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

Adobe Photoshop is loaded with brushes. Oftentimes, the quality of your lines and your artwork depends on the brush you use. Because of that, before you even get started drawing your first picture, you should experiment with brushes to find the brush that will be perfect for whatever you’re trying to draw. I’m going to go through each distinct brush type for each brush category, experimenting with the brushes and hopefully figuring out what each different brush can be used for.

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Tags: Alex, animal, anime, artist, Artists, brush, brushes, circles, draw, drawing, Drawings, eye, Eyes, figure, lines, paint, Painting, Paintings, Photoshop, photoshopped, picture, pound, side, Star, strokes, tips, tools, Travel, tricks, Work

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

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

This is a late tutorial I whipped up after a long day cranking out papers and freelance work. At least Marisol and I went out today. We read Santa Responds: He’s Had Enough…and He’s Writing Back! the whole way through at a bookstore (so we didn’t have to pay for it ). We read a book on the 501 greatest movies of all time (like 501 is an original number. Why not 44432)? I also ritualistically checked out the cartooning section.

Anyway, I’m amazed by the infinite number of cartoon eye varieties. It seems like in some mediums, the shape and style of the eye is the most crucial part of determining a character’s appearance and identity. Cartoon eyes show both emotion and personality. Wide eyes indicate emotion, while more narrowed eyes indicate a focused and confident character. Though coloring, glare, and shading can be used to add personality to a character, I believe that the most effective and reliable way to distinguish a character from other characters is to give him distinct eyes. This is especially true with anime eyes. So I decided to do 7 mini tutorials in one. Each one of these is done in a step-by-step fashion. It’s really hard to describe what I did in this tutorial, so I’m including pictures. Enjoy. Click to read more …

Tags: cartoon, draw, drawing, eye, Eyes, illustration, manga, sketch, sketching, Tutorial