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

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

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

Welcome to part 2 of my How to Draw Characters series. This time, I’m putting this guy in technicolor. But before that, I’m going to try to make his body more anatomically correct. Below is what we left off with last time.

Distorted angel, arms, hands, and feet badly drawn.

His wings could be better drawn, but drawing wings can be an entire tutorial on its own (hint, hint). But I was really unhappy with his hands and feet. His left hand (our left) was not even complete and wasn’t correctly connected to the wrist. His right hand was ginormous and his fingers weren’t proportionate at all. His feet seemed a little too long and his toes were tiny. His right arm was way too long. I also didn’t like how his right side curved in more than his left side, like he only got love handles on one side. Click to read more …

Tags: Art, cell style, character conception, coloring, drawing, highlights, Photoshop, shading, sketching, Tutorial, wings

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