Assorted Brush #1

This brush is made up of small circles that are strung together. When drawing in a line, this brush creates what looks like a slinky, cord or some type of microbe. If you scribble the lines together, it forms a black splotch with little renegade circles all around it. If you use the mouse to make single clicks, this brush will create tiny circles. This can serve as an alternative to using the ellipses tool. All you have to do is resize the brush using “[“ or “]” in order to get the right sized circle. However, the lines will be blurry. This might not work if you are searching for more fine lines.

Assorted Brush #2

Assorted brush #2 is just like brush one except that this circle has two circles instead of one with one circle contained within the other circle like a bulls-eye. The result is a darker line and little individual circles that look like tiny bulls-eyes. Like the other brush, as you increase the size of this brush the lines get blurry.

Assorted Brush #3

This brush is made up of a bunch of X’s stringed together. This brush has all sorts of uses ranging from texturizing a picture to creating something that looks like a metal fence. Individually, this brush can really create interesting texture when the brush is scribbled in one location, though scribbling too much will only create a black blotch. Making singular clicks of the mouse will create little X’s that could be used for stars. If you enlarge the X, the X becomes more blurry and the X appears as if its made out of blotches that start off larger in the middle and get smaller towards the tips of the X’s.

Assorted Brush #4

This brush is a diagonal pound symbol. But when used for drawing lines, it creates a line that has a rough edge and a thick black line in the middle. This creates nice little edges on the lines that are great for texture. I like how the text looked when I wrote it. When the brush is drawn over itself, it creates very thickly black blotches with rough edges, which reminds me of some paint mediums. Placed individually, this brush creates a sharp that gets progressively more blurry the more you increase the size.

Assorted Brush #5

I like this brush a lot. The lines created by this brush have very scratchy edges that look manmade at the same time because they are so uniform. This might be a useful brush for drawing the silhouette of an animal such as a caterpillar. The edges of the brush are reminiscent of fur. If clicked individually with a mouse, this brush leaves nice little gridlines that can have different applications.

Assorted Brush #6

Do you want a lizard, a fuzz ball, or a spiral? This really awesome brush creates the illusion of scales with drawn in a straight line and creates what looks like a ball of fur when the brush is draw over itself. When clicked individually, this brush creates a little spiral. Let your imagination run wild with this brush.

Assorted Brush #7

Made from diamonds. Not sure if a diamond is an artist’s best friend. This brush can create lines that look like they have bad quality. This brush might be useful in some way, but I can’t really think of any uses right now.

Assorted Brush #8

Looking to create lace? This brush brush is for you. This brush allows you to draw lines that look like laces. A very fun brush to use, but I cannot think of any applications beyond creating lacy material. But that’s good enough to make it useful.

Assorted Brush #9

I guess this is a cool brush. At a smaller size, this brush creates lines with really interesting edges. Make the lines larger and they start to remind me of centipedes. The symbol used to create this brush is kinda strange. I don’t really find the blotch in the middle really interesting.

Assorted Brush #10

I like this brush overall, though I don’t like the blurriness of it when you create larger sized strokes. This brush gets thicker as you travel horizontally and thinner as you travel vertically. The brush creates a 3D look that reminds me of the ribbon brush. The splotch is kinda boring and the individual mouse clicks created little marks that could be flames in the right picture.

Assorted Brush #11

Even though the shape of this brush is way different, this brush is like the opposite of brush #10 in effect. Lines get thicker as you travel vertically and thinner as you travel horizontally. The brush is kinda shaped like a genie lamp. I like how the left side of the brush seems to fade.

Assorted Brush #12

This is a cool brush but I’m not sure what it would be useful for except for really neat font. The lines sorta make me think of the edge of a rock, but that might just be my eyes playing tricks on me.

Assorted Brush #13

I almost skipped this one. This brush might be useful for texture, but it mostly only creates what looks like railroad tracks. But it’s a little too much on the blurry side.

That’s it for the first half. There’s a bunch more brushes in the assorted brush section like the star brush and the black widow brush. I’ll hit those tomorrow.

Alex

Where was I? Working, school and being lazy. I’m sorry! I know, it’s been awhile. Marisol and I were trying to get an apartment but we ended up working so hard that everything started to suffer. From now on I’m going to stick with contributing to our tutorial art gallery.

Anyway, here’s another art drawing tutorial on nothing specific in particular. This tutorial focuses on drawing face art, rather than body art, giving explanations on how to draw out each part. I added advanced sections, even though they’re not really that much more advanced. They’re really just extra things you can look out for when you’re trying to go the extra mile with your art lessons.

Outline of the head

Make light strokes in a slightly curling motion when drawing the line art for the head. Stare at the edge of your reference photo and try to visualize the shape of the outline of the head. Advanced: pay extra attention to special details like whether or not the face is round or sunken. If you can capture each indentation of the face, capture it.

Mouth

Mouths can be an incredibly simple part of line drawing. With the mouth, draw a very simple curving line. The way I drew the mouth gave the character a slight smirk. Now, to draw the lips or not to draw them. Advanced: The mouth is drawn sorta like a small m. There is a dip in the middle, though the dip varies from person to person. Some dips are tiny, while others take up a little more space. Since the lips are not directly facing the camera but are faced slightly to the left, make the left side of the lips more rounded while making the right side more slanted in order to create that illusion.

Why draw the lips? A lot of don’t include the lips, which can create a very cute picture. Some artists even avoid drawing the mouth in order to emphasize the character’s youth. Plus, lips often look somewhat strange on drawn character, though they don’t have to be. Much of the beauty of lips comes from the right shading and highlights, which will be in another tutorial. For now, you can stick with drawing simplistic lips, which work well with ethnic characters.

Eyes

A lot of artists start with the eyes because the eyes often determine whether or not the rest of the picture will end up working. But where you start really does not matter. For these eyes, take the reference picture and try to capture the outline of the eyes. For cartooning, this does not have to be exact and be sure to draw somewhat larger than what is in the real life picture. Draw the bottom part of the eye with a bulge in the middle bulging downward. The outer edges of the eyes can be drawn slanting up or down. Usually they are slanting downwards.

The top part of the eyes curve sharply upward from the outer corners of the eyes and form a gentle round curve. I removed the inner corners of the eyes because they did not look attractive. I then enlarged the eyes because I was worried that the eyes would be too hard to see. Advanced: start cleaning up the eyes. Use an eraser or white coloring to color over the parts of the lines you want to erase. Always erase in a way that will increase the roundness of the eyes.

Choose a color that you would like to use for your eyes. Fill in circles that fill up the entire eye lid. Draw a nice black line around your irises that is somewhat faint. Then switch to white and draw in a glare that is on the same spot for both eyes. This will be a small white circle that represents the light reflecting off of the eye. Advanced: Add a faint white line at the bottom of the irises.

Eyebrows

Add the eyebrows. Much of the individuality and emotion of the character comes from how the eyebrows are drawn. The combination of eyebrows and mouth form a large percentage of the emotions depicted through drawing. Also, since eyebrows vary, you can be somewhat creative with them. For these eyebrows, put a lot of weight on the inner part of the eyebrows in order to make them look thick. As you slant upwards and curve to the outer part of the eyebrow, make the line progressively fainter and thinner.

Hair

Draw the bangs as curving triangles. You can start by drawing the outline of the hair or add the bangs first. Bangs can be drawn in all sorts of ways. The types of bangs I drew were the ones that curve inward and are triangular. With these bangs, the messiness or neatness of your character can be emphasized by whether or not you have the bangs all going in one direction or not.

Coloring

Coloring, one of the most awesome parts of creating an image. This is especially awesome when you are using a Photoshop program. Not only can you choose among a seemingly infinite array of colors, but you can also place different colors on different layers and then alter these colors using hue/saturation.

Regardless of what you use, make sure that you color very carefully by going along the edges without going over them. If you’re drawing traditionally, it is recommended that you go over your artwork lines using and then finish coloring with high-quality markers. Alternatively, you can draw everything using your tablet or mouse and then create new layers for each color. Then, be sure to set each layer to multiply in order to avoid coloring over the lines that you worked so hard to draw.

That’s all it takes to construct a typical face (at least in the anime world). It really all comes down to personal taste. Draw a little here and see if you like it. Erase something there when you realize that it looks really dumb. Slowly clean up every stray pixel or smudge until everything starts to look polished.

So the first thing I did, I went back to the background layer, finding a good brush that I could use to shape clouds and the sky, I picked these colors, though you could use anything you want.

Now, just take that same brush and start blending, you’ll notice how the background starts to look a little more like a scenery, here I can almost see clouds developing, which is just what I want.

Now I changed the adjustment and hue a bit so now it’s a darker blue, which I like, it blends in better this way. I grabbed a light  color blue and a small hard brush and started making the linings of the clouds, highlights give them that depth and definition.

Now to make the moon! The moon is just about the easiest step ever! Take a large soft brush and with a pale blueish gray color, make a circle, the shape of the moon. Then, take a light blue color, a little smaller brush, not too small, just a smidge smaller than the one you had and make the center of the moon for the glow. I make a custom brush for the craters, but usually I add a dark shade and make the little marks in there. After you’ve done that, duplicate the layer, gaussian blur the layer, and pick a mode that bests suits you, I tend to like Overlay.

And here, I added more highlights to the clouds, taking the dodge tool over them, making the reflection of the moon more prominent. Also, I added the little bit of background in the far off, the church which is basically a silhouette with a light blue lighting. So there, all you do is make a solid dark shape of the building, then where the light hits, add the highlight of that color, in this case blue. That’s all there is to it! Now, you could leave the entire picture like this and it’ll be fine, you’re done! But, if you’re me, and feel like it could use an extra something, try to flatten the image, duplicate it, blur, gaussian blur to 3.0 or something, and change the layer to Overlay or anything else you like. The end result may look like this:

Tada! I used overlay as my option, and though it really takes away from the detail, since everything was so dark, it really enhanced the mood and feel of the picture. I love how it made the background really bright and dark at the same time, that’s a pretty sky isn’t it? Look how smooth the skin turned out! The church in the back also looks creepy and mysterious, just how I wanted! Well that’s it for this tutorial series, maybe I’ll do another one within these next days I’m off.

So there you have it folks! From skin, to hair, to clothes to background! Hope you enjoyed. Now I’m off to sulk a bit and drown myself in music. Sayounara!

-Tala

Alright, so right now it’s pretty plain, and looks something like this 

Azcona needs clothes! This design is really simple, and quite lazy, I had no idea what kind of clothes I wanted him in, so I just threw something together.  Now this brings me to the next step.

With a soft round brush, or a hard brush with 70 percent opacity, paint the clothes with their base color. This is what I figure would be the color clothes he’d wear, I can change it later, which I just might end up doing. Anyway, fill in the shapes, clean it up a bit and it should look like this.

Alright, now start taking a darker color and fill it in, define more shapes to the clothes, add shadows where they should be, like where the creases and wrinkles are, folds and all that good stuff.

Alright, so I went to Image, adjust, hue/saturation and adjusted it so that it was a bit more black. Also, I took a small pixel eraser and started to erase parts of his cloak to make it look more tattered. Also, with about 3 pix hard brush, I drew loose strings that would come from those rips and tears, as if you know when you rip something, there are fibers that are ripped too.

Alright, here I drew  more shadows and fibers, along with doing the piece near his neck, which is like a tight turtle neck cover. Nothing much here, but I wanted to show a picture of how that works out. Just use a slightly darker color from the base color and make horizontal lines, and repeat the process getting a little darker at a time.

Ok! Now the fun part, I’m going to show a very quick and easy way to draw the cross. It’s so simple, you’ll be amazed to find out just how it’s done! So what you want to do is draw everything in a dark dark color, almost black, but in the hue you want. For me, I want the beads to be red, so I’m going to start with a dark dark red color.  Alright, now that I have that, I’m going to take a small brush, 3 pix is what I usually use, since it’s nice and small. So I take a vibrant red color and make the little red dots inside the darker ones, which gives it some volume, but we’re not done yet! Now I take an almost white color and add tiny tiny white shiney dots on the side where the light is, which makes it seem to pop out a lot. I go back to the skin layer and make shadows where the necklace is, and take a soft brush, with the vibrant red color and lightly dab it on to look like the reflection is hitting on skin.

That’s all for the clothes! It’s turning out nice, now just the background is left! I’d upload that one right now… but I’m too busy listening to this guy sing and falling in love with his voice! He’s amazing and I think everyone should check him out on Youtube! <3 But that’s for another time….

-Tala

Anyway, I’ll try to get as much as this tutorial up as I can, since I’m also going to be hanging out with Mari and Alex today, which I look forward to! <3 They are truly great and my medicine for everything. Now, how about we get to that tutorial now shall we?

Start on a new layer, above the skin layer. First you need to pic a soft brush (which is just a hard round brush with the settings on Other dynamics –> opacity jitter set to pen pressure and flow jitter set to pen pressure) and start shaping out the hair. Now, the color isn’t too too important right now, as I’ll show you how to change that without having to make a huge mess of everything. For Azzie, I picked a dark reddish brown color, something that would almost resemble black, even though I didn’t want to go too dark there, it works fine. Sketch out the flow of the hair, shapes, that sort of thing, right here it doesn’t have to be perfect, we’re just using it as a base.

Alright, taking a smaller brush, about a size 7-9, and a darker color, I start to give the hair some dimension, coloring out dark clumps of hair, giving it more shape, and then taking a smaller brush 3-5 and making wavy strands. The more strands, the better it turns out. Hair isn’t just a big clump, it has motion, and there’s something about loose strands on a guy’s face that makes them look mysterious and sexy, that’s why I LOOOVE guys with this length hair. XD Aherm, anyway…moving out of fantasy land… once you depicted the hair, take the blur tool and get it to a nice large size, and brush lightly over it, to where it’s blurred enough, but not too much to smear the detail away.

Alrighty, now we’re getting somewhere, see it’s not so bad! Here I did the same thing as above, only taking a lighter color than the base color and shadow color, and started to make more strands with a hard brush set to 3-5 pix. Keep working on the flow of the hair, making more loose strands as it gives a wavy motion kind of look and really enhances your picture. After that, use the blur tool again, going very lightly over the hair. Do you like how it’s turning out so far? Of course you do! If now, then… >.> maybe you messed up. =P

Continue with the patern above, adding light strands, tracing shapes and making the hair really flowy. For every new color you use, try to blur it out, because hair isn’t perfectly sharp, it has some detail, but most of it is pretty blurry, besides it blends very well this way. Here I added some blue for the reflection of the background I’m going to be using.

Now is the part where I said you can change the color. I’m realizing that this brownish red color is way too light for Azcona, his hair is dark, he needs to have it dyed. Oh no! Look at all that hard work though! Does this mean we should start all over from scratch? No no child, you don’t need to, for there’s an easy way to fix this, just follow my lead.

Go to image—> adjustments—-> hue/saturation (Or just hit ctrl+u) and a little menu will pop up with three different options, hue, saturation, and Lightness. Hue will change the color of the layer, in this case the hair. Scroll through left and right for different options, I chose to keep it the same hue, but what I want is to make it darker. I went to saturation, which tones the color down, or really brightens it up, but I toned the color of mine down just a bit, to where it was a little greyer. Then, Lightness. If you go completely to each end, you’ll see one is pure white, and one is pure black, while I like the pure black look, I don’t want to lose all that detail I added in, so I turned the lightnes down just a bit to where it was dark, but you could still see the details.

Here is the end result, I still have my details in there, and the hair is nice and dark. I went and took a 3 pix size brush and very lightly painted some blue highlights where the reflection would be. I also colored in his eyebrows to match his hair color. There you go! It’s simple, and if you want, you can even add more colors to this, maybe even add more strands (but don’t go too crazy or else it will look like the hair is just made up of nothing but string).

That’s all for the hair tutorial, quick, easy and fun indeed! More should be coming soon, maybe I can finish one before I go to sleep tonight… since I have icky work in the morning at 9 am! Bahhh, May Neptune have mercy on my soul. ;-; Any how, till next time, this is Tala signing out!

Awhile back, I promised that I would post a tutorial on drawing a female figure. Because of a bit of an ADD problem, some personal drawing of my own, and the fact that I am engrossed in Celia Rivenbark’s latest book, Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits, I somewhat put my tutorial off to the side. *Laughs.* I’m sorry about that, but even I, Mari, need some time to myself. My second semester of graduate school starts next week on the 12th, so, naturally, I need to psych myself up. Deep breathing everyone! Shall we move on to the tutorial, my dear chaps? Pip, pip, Cheerio! This is for you, Brandon from Ohio!

Now, I have to apologize, I started drawing this BEFORE I decided to turn it into a tutorial, therefore, a lot of the guideline steps are skipped over, so I think I rate this tutorial for those artists at an intermediate level. If there’s an issue, please email me and I will simplify the steps. =^_^= <–It’s a kitty! Mreow! This tutorial is a realism/anime hybrid. I didn’t really know what style I wanted to use.

1) First, we’re going to start with guidelines. Draw an oval for the head and split it into four equal quadrants. I did not do this, but there again, I have no sense of equal spacing due to a perception issue.  Add a column that stems from the bottom of the head circle and goes off slightly to the right. The At the base of this column, draw a circle that is smaller than the head and more rounded. On the left of the circle and at the bottom of the neck column, add a block that fades in the distance (I think someone should do a tutorial on vanishing points, what do you think?). Add a hint of a circle at the back of the square and neck column as shown in the image. Now, draw an hourglass shape from the bottom of these shapes that extends two-to-three inches down. Here is the body and the hips. From the circle you drew at the bottom of the neck column, draw a straight line that extends down for about an inch; add a small circle to the end of the line. Add another straight line that extends from this circle for another inch, than add an oval to the bottom for the hand. Now for the legs, draw two straight lines that extend left from them upper bottom portion of the hourglass. These lines should also extend for about an inch, inch-and-a-half. Add small circles to the ends of these lines like you did the arm. For the leg closest to you, draw a line that expands to the right for about two inches, since the girl is kneeling. For the leg furthest back, only draw the line going down and right until you hit the knee circle you drew for the leg closest to you. Now, like me, I know there are a lot of visual learners out there, so hopefully, your image, with  my poor literary direction, looks like this:

Sorry if this seems complicated, but here is how the guidelines should look.

2) Now you’re going to trace over the outside of the lines of the guidelines you drew in step one. With the front square, you’re going to split that in half with a curved line to create the illusion of breasts. With the arm, however, you are going to flesh it out by drawing lines outside of the center line (too much mention of the word “lines!”), curving those lines in slightly at the circle, bowing slightly out again, and tapering to create a wrist. Draw a hand. The easiest method of drawing a hand is to draw a mitten and add three lines where the fingers should be. The image, hopefully, looks like this:

Tralala, I like outlines!

3) Starting with the leg line, trace over it all the way around. Then, from the bottom of the hourglass, Create a secondary line that is a half inch below the primary leg line and extend out to the left an inch and a half. Make sure the bottom toward the hourglass is fatter than the top, since this line will taper creating the thigh and the bend of the knee. Erase all primary guidelines  but the head; the image should now look like this:

It gets easier from here, I swear!

4) Draw guidelines for the face structure. On the horizontal line, draw two very small circles for irises that are slightly distance from the center vertical line. On either side of the vertical line, add two more secondary lines that have three circles like an upside down Hidden Mickeys head attached to them. This is the nose guideline. At the bottom of the nose guideline, add a straight line for the mouth and add another Mickey Head, this time right-side-up, for the lip guideline. Draw ears at the side of the head. I decided to make my girl elfen, but you can do human ears, also. I will do an ear tutorial, soon. Add an eliptical circle halfway between the eyes and the top of the head for a hairline. Add clothes if you choose to. The image could (and I say “could” because your clothes may look different than mine) look like this:

5) Draw the upper and lower lids around your iris circle and give the eyes a pupil. Draw over the nose and lip guidelines and erase the guidelines. Create a hairstyle if you so choose. I gave my girl long curly blonde hair. You may also add wings if you so choose, like I did. Shade your character (or color, whichever you prefer) and add other details such as jewelry, things to sit on, or a background. In the end, depending on what you did, you should have a drawing that you are happy with. I am not happy with my drawing because my shading off. I drew this image by the light of my TV only. So, for my next tutorial, I will attempt to show you have to do digital inking for digital coloring. Sounds fun, right? I hope so!

This is Mari Dominguez, signing out!

Whoo, I drew my first picture of 2009, and even though I’m not totally

enthusiastic with the way it turned out, I think I can deal with it for now.

I don’t know what possesed me to do this… or well, yeah I do but I just felt

the need to do it anyway. I chose to do realism, and my next guide will be how

I do realism in Photoshop, step by step. There may be much better ways

of doing this, but I guess I’ll show mine.

-Tala

It’s currently really early for me, too. I could not sleep a wink last night for some reason, yet, I was very tired. Personally, it sucks. I’m very tired and I have that somewhat dizzy feeling I usually get when I’m very tired. It sucks more because, today, Alex and I are suppose to go back to Artist’s Square to do some antique shopping. I better get a lot of coffee in me, or else I’m not going to survive the day.

*Yawns*

I have an idea. How about instead of me rambling on about how tired I am, how about we do another tutorial? We’ve done hair–digital, long, short, and medium length–eyes, lips, but we haven’t structured a full face. I have three methods for structuring a face: anime style, unfeatured, and features first. Today, I’m going to use a style that I’m totally unaccustom to: unfeatured. This is going to be scary.

*Rubs eyes and yawns again*

Now, dearest Mari, what is an unfeatured face, you–our wonderful, yet mysterious viewers–may ask. The answer is simple, my friends. An unfeatured face is a face structure you draw BEFORE adding the eyes, nose, and mouth. I usually draw all my facial features before, THEN add the face around it, then a friend of mine–who is totally annoying me at the moment, but that’s a rant for another time–pointed out that, sometimes, my faces look goofy because I do things that way. Well, poo on him. To each their own, I suppose. But anyway, that is besides the point. So, I figured I’d try doing the face structure FIRST, then add the features. Now every character I draw kinda looks like Jennifer Aniston. Hopefully, this will not be the case for you!

Additionally, for this tutorial, I apologize for my shading looking very dark and askew. My family, for some reason, has an aversion to using lights in my house. I think it has to do with NIPSCO raising the electric bill 50% or something. Eep!

Now for the tutorial!

FACE STRUCTURE

1) First, you’re going to draw a figure that looks like an egg standing on the tip. The tip will act like a chin guideline, the fat part, the top of the head. You know, I never really noticed this, but all our heads are kinda shaped like eggs. Wow!

Next, we’re going to separate our egg into sections. No, we’re not separating our yolk from our whites; we’re not cooking today. What I mean is that we’re going to literally section off our head so the face itself will be easier to create later on. Starting from the chin, measure about an inch to half an inch up; Draw a straight horizontal line at this point. From the line down is where the mouth and chin will be. Next, measure half an inch up from this line; create another horizontal line. This sections off where the lips will go. From that line, measure, once more, a half an inch up. Draw another horizontal line; this is where the lower half of the nose guidelines will go. Now, measure 3/4 of an inch up and add a horizontal line; this is where the middle nose guideline will go. Then, from the 3/4 line, measure half an inch up and draw a horizontal line; these are where the eyes will go.

WHEW! Holy moley, that’s a lot of measuring. Did I tell you I was not accustom to this? I’m mathematically challenged. Oh, I forgot to mention, adjust my measurements to actually fit the dimensions of your image.

Moving on to step two…

2) At the top of your head, create a basic hair outline. This will determine where you want the bangs to be. This outline doesn’t have to be too detailed.

After creating the hair outline, you’re going to shape the face. You can square off the bottom edges of the egg shape to add jaw definition, if you want. To make this simple, I stuck to the egg shape. Once you drew the lines defining how you want your face structure to look, start shading. The outside edges of the face should be dark, because those are the vanishing points. Shade darkly, then, take the blendy stick (or tortillion, depending on how professional you want to be) and blend these dark lines into your midtones toward the inside of the face. Don’t forget to shade the neck, too! Create shadows to add depth. I don’t think I created the depth illusion well for this image. Like I mentioned before, my depth perception is really bad.

You also want to create jaw features. From the tip of the egg (chin), shade UP toward the inch line we created in step one. You can make this shading as wide or as narrow as you want; it depends on how defined or how hollow your jaw or cheeks are.

My laptop battery is about to die; I better hurry along.

3) Now we’re going to add ears (ear tutorial coming some to a Sketching House near you!). Where the 3/4 inch lines are, add your ears. Start from the upper line and create a C-shape; create a backwards C-shape for the right side. Create smaller C-shapes, or small R-shapes as I have done in the image to create the illusion of the inner ear. Shade the ears, remembering to start with the darker shades first.

Extend the hair outline and add definition.

4) Draw the guidelines for the eyes and nose. The eyes go in the upper 1 inch section; the nose guidelines go in between the eyes and down to the center half inch section. Remember, the nose has a circle and “wings” at the bottom.

5) Create the nose and eyes as we did in the nose and eye tutorials. Shade and blend. Add circles around the eyes to add definition and give the image eyebrows.

6) About a half inch below the nose, add your lips. Remember, the beginning of the lips consist of one horizontal line and circles. Please recall the lip tutorial, if needed.

Shade the lips and add a light source to the entire face.

You have created a face! Congrats! Oh, and please remove the guidelines; I didn’t.

Next time, I will show you how to draw the face structure using anime style and featured style.

This is Marisol signing out so she can go to work!

Love always!

Part One of the Hair Trilogy

Part Two of the Hair Trilogy

How to Draw a Long Hair Explosion!

Hello to you all! This is the last hair tutorial from me for awhile. I got really carried away with the drawing, but I created a bunch of new hairstyles that I’m going to put on my characters. Today I’m playing around with long hair. The really great thing about long hair is that there’s really no limit to what you can do with it. And long hair looks so… cool. *(^_^)*

Lengthening the hair on a character means only one thing… HAIR EXPLOSION! That’s right. Bangs, strands, flips, curls, and dos can go all over the place.

I really, really love drawing long hair. Hair can have a fine, coarse, or wirey texture. People with drier hair have all sorts of curls that flow and bounce all over the head like they’re taking over the joint. Wetter hair is long and free-spirited, blowing whereever the wind wants to take it. Some hair-owners try to make their hair symmetrical and pretty, while others let hair go wherever they want it to. The wilder the hair, the more interesting it is to look at.

I’ve seen cartoon hair in three styles. The most common seems to be the angle look, since the really sharp edges of the angle show up really nice on a cartoon. Figure one shows the basic principles of the angles. Lazier artists draw huge gobs of hair and then fill these gobs in with lines. But these gobs of hair can look really great, especially if colored well. You can see the gobs of hair in figure 2. They have a really nice cartoon look to them. But if you’re going for a much more realistic look, you might want to try drawing each strand individually. There’s really no limit to how realistic you can make each strand of hair, but you should keep two things in mind. The more realistic you make your hair, the more realistic you should make the rest of the character. Also, the more realistic you make the hair, the longer it will take to draw the entire head of hair. Really, there’s no limit to how detailed you can make a head of hair.

Figure 1                     Figure 2

Drawing Tutorial Part 1: How to Draw Gobs of Hair.

There’s really only four parts to a long set of hair. These are the front, back, sides, and top. The top is really the easiest to draw… most of the time. If you’re getting really creative, you might want to draw spikes and curves all over the top of the head. But for neater hair, all you need to do is draw a nice round line. Or you can draw a slight dip in the middle of the top of the hair. This is the easiest part of learning how to draw long hair.

Back of Hair

The next part of the hair usually drawn is the back, though you can start drawing from any part of the hair. Do not get the back confused with the sides. The outline of the back of the hair can be seen at the sides of the head, but the sides are actually the part of the hair that connects to the front of the hair, or bangs.

This is where hair gets defined as a gob of hair or  angled hair. Draw gobs of hair like the hair on the left by focusing on the outline of the hair. For the style on the left, all you have to do is draw slightly wavey lines going vertically. Then, you get to decide how detailed you want the hair to be by adding lines.

Draw simple lines

Draw really simple lines that curve roughly the same way as the outline of the back of the hair curves. This hairstyle is great practice for new artists, since these lines can be drawn without a whole lot of effort.

As you might see on the picture to the left, the curving lines on the back of the hair curve sharply and collide in the center of the top of the hair. This is done to emphasize that each strand of hair connects to the character’s scalp.

When you reach the bottom of the hair, you can make the hair do whatever you want it to. You can make the hair disappear behind the character’s shoulders, or you can draw a really simple straight line that neatly connects the bottom of each strand. You can have each strand end with an angle, or you can have the strands of hair curve upwards. The choice is yours.

Click to view description.

Sideburns included.

For globs of hair, the sides of the hair can be completely ditched. The sides of the hair are often brushed so that they become part of the back of the hair. The bangs seem to rest magically on the forehead. If the sides of the hair are draw, they often appear like renegade sideburns that go in directions different than the rest of the hair. This part of the hair can be really fun, since you can do all sorts of things with the sides of the hair. But this part of the hair is nowhere near as fun as the front of the hair, aka the bangs.

These bangs clump together on each side and curve outwards.

These bangs clump together in a really cute way.

The bangs are where an artist can really show creativity. Bangs vary based off the texture of the hair, the wetness, the length, and how the bangs are combed. One thing that is almost universal about bangs is that they are almost always curvy. But how they curve is up to you. They can curve in a natural way by having the curves on the left and right curving with their strands pointing towards each other. This often creates a space in the front of the head. The strands of hair can curve in all sorts of random directions. Thick, short bangs often clump up in a really cute way, creating really unique and adorable bangs. Also, a bunch of hair can really rebel and clump together in what looks like a giant strand. This curve can then swing in a really dramatic direction. This monstrous strand of hair can cover the entire face. The possiblities are endless.

Clumpy bangs: when bangs go horribly wrong!

Drawing Tutorial Part 2: How to Draw Angled Hair

The sides of the hair have little angles that break away from the sides of the hair and then return.

This hairdo is made up of almost all the same curved angles.

Angled hair is extremely common in cartoon drawing. Angled hair creates really nice points for the tips of the strands of hair. These strands can curve, or they can form nearly perfect triangles. This type of hair might seem intimidating at first, but anyone can master it! The back is sometimes drawn as really large curves. Other times, the back is drawn just like the hair globs, only with little angles breaking away from the hair to create a more messy look. The top is usually drawn just like in the hair gobs, though sometimes the artist can get really creative and draw angles that curve upwards. One of the most defining features with this style of hair is the sides of the hair. Sometimes the sides behave in a renegade fashion like with the hair globs, while other times the sides of the hair look just like the back of the hair. The

With angled hair, the top of the hair can go crazy.

only difference is that the sides of the hair are always a little shorter

The bangs sorta hang there, covering the face.

and get shorter as they merge with the bangs. The bangs can be drawn however you like, though the hairdo usually looks better if the bangs are drawn similar to the rest of the hair, unlike with the hair globs. This hair-drawing method is great for really messy hair, though it takes more effort to draw. Since this style involves more lines, there is more room to screw up some of the lines. But drawing curves and points are easier than you think and you’ll soon get the hang of it.

Drawing Tutorial Part 3: How to Draw Individual Strands of Hair

Individual strands can get out of hand.

Its really easy to screw up the individual strands of hair.

This part deserves a whole tutorial on its own. Individual strands can get ever more complex and detailed when you add shading and color. Given enough effort, you can eventually make individual strands of hair look like real hair. What sucks is that a project like this can take hours. Thus, comic artists have come up with the methods described above for drawing hair. But the angled hair and gobs of hair don’t work with really wavy or curly hair. With curly hair especially, you will have to draw each strand of hair individually in order to make the hair look right. The reason why curly hair is less common in cartoons is that it is very hard to get curly hair to look right and drawing curly hair takes forever. Drawing individual strands of hair really only involves drawing two similar lines and connecting them at one end.

That concludes this drawing tutorial and the rest of the tutorials on basic hair drawing. Hair can get way more complicated when shading, tones, line darkening, coloring, and texture are thrown into the mixture. Hair can get really messy (literally) when in motion. Sooner or later, someone on here will do a tutorial on any one of these things.

Thanks for reading!

“There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too
And up in the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say “cuckoo”

Regretfully they tell us Cuckoo, cuckoo
But firmly they compel us Cuckoo, cuckoo
To say goodbye . . .

. . . to you,”

(Sorry, song’s stuck in my head >.<)

Alex

Draw small curving triangles that vary in size and length.

Add lines in the middle of the hair to give the hair depth. If you completely screw up the lines like I did, just erase them.

Draw a curve for fun. It can curve upwards.

Draw what is almost a circle. Leave a space at the bottom of the circle. Draw two zig-zag lines that go upwards from this space. Draw two curving lines that lead up to where the bangs should be. Draw the bangs as curving triangles.

Make this weird-looking hairdo suddenly look normal by adding curving lines that go in all kinds of directions (except DOWN). This will make the hair look more round. Also, add lines on the sides of the mass of hair that curve in the same way as sides of the hair. This will emphasize some of the strands of hair.

Side profiles of hair are hard to imagine sometimes, depending on how complex the hairstyle is. Start by drawing a half circle.

The rest of the hairstyle is kinda weird. Draw a right angle right in the middle of the hair that connects both ends of the half circle. Have both parts of the right angle curve.

Draw curving lines coming out of the top part of the right angle, curving towards the front of the head. Draw more lines on the lower part of the hair mass that curve towards the back of the head.

Draw the deflated McDonalds logo.

At the ends of the deflated golden arches above, draw long, curving lines that curve in towards each other. At the ends of these curved lines, draw lines that curve upwards and away from each other. These curving lines should meet together to form a baby McDonalds logo.

Draw vertical curving lines on the sides of the hair.

Draw what looks like part of a cloud. The top of this hairdo is similar to the top of the first hairdo in this drawing tutorial.

Draw really curvy strands of hair that curve in different directions. Draw some lone strands of hair to give this style a really savory mullet-look.

Draw a really smooth curve.

Underneath the really round top of the head, draw triangles that curve towards each other.

Draw curving lines that dance around each other, forming what looks like a sparkle. This will make the hair look very round and shiny.

These hairstyles really overpopulate cartoons and the 70’s. Master them if you want to draw mostly modern characters. Also, do not write blog posts at night unless you absolutely have to. If you’re drawing a historical or fantasy setting, you’ll probably be drawing a lot more long-haired characters. Though long hair is making a comeback.

Stay tuned for Hair III: The Blob That Ate Mah Page!

Alex