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.

Click to read more …

Tags: Blending, Color, coloring, darkness, eye, face, forehead, hair, high, highlights, iris, Lips, shading, strands, Tones

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.

Click to read more …

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

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

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

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

Good morning, everyone, if you consider this a good morning. It is currently a balmy 18 degrees out with six inches of fresh powder covering my lawn. The Chicagoland area was inundated with snow last night, and even though it’s pretty, I don’t like it. I’m not a fan of snow; only on Christmas. Christmas snow is magical.

It’s currently really early for me, too. I could not sleep a wink last night for some reason, yet, I was very tired. Personally, it sucks. I’m very tired and I have that somewhat dizzy feeling I usually get when I’m very tired. It sucks more because, today, Alex and I are suppose to go back to Artist’s Square to do some antique shopping. I better get a lot of coffee in me, or else I’m not going to survive the day.

*Yawns*

I have an idea. How about instead of me rambling on about how tired I am, how about we do another tutorial? We’ve done hair–digital, long, short, and medium length–eyes, lips, but we haven’t structured a full face. I have three methods for structuring a face: anime style, unfeatured, and features first. Today, I’m going to use a style that I’m totally unaccustom to: unfeatured. This is going to be scary.

*Rubs eyes and yawns again*

Now, dearest Mari, what is an unfeatured face, you–our wonderful, yet mysterious viewers–may ask. The answer is simple, my friends. An unfeatured face is a face structure you draw BEFORE adding the eyes, nose, and mouth. I usually draw all my facial features before, THEN add the face around it, then a friend of mine–who is totally annoying me at the moment, but that’s a rant for another time–pointed out that, sometimes, my faces look goofy because I do things that way. Well, poo on him. To each their own, I suppose. But anyway, that is besides the point. So, I figured I’d try doing the face structure FIRST, then add the features. Now every character I draw kinda looks like Jennifer Aniston. Hopefully, this will not be the case for you!

Additionally, for this tutorial, I apologize for my shading looking very dark and askew. My family, for some reason, has an aversion to using lights in my house. I think it has to do with NIPSCO raising the electric bill 50% or something. Eep!

Now for the tutorial!

FACE STRUCTURE Click to read more …

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, anime, Art, Artists, Crown Point Indiana, Digital Art, drawing, Eyes, face, guidelines, Lips, midtones, Nose, Pencil Art, Pencil Drawing, Photoshop, photoshop elements, Photoshop Tutorial, shading, traditional Art, Tutorial, wings

I got my first A as a final grade in psychology! How exciting is that?! On the final exam, I got 105 out of 100 points: a perfect score plus the extra credit! And guess what, I barely studied! That’s nothing to be proud of; when in graduate school, you should ALWAYS study. That’s Marisol’s school lesson of the day! Now on to the tutorial…

Noses– most people have them and like lips and eyes, they are very useful. People can steal noses (hehehe, got your nose!), or get smacked in the nose every winter at least once. I get smacked in the nose at least once per winter because my boyfriend slips on the ice and I have to catch him, only to have him accidentally hit me in the nose and mouth. Ouch.

Some people have anxiety when it comes to drawing noses, but have no fear, noses are easy! In fact, noses are so easy that they can be drawn in four steps. This is going to be a short tutorial, folks. Click to read more …

Tags: drawing, Drawing the Face, Eyes, face, guidelines, light, Lips, Noses, Photoshop, sketching, Tutorial, wings

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.
Click to read more …

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