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.

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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.

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Hello! I’m back for yet another shading tutorial! I know, I didn’t get around to the last character’s clothing shading. Her clothes will get shaded soon, but I first need to figure out what texture her clothes are going to have and how the light source will interact with her clothes. So this face shading tutorial is going to be thrown right in for no reason other than that it will hopefully be helpful to those who are trying to figure out the intricate (or in some cases, very simple) art of shading.

Last night, I was looking at Marisol and the light source completely struck the side of her face. The majority of her face was completely shaded, but there was a highlight on the right side of her face. The lighting effects look so cool when the light interacts with the nose, cheeks and eyes. I tried to take a mental snapshot so that I could cover that type of lighting. We both looked at each other’s faces and it was really need to see all the subtle features that you normally don’t notice when you look at someone at a distance. For instance, you kinda forget that your skin, when you look at it really close, is made up of criss-crossing lines.

Also, I decided to try a lineless piece of art. This is the second time I’ve tried a lineless piece of art and it was really fun, though sorta time-consuming. The good news is that the more you draw, the faster you get at drawing and the less time it takes. I remember the last very realistic drawing took all day. Of course, it had a bunch of colors mixed in for the skin tone and I’m probably not going to get to that until some other day.

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Shading… and highlights

There is nothing quite like shading in the world of drawing. Shading is one of the most important parts of realistic drawing. Shading also plays a major role in the stylistic aspects of animation. Shading tricks the eye into seeing 3D on a 2D plane. With shading, an object can really jump out at you.

Shading can be as difficult or easy as you want it to be. Light from a powerful and consistent light source like the sun, creating a gradual increase in the darkness of tones the farther you get away from the light source. Objects can block the light source and create shapes that have defined or blurry edges. Shadows can occur gradually or can be cut off abruptly. Highlights shine and sometimes even reflect images opposite of the object you are drawing. Shading can be a pain and creating guides on how to shade can be a pain. But the results are oh so worth it.

There are tons of ways to shade. Since there are so many factors that affect shading, one of the easier ways to shade is to break shading down into different components. Also, since different kinds of lighting and different objects interact to create different shading effects, with this guide I am going to focus on skin and hair with an overhead sun.

Learn to love shadows. The only way to truly learn shading is to observe objects and their interaction with light.

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Tags: Blending, high, light, shading, Tones

If you haven’t read it, please take a look at part 1

Thanks for checking out my latest tutorial. Like promised, I will now be looking at the iris. The iris ended up taking up the entire guide because I didn’t take into consideration how very complex the iris can be.
Irises are where the eyes can get really fun and captivating. If you don’t believe me, just look at the iris of a friend. Irises have all sorts of colors within them with little lines of color. These lines exist because the iris actually has the ability to widen or close in order to get more light in dark areas. Eyes also have a shininess to them, making them even reflective under the right lighting conditions. Neat to look at, but tough to draw. That is, until you get used to it.
With cartoon eyes, you can completely skip the iris and just draw circles with dots in them. If you’re lazy, you can even just draw dots. These are great for simplistic cartoons and save enormous amounts of time. But artists who want to draw eyes that are prettier try to capture the enormous amounts of color found in the eyes. Blending a variety of shades and colors works fine for cartoon eyes, but to achieve the realistic look, much greater care must be taken.

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Tags: cartoon, circles, Color, eye, Eyes, highlight, iris, Photoshop, realistic, shading

Good afternoon everyone! Oh my goodness, Alex and I apologize for our VERY LONG absence. As mentioned in a previous post, Alex and I had a summer class, and it involved A LOT of writing and research for our final paper. So again, we apologize. For those of our faithful viewers who stuck with us through our absence, thank you. Faithful viewers like you keep us alive. I’m sorry for sounding like a public access television station, but it’s true.

I’ve received emails from people asking how, when an image is colored, to shade white objects and clothing. One of the main complaints is how an object looks “dingy” or “dirty” when people shade using shades of grey. Well, shading white objects and clothes is something I learned a few years ago when I was still in high school. Grey does drag white down and often makes it look dingy. White is suppose to be crisp, clean, and fresh. I discovered that using shades of aqua help with the shading process. Why? Aqua plays off the white, making the white pop off the paper/screen and shout “CRISP!” Additionally, the white also makes the aqua pop creating the illusion of true shadows. Of course, in the non-drawing word, objects that are white often have grey shadows, but remember, when drawing, sometimes art doesn’t intimidate life. Let’s that a look, shall we? Click to read more …

Tags: Aquas, coloring techniques, coloring white, drawing tutorial, shading, shading techniques, shading white, white

Back I am. Hopefully for good this time if life doesn’t get in the way. Just wrote one of the toughest final essays ever.

Eyes are incredible. There are so many ways to draw them and so much emotion and personality can be conveyed through the eyes. The eyes come in a good variety of styles. Not only are there realistic, digital and cartoon eyes, but each of these kinds has their own sub-categories. Eyes have different shapes, even though that might not be so noticeable. Eyelashes have different lengths. The spacing of the eyes and the position of the eyes on the head can mean so much when conveying your character’s unique look. Eyelids can be tricky, the iris can be intricate and the eye color can be rich and beautiful.

This week, and maybe next week, I’m going to take you through the miraculous world of eyes. I’m going to cover all of the different styles of eyes. But in addition to that, I’m going to do something more. Eyes do not have to necessarily fall into one category or another. Serious subjects might ask for realistic eyes, but these eyes might take far too long to draw for a time-pressed artist or an artist who wants to focus on other aspects of a drawing. Artists have been known to lighten up the eyes in order to emphasize the emotion contained within the character – and artists have also downplayed the eyes so that they do not distract from the actions that the character happens to be carrying out.

This guide can be completed with:
Pencils
Markers
Pens
Tablets
Graphic Programs – Free downloads: www.gimp.org/downloads/ /> Click to read more …

Tags: cartoon, Comics, s