initial sketch I started off with. I like that sketch and might use it for a different drawing. How did she change so much? A whole bunch of reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to practice foreshortening, which is something I need to learn how to do with the body. Well, I didn’t really succeed at foreshortening her because that is tough!

What’s foreshortening? Foreshortening is how objects seem deformed at different angles. I guess I made her arms somewhat foreshortened, but their sizes are roughly the same and not large enough to show a real contrast.

So now what? I drew new torso lines in order to make her body appear turned to the side. I also foreshortened her shoulders, making one appear larger and one smaller to indicate that one shoulder is turned farther away from the point-of-view.

Next, I made her sides more shapely and raised her chest. Now she doesn’t look like she has the body of a 90000 year old woman. (I meant to say 900, not 90000).

At this point, I decided to redraw her clothes. Why? She looked like she was wearing a kimono or tunic, which doesn’t really fit with her character. But nudity doesn’t work for me, so I made up some clothes. I also redrew her arms. I liked how they looked, but they look way too long right now. I think this is where I was getting tired two nights ago because her proportions are extremely out of whack. I started drawing her legs because I wanted to shorten her dress. With dresses, its really important that you draw all of the legs out in order to make sure that you have the proportions right.

I did a little resizing and drew out the basic shape of the head.

Then I drew her face. I was aiming for a face that was both delicate and Negrito, but I ran into a problem. Most cartoon and manga faces are European/Asian inspired. Rarely do you see other races represented. I really had nothing to go off. I wanted to emphasize this character’s ethnicity, but I also wanted to keep her features relatively simple. So I experimented with the nose and lips until I got the results that I wanted.

I also added hair, my favorite part.

Then I added lineart and widened her features. I don’t know why I did this and I think I’m going to change it back later.

As you can see now, I colored her. I don’t know if I gave this advice out yet or not, but setting your coloring layers on multiply allows you to color without coloring over dark lines. This is good if you have a hard time coloring within the lines.

Then I used a handy-dandy color scheme generator at: www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Just plug in the value for one of the colors you’re using and it’ll generate colors that are compatible. These colors should pop out more when put together.

So I drew her and showed her to Marisol and she drew all over her. She took her mouse and drew all these lines all over my drawing like it was nobody’s business (joking. I asked her to).

This is sort of like an artist’s version of proofreading. It really helps to have someone else look at your artwork before you finish it because they can see mistakes that you missed. Being an artist doesn’t have to be lonely.

I took her advice and adjusted her. But I gave her brown eyes instead of blue.

Like usual, I have to finish most of my tutorials in multiple blog posts. This isn’t because tutorials take that long, but because I have to write these in gaps of time between school and work. I wish I could write more tutorials, but time is always so short. Still, Marisol and I promise that we’ll always keep updating. We won’t be those people who stop posting out of the blue.

I love you all,

Alex

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!

Now on to the hardest part. I’m not kidding. This is all there is to it. With each corner of each box, draw lines that go straight to the vanishing point.

Now you have three hallways. If you want to make these hallways shorter, connect the top lines, the bottom lines, and the right and left lines to create smaller back wall boxes.

So now you have glass hallways. But you can start adding details to the hallways. All you have to do is figure out from which point you’re expecting the person looking at your artwork to see the inside of the hallway. You can add a door or window that lets people see inside. Another common tactic is to make one of the walls invisible. You can really do whatever you want. It’s your drawing! Of course, once you’re done, erase all the guidelines.

Let’s draw hallways from different angles (unless you already think you got this, then move on to the next part). Draw a line straight down the middle of the page. Again, put a vanishing point on the horizon line.

Next, draw boxes. But instead of putting the boxes underneath the horizon line, draw the boxes on the horizon line. Then repeat the steps above. Draw lines that go from the vanishing point to the corners of the squares.

With the middle box, since it is right over the vanishing point, you can see a hallway that seems to go on forever. You can make that hallway have an end by drawing a box down the hallway. On the right and the left, the hallways look the way hallways would look if you were walking around a corner.

Now usually you don’t draw hallways floating in the air. Instead, the front part of the hallway completely consumes the screen. So you want to get the front wall expanded or the picture cropped in order to get rid of the box.

But another thing you can do is start from a vanishing point. For this, I whipped out my trusty ruler and started measuring out a box. From there, I drew a line from the vanishing point to where the corner of the room would be.

Looking back, I don’t know if the ruler was necessary. But if you want the back wall to be a certain size, its definitely important!

Tada! I drew a box. Now I just have to draw another box and ditch any unnecessary guidelines.

This room’s okay, but I decided that I want to make the room a little taller. So I stretched it. You can do this with a graphics program by selecting everything with a marquee tool and then using the free transform to stretch it. Without a graphics program, you’ll probably have to redraw everything.

Anyway, in order to get the 3D nature of the room to really pop out, I created a new vanishing line and started drawing out some lines to give the room texture. Then I erased all the guidelines that are not a part of the walls.

Next, I drew horizontal lines on the back wall that connect to the slanting lines on the side walls. This really gives the room a nice, clean 3D look.

Of course, lines are really easy textures to figure out when drawing a room. If you want to draw cracks, pictures, bumps, or other objects, you’re going to have a harder time. But using these guidelines can help you figure out how big each part of the objects in the room should be.

Before I go, I’m going to show you a neat trick when figuring out the perspective of the characters in the room. Since the proportions of the walls in the hallway are the same as the proportions of the characters and objects, you can use a wall to figure out how big a character should be. Observe the hallway on the left. i didn’t make the walls transparent so you can only see through the roof. I want the characters in the hallway to be the right size in proportion to each other. So in order to figure this out, I drew a bunch of characters along the wall, making sure that the head of each character touched the top of the wall and that the feet of each character touched the bottom of the wall.

Then once I got the proportions right, I moved the characters to the right so that they don’t look like the wall is swallowing them up.

Yay, another trick for figuring out the hair splitting task of getting perspective done right.

Alrighty. There’s a whole bunch of other tips and tricks you can use when figuring out perspective and we’ll be practicing it soon.

Love it or hate it,

Alex

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.

But vanishing points don’t just relate to tunnels. A lot of objects have lines that stop at the ends of wherever that object stops. For a house, you have the bottom of the house and the roof that stop when you reach the edge of the house. But if the roof slants, you can imagine the line that makes up the roof eventually colliding with the line that makes up the bottom of the house. Wherever the lines collide you can put a vanishing point. Then with that vanishing point you can figure out where everything else on the house should go.

Here’s an example. I was trying to draw a house. I used the top and bottom part of the house to create guidelines that will eventually collide and form a vanishing point.

Now that I have this all set up, I can figure out where everything else is supposed to go. From the vanishing point, I can draw the rest of the roof, the side of the house. If I wanted to add windows or a door, all I have to do is draw guidelines from where the vanishing point is and I can figure out what shape the frames of the door and windows should be.

Still not convinced? I had better results when I tried to draw a bunch of tall buildings.

First I sketched the buildings. I didn’t worry about if it was sloppy or not and I just tried to get the general shape and size of the buildings.

Then I put my pencil at the top right corner of each building and drew a guideline all the way down. Where these guidelines intersected I put my vanishing point. Using the guidelines, I was able to get the tops of the buildings straight. Then, using the line tool (or a ruler if you’re not using a graphics program. A ruler is definitely your best friend and you definitely need one if you’re working on perspective), I was able to draw perfectly verticle lines.

But I didn’t stop with really simple verticle bars. I wanted more details on my buildings. So I used my trusty vanishing point and worked some magic. With all the lines, I was able to create guidelines that’ll help me position all the different features on the buildings. You can kinda see the 3-dimensionality of the buildings already just by adding guidelines that have the right proportions.

So after using the guidelines and experimenting a little bit, I was able to create buildings that are a little more diverse than the blocks of ice that I started out with.

Oftentimes there’s two vanishing points. There might be plenty more in really complex pictures. I tried drawing a bunch of buildings using two-point perspective and I got okay results. But then I tried using two-point perspective to transform a real-life picture into a drawn picture. I think the results of that experiment better shows what you can do with vanishing points and guidelines.

I used the picture on the left. The perspective is interesting and there’s roofs slanting downwards in different directions, which makes it a nice picture to try to reconstruct using two-point perspective.

I drew lines from vanishing points off the page across the tops of the buildings. Some buildings had roofs that slanted downward and towards the right while others had lines that slanted downwards and to the left. But at some angles, you can see the roofs slanting both ways.

Then all i had to do was draw the vertical lines and erase the picture. Except that the lines on the sides of the buildings aren’t exactly vertical. Arrgh! I told you perspective’s tough and frustrating. But its fun, challenging, and it gets the results you are looking for much better than trying to picture exactly where every line should go. If you can already do that… woo you! Can I take notes?

If you like and care about perspective drawing, you’ll be happy to know that I’M NOT DONE YET… MWAHAHAHAHA! Unless you beg me to stop (at sketchinghouse@gmail.com). But all joking aside… perspective is really important to master if you want to draw backgrounds, scenery, or anything from an odd angle. It takes awhile but it eventually pays off.

Hahahaha… hahahaha…. ha

Alex

]]> http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/700/feed 1 http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/666 http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/666#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:54:16 +0000 Alex http://sketchinghouse.com/?p=666 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.

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.

Picture still needs some work, but will be good enough for illustrative purposes

My goal is to get the characters more proportionate. The first step I took was to create the line that indicates the top corner of the room. This is also going to be the line that our sliding dummy will be slid on. Next, I used the farthest-away character to determine roughly how large the head for the dummy would be. I placed this dummy on the left side.

Next, I’m going to use the dummy to create the vanishing point. Oftentimes, you create the vanishing point first but since I already have a picture, I’m going to be working backwards. So I’m going to slide the dummy towards the center so that I can use it to pin point the vanishing point.

How do I slide over the dummy? One solution is to tear off a piece of paper and then draw the dummy on that paper. Tracing paper would work well for this since you can get the head to be the right size. If you’re using a graphics program with a layers feature, you can create the dummy on a different layer and use the selection and move tool to move the dummy wherever you want to. Just keep the top of the dummy’s head on the line. Then use a ruler or the line tool to draw two lines that intersect above the characters and travel past the dummy’s head with each line touching the side of the head.

Now you have the vanishing point, which is essential when using the sliding dummy to determine how large each character is supposed to be based on where he or she is in the picture. The next part is the difficult part. Imagine a line shooting from the vanishing point to one of the character’s heads. Wherever this line intersects with the horizontal line, place the dummy’s head. Then, with your pencil or stylus, start from the vanishing point and draw a straight line towards one of the edges of the dummy’s head. When you reach this point, do not stop but instead keep drawing the straight line. A ruler is essential with this process. Next, draw a second line from the vanishing point to the other side of the head.

Following this step, you must then resize the head of the character so that the head is touching both lines. You do not have to count the hair, but the edges of the head should come close to touching the lines.

In order to resize these heads, you might need to redraw them to an extent. That’s why it’s easier to set up the vanishing point and sliding dummy before drawing the picture. But its very possible that you might someday have to work backwards like I am.

So that’s the final result. I think it looks more natural. I can’t wait to continue this picture and get it to look a little better, but I have almost no experience drawing backgrounds. I think Tala does.

I have no clue what I’m doing next, but that’s the fun part of this all. Maybe next time I’ll finish soon enough that I won’t feel like saying goodnight. That’ll be kinda weird for people reading this in the morning.

Please email sketching tutorial suggestions to sketchinghouse@gmail.com

Please, please, please…

Alex

]]> http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/599/feed 1 http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/6 http://sketchinghouse.com/archives/6#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:35:34 +0000 Alex http://sketchinghouse.com/2008.11.23_arch.html#1227560024537 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.

Basically, when you look in any direction, most of the lines of what you see will converge at one or two points called vanishing points. If you are looking down a street or tunnel, the lines will meet at some point in the center of what you see. If you’re looking at a 3D object, the lines will often meet at certain vanishing points off the page. Sometimes these lines will meet at one vanishing point, while other times they’ll meet at two. The first object I’m going to draw is a school, which has one vanishing point that meets

A modern school

The annoying thing about modern schools is that they don’t look like much. While modern schools might be blander than the classic school on the prairie, they are far easier to draw. By using one- or two-point perspective, you can draw a building that looks perfectly symmetrical and clean. The building described here is drawn using one-point perspective.

Draw a horizon line. Place the vanishing point as far on the left as possible.

Draw diagonal guidelines traveling from the vanishing point to the points where you want the top and bottom of your building to be.

Draw additional lines for the edge of the roof. These lines will make the roof look 3-D. Also, start drawing the windows.

Draw a vertical line and a diagonal line that connect to the top and side of the house. These lines are the edge of the roof on the modern school.

Erase the guidelines.

A classroom with students

All that perspective stuff is just as useful for drawing perspective in a classroom as it is for drawing outside the classroom. Drawing a schoolroom presents the challenge of depicting multiple characters sitting down at their desks. This requires several steps, including determining the perspective in the room and rendering each student in a way he would realistically sit at a desk.

Draw a horizontal line and make a mark somewhere on the horizontal line. That line will be your vanishing point.

Use your ruler to draw four lines that start at the vanishing point and extend to the end of the paper in a straight line. Make sure that the distance between your left inner and outer line is the same as the distance between your right inner and outer line, in order to keep the desk proportionate. The outer lines will represent the desktop and the inner lines will represent the seat.

Draw two additional lines that are slightly outside the two inner lines. These will represent the back of the chair.

Draw four horizontal lines. The top line will represent the top of the back of the chair, the bottom line will represent the bottom of the chair, and the two middle lines will represent the desktop.

Round out the edges of the desk, especially the parts that won’t be covered by the student.

Draw a rough sketch of the character at the desk. Find a picture of someone sitting if you’re having difficulty figuring out how the legs are supposed to be bent.

Add details to the desk, like the bar that connects its two front legs. Remove the cross-lines and clean up your character.

Create other characters sitting at their own desks. Draw a door or window to indicate that there is a wall behind the characters and to lend a sense of perspective.

Drawing a gym

Now I’m going to throw in a gym for good measure.

A gym is a unique building that is very spacious and often has a dome as a ceiling. Besides the domed ceiling, drawing the interior of a gymnasium is the same as drawing the interior of most other buildings.

Drawing the Gymnasium

Draw a box to serve as the back wall.

Determine the vanishing point and then draw the lines for the gymnasium through the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the point where most of the lines intersect.

Draw the details on the back wall.

Draw the basic details on the side walls. Draw vertical lines directly vertical and draw the horizontal lines along the guidelines that travel through the vanishing point.

Add more details to the drawing.

Draw half circles for the ceiling. Add a basketball net and other features.

Drawing a basketball net

Draw a box. Then draw a box within that box with the inner box almost touching the outer box.

Draw a box in the center that represents the backboard.

Draw an oval. Then draw curving lines hanging from the circle. Finally draw a curving line connecting the curves hanging from the circle. The curve on the bottom should curve out, while the curves on the sides should curve in.

I don’t know if you can ever master perspective. Perspective gets harder and harder as you draw more and more complex settings. But once you master the principals of perspective, you’ll be able to draw any kind of setting.

Sorry if this post is kinda short. My semester’s almost over. But the good news is that Sketching House readers are going to get an early Christmas present. Pretty soon, Sketching House will be powered by Wordpress (unless we somehow totally screw it up. We’re amateur website designers). So we’ll have a new custom-made design, a comment feature, and a leaner, nicer blog. Below is the new background we whipped up

Love,

Alex