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

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

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

Aren’t you glad?! This is the last part, consisting of the background, which I made relatively simple, and can be done suuuper fast, at least this one anyway. I’ll be going about how to finish off your picture. Anyway, as a side rant, I went up to the College I want to attend, and all that happened was one screw up after another. They have my test scores and GPA all messed up, saying I got lower than what I KNOW I did. This is putting a LOT of stress on me right now, especially because I tried really hard and I was a good student. *30 minutes pass* Ok, so I took a break from writing out my rant, listened to a song called “When Reason Fails- Texhnolyze” and now I feel a bit better. I do love that song, and it explains my thoughts on a lot of things. Ah, those beautiful words, believe, hope, miracles, they all play a special part for me, but enough ranting on that, let’s go and finish this shall we?

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.

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Tags: anime, background, blue, bright, brush, brushes, circles, clothes, clothing, clouds, Color, coloring, colors, CS, dark, draw, guy, hair, high highs, how to, image, light, lines, Love, manga, moon, music, Night, paint, Photoshop, picture, Rant, real, realism, realistic, scenery, shades, shading, side, sky, song, strokes, tools, Tutorial, Tutorials, write, Writing

Ahhh! It’s so long! There’s one more part after this, and then, it’s over. XD I finished this picture last night, but I couldn’t help take a bit longer to finish, because I was oggling all my beautiful gifts I got from Mari and Alex. Mari got me this Japanese dagger, it’s soooo pretty, and she made me a little Kotou doll out of clay! That woman is a pure genious, it’s gorgeous! I’d want to expirament with clay sometime as well, but when I had before… everything came out looking like the bad end of a prune salad. *shivers* Besides, I was spending my time looking at my pretty pictures on the World of Warcraft Card game from the Burning Crusade series.  Ah but what was I talking about? Oh yes, back to the tutorial. This lesson, I’ll be pretty brief on how I do the clothes, and the jewelry for the cross.

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

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Tags: 3D, anime, bright, clothes, clothing, Color, colors, dark, draw, drawing, Eyes, guy, hair, how to, manga, Photoshop, realism, realistic, shades, shading, Tala, tips, tricks, Tutorial

Aaand we’re back with my latest instalment of the “semi-realism tutorial” brought to you by Tala herself! Alright ladies and gentlemen, (I wonder why guys are called gentlemen anyway, are guys really gentle? Most I know aren’t.) Aherm, yes, back to the subject after getting off topic. I’m going to start my second part of the tutorial, which deals with coloring in realistic hair! Here’ you’ll learn a really simple way to color great hair, and do it in half the time you can imagine! I would have had this up sooner, but my dear Kyo was not feeling very well, that and we really needed to have a heart to heart talk about certain things. It turns out that he does care about me very much, it just happens that his thoughts are being impacted by what’s around him, and when your world comes crashing down, it really becomes a challenge to see things in the same light you used to. ;-;

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? Click to read more …

Tags: anime, brush, Color, dark, easy, face, hair, highlight, hints, light, manga, paint, Painting, Photoshop, realism, Tala, tricks, Tutorial

Photomash 1

Photomash 2

*Collapses*

Wow, Marisol here, back after a short hiatus to work on a new tutorial. It’s been a busy few days here for me, and I am tired! I’ve been working on the tutorials and studying for my psychology final and tying up some loose ends with things. I have great news: I got an A on my psychology paper! Psychology is one of my worst subjects, and I’ve never done well in it–until now! It takes me to get an A now. Yay! That makes me happy.

Alex and I also updated our “About Us” page; we’ve added images of ourselves. Also, please send a warm welcome to Tala, our newest member to the Sketching House family! Tala was suppose to be with us to begin with, but work and school come first. She will be contributing shortly and her profile will be posted in the About Us section in a few days.

Okay, as I have mentioned, I created a new tutorial. After a long wait, I finished the third part of the Photomashing tutorial and the Photomashed outline drawing, so now, after you reach the end of this, you can forget how long and monotonous this tutorial was. I’m kidding, I hope you don’t forget because many of the techniques you learn here can be transferred to other projects. So, without further ado, Photomashing Part Three: Coloring! Click to read more …

Tags: Art, burn tool, Color, coloring, digital, Digital Art, digitally, guidelines, lines, Photomashing, Photoshop, photoshop elements, shading, tools

As I promised yesterday, regular tutorial posts continue today. However, I am bogged down with homework and Alex seems to be taking a vacation, that lazy bum. Anymore, it feels like I am the only one writing posts for Sketching House. Alex, that slacker, wants to “beautify,” while I am stuck doing all the writing. What Alex does not seem to notice is that I have a ton of work, too, but I am not slacking. Someone please kick Alex and tell that person (I do not know a good insult right now) to write some more posts, because I know y’all are just sick of me.
Nyah!
I am feeling in a Disney mood today, so how about drawing a Disney character? Before I began pursuing an English degree, I always had a dream of someday working and animating for Disney. Unfortunately, some dreams die when it comes to being practical (but is going to school for millions of years practical for English/ESL teaching?), so here I am in graduate school getting another English degree. In the meantime, however, a girl can always dream and maybe with a “little faith, hope, and Pixie Dust,” maybe I can someday fulfill my dream of being a Disney animator. Click to read more …

Tags: Color, Disney, draw, Lady and the Tramp, Trace

There is way too much ambient light anymore! We can’t see the stars, the planets, nothing! Unless you’re from Montana, Canada, Alaska, the Dakotas, or parts of Florida (I curseth thee!), the rest of us don’t even know how many stars exist in the night sky. I’ve heard that in places like Montana, people can actually see parts of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is fantastically awesome. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a galaxy-like night sky with Photoshop that can be used in any type of digital drawing. Ready? Let’s begin! Click to read more …

Tags: burn tool, Color, dodge tool, light, paintbrush tool, Photoshop

Creating hair digitally has proven to be a headache to many people, but trust me, it’s not as hard as some folks think. I had to learn through trial and error—I had more errors than triumphs, but I finally learned. I think I draw pretty well, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but when I first started draw digitally, I had stick hair! Straight lines, no depth, no definition: That was the type of hair I drew. I still have trouble drawing hair digitally, but I am improving every day, well every day that is not filled with writing English and psychology papers and reading dull material (Percy Byssthe Shelley, anyone?). However, I do have a fairly simple tutorial on digital hair techniques. I’ve created this tutorial in five steps, and it uses Photoshop Elements 5.0. If you have an image that needs hair, follow along with this simple tutorial. Hopefully, your character’s hair will look better than mine. Today, I’m going to use Tala’s character, Kotou, for my hair tutorial. Click to read more …

Tags: brush, Color, digital, digitally, draw, drawing, drew, gimp, hair, midtones, opacity, paint, paintbrush, Photoshop, photoshop elements, tone, Tutorial