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

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.

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

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

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.

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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’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

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

Part One of the Hair Trilogy

Part Two of the Hair Trilogy

How to Draw a Long Hair Explosion!

Hello to you all! This is the last hair tutorial from me for awhile. I got really carried away with the drawing, but I created a bunch of new hairstyles that I’m going to put on my characters. Today I’m playing around with long hair. The really great thing about long hair is that there’s really no limit to what you can do with it. And long hair looks so… cool. *(^_^)*

Lengthening the hair on a character means only one thing… HAIR EXPLOSION! That’s right. Bangs, strands, flips, curls, and dos can go all over the place.

I really, really love drawing long hair. Hair can have a fine, coarse, or wirey texture. People with drier hair have all sorts of curls that flow and bounce all over the head like they’re taking over the joint. Wetter hair is long and free-spirited, blowing whereever the wind wants to take it. Some hair-owners try to make their hair symmetrical and pretty, while others let hair go wherever they want it to. The wilder the hair, the more interesting it is to look at.

I’ve seen cartoon hair in three styles. The most common seems to be the angle look, since the really sharp edges of the angle show up really nice on a cartoon. Figure one shows the basic principles of the angles. Lazier artists draw huge gobs of hair and then fill these gobs in with lines. But these gobs of hair can look really great, especially if colored well. You can see the gobs of hair in figure 2. They have a really nice cartoon look to them. But if you’re going for a much more realistic look, you might want to try drawing each strand individually. There’s really no limit to how realistic you can make each strand of hair, but you should keep two things in mind. The more realistic you make your hair, the more realistic you should make the rest of the character. Also, the more realistic you make the hair, the longer it will take to draw the entire head of hair. Really, there’s no limit to how detailed you can make a head of hair.

Figure 1                     Figure 2

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Tags: anime, Art, bangs, cartoon, cartoon drawing, comb, curly, Digital Art, do, draw, drawing tutorial, forehead, hair, hairbrush, hairstyle, how to draw cartoons, illustration, manga, paintbrush tool, scalp, sketch, sketching, spikey, spiky, strands, traditional Art, Tutorial, widow's peak