Hi everyone. Sorry I’ve been gone so long. The evil finals are finally gone, so I’m back, hopefully for good. I hit a little burnout last week, but now I think I’m finally ready to go.

The tutorial I have today I came up with spontaneously while working on a picture of a tribal character I’m working on. He’s from the prehistory Phillipines, an area that I’ve never heard of a story being written about. Such a fascinating area.

That picture up there shows Snake Island in the Philippines. The completely naturally formed landbridge connecting two islands is shaped like a snake. Click the thumbnail to see how beautiful and clear the water looks. Anyway, I can’t get myself to draw the main protagonist as I see him in my mind.

Anyway, as I was working on trying to draw him a few nights ago, I realized that a lot of people draw the majority of their characters the same way. They’re always standing forward or to the side with their legs straight or slightly bend. But in real life there is a whole range of positions and motions that an individual can do. So I decided that my newest tutorial would be on how to draw a character sitting. Click to read more …

Tags: Anatomy, character, characters, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, How to Draw, Life, lines, Night, Perspective, picture, poses, profile, proportions, real, Returning, side, Travel, Tutorial, Tutorials, Work

Arms can be some of the most pain-in-the butt parts that you can ever learn how to draw. The way the arm flexes, twists, stretches and raises can really drive an artist crazy. There are so many ways that an arm can position itself that I’d be insane to try to cover all arm positions in one tutorial. So in this drawing tutorial, I’m hitting arms that are mostly straight and downwards. Whew, here goes. Click to read more …

Tags: Alex, Art, artist, Artists, character, characters, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, face, figure, lines, side, Travel, Tutorial, Tutorials, view, Work, write, Writing

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.

Click to read more …

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.

Click to read more …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello! Tala here and I thought I’d put in my first tutorial for you guys! I’m sure there are a lot of gamers out there who want to show off their characters or make guild banners but you just don’t know how. It’s frusturating, yes, but here’s a really quick and easy method using Photoshop!

First and foremost, open the game and hop on your character. Once you’re in, either find some gear that you like to put on, or just wear whatever you’re wearing and set your character behind the planest background you can find.

Picture 1

Alright, now that you did that, you might notice that… your interface is totally in the way, not very good for taking pictures right? Right! So to get rid of that, hold down ctrl+alt+z and then you should have something that looks like this Click to read more …

Tags: brush, character, characters, edit, game, Photoshop, photoshopped, picture, Tala, Tutorial, Tutorials, World of Warcraft, WoW

Hello everyone. It’s time to upload part 3. This time I’m going to town on the wings. They’re flat out boring and not really that well defined. So I spent yesterday transforming them from the left to the right.

A lot bigger change. The feathers could be made more realistic and slender. Maybe I’ll redraw them again next time in the same way that I redrew everything else except the hair :p

My inspiration for the wings was derived from J Peffer’s angel character, though I tried hard to make my wings look distinct from hers. For me, the hardest part was getting the reflection of light on the feathers to pop out, which means that i have to tweak the shadings and highlights. He needs better shading to make him look more 3D too. Maybe a background would help (hint, hint). Click to read more …

Tags: angel, Art, character, drawing, Photoshop, shading, sketching, staff, Tutorial, wings

I decided to create a digital character and see how far I could go in a drawing tutorial. First a little sketching. Then some line cleanup. Lay over some lineart. Erase the sketches beneath. Add details. Add color. Do cell style shading. I don’t get how professional digital artists pull that off in 6 hours. I worked on this guy for 6 hours and I was able to get the lineart done only. Now at 11 o’clock, I’m yawning too much to even see my keyboard. Since I’m on break, I want to see how far I can take him. Maybe I’ll even add a background.

When drawing or painting, the artist has a boatload of choices. Painters can choose between watercolor, acrylic, and oils. Sketchers can use graphite pencils, regular pencils, or go straight to pen. Digital artists can use a mouse, tablet, or pen tool. You can even combine different tools. For instance, you can start off with graphite pencils on drawing paper, then scan the drawing with a really good scanner, and then use the pen tool to replace the rough sketch with smooth lines. You can even print out a piece of digital art, fix a mistake, and then scan the image again. Click to read more …

Tags: angel, Art, character, drawing, fantasy, figure, halberd, sketch, sketching, staff, wand, wing, winged, wings

I get bored easily; I discovered that the past few days in my psychology class. My professor is nice, but she talks like a funeral director—which is fitting considering that the class is called the Psychology of Death and Dying. I know I should be paying attention to the lectures, but I find it so hard. It might be because it’s cold outside in Indiana this time of year, and it could be because it gets dark during the time I’m in class, but either way, my attention tends to wane while I’m sitting in that class. So what do I do? Well, I’ve been reading my Banana Yoshimoto novels, mainly because I may focus on her for my Master’s thesis (her or how text messaging and Instant Messaging help ESL students learn English), or I draw on anything and everything I get my hands on (like my class syllabus, as shown). I guess maybe because this semester has dragged on for SO LONG, I just want to draw; I have not been able to do so in forever and that fact depresses me. However, I created a new character today, a vampiress who does not have a name yet, but she made me think, how does one create a character? Click to read more …

Tags: character, character development, characterization, concept, personality, trait