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

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

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

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

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

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

Elderly men do not dominate manga and cartoons, but you can sometimes still find them playing a few important roles. These characters are given extra lines on the face to emphasize wrinkling and the sagging of a face. The elderly face usually has some features that are drawn out more than you would with a younger face. It seems like the older a character is, the more realistic the features are drawn, while the younger the face, the more details you omit. For instance, some young children do not even have mouths drawn. The elderly face can be really complex and the extra angles can end up requiring some really innovative shading. For this drawing tutorial, a more simplistic face is going to be drawn.

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Tags: cartoon, character, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, eye, Eyes, face, features, guy, hair, lines, manga, Men, Nose, Noses, realistic, Tutorial, Tutorials

Ears can be wildly complicated to draw, since the ear is a bunch of folds that seem kinda asymmetrical. Luckily, you don’t have to always draw every aspect of the ear when you’re doing cartoon drawing. However, if you want to learn how to draw people realistically, you’ll have your work cut out for you. Hopefully this drawing tutorial will help.

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Tags: Art, cartoon, cartooning, character, characters, circles, do, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, Father, hair, lines, picture, realistic, side, strands, tips, tools, Travel, Tutorial, Tutorials

When you finally learn to draw arms, a large part of your quest to learn how to draw body art is a quarter of the way through. Whether you draw manga or fine art, arms are often the most dynamic parts of the body because they can be moved in all sorts of directions and action poses. Arms can be easy or hard to draw depending on how detailed and muscular you want your character’s arms to look.

Start off by drawing a head. Theoretically, you could just draw the arm. But arms are hard to draw if you aren’t seeing them in proportion to the rest of the body and you might as well get more practice with figure drawing. So draw a circle. Click to read more …

Tags: Art, cartoon, circles, draw, lines, manga, proportion, realistic, Tutorial

I’m back

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. Click to read more …

Tags: anime, Art, artist, Artists, bangs, cartoon, cartooning, coloring, colors, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, emotions, eye, Eyes, face, hair, personality, tablet, Tutorial, Tutorials

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

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

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

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

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Tags: anime, Art, bangs, cartoon, cartoon drawing, comb, curly, Digital Art, do, draw, drawing tutorial, forehead, hair, hairbrush, hairstyle, how to draw cartoons, illustration, manga, paintbrush tool, scalp, sketch, sketching, spikey, spiky, strands, traditional Art, Tutorial, widow's peak

The next natural drawing tutorial is “How to Draw Medium Hair.” Short hair stays on the top of the head and sometimes throws a party, except when a comb comes to crash it. Medium hair often covers the ears, or extends down part of the neck. That includes my favorite hairstyle, the one that is made up of curved triangles and wraps around the character’s head, making it look really round. Its a common hairstyle in Japan both among men and women.
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Tags: anime, Art, artist, bangs, cartoon, cartoon drawing, curly, draw, drawing tutorial, face, hair, hairbrush, hairstyle, how to draw cartoons, manga, Pencils, sketch, sketching, strands, Tutorial