Hi everyone. Sorry I’ve been gone so long. The evil finals are finally gone, so I’m back, hopefully for good. I hit a little burnout last week, but now I think I’m finally ready to go.

The tutorial I have today I came up with spontaneously while working on a picture of a tribal character I’m working on. He’s from the prehistory Phillipines, an area that I’ve never heard of a story being written about. Such a fascinating area.

That picture up there shows Snake Island in the Philippines. The completely naturally formed landbridge connecting two islands is shaped like a snake. Click the thumbnail to see how beautiful and clear the water looks. Anyway, I can’t get myself to draw the main protagonist as I see him in my mind.

Anyway, as I was working on trying to draw him a few nights ago, I realized that a lot of people draw the majority of their characters the same way. They’re always standing forward or to the side with their legs straight or slightly bend. But in real life there is a whole range of positions and motions that an individual can do. So I decided that my newest tutorial would be on how to draw a character sitting. Click to read more …

Tags: Anatomy, character, characters, draw, drawing, Drawings, drew, How to Draw, Life, lines, Night, Perspective, picture, poses, profile, proportions, real, Returning, side, Travel, Tutorial, Tutorials, Work

Hello everyone, Marisol and Alex here! How is everyone doing today? I think Alex and I are doing alright, we’ve just been really busy. Now, I’m sure you guys are reading this saying “huh? Alex and Marisol?” Yep, we’re both posting under the same blog today. Why, you may ask? Well, I will tell you.
A few weeks ago (it may have been a few months ago, I’m no longer sure), Alex and I devised a plan about how we can create a joint post. I came up with an analysis post where he and I look at one picture and we each come up with our own interpretations of the image. This is a bit of an experiment on the male and female perspectives of art, if there is such a thing, that is. Today, Alex and I will be analyzing  “Unrequited Love” by Deviant Art’s Elfdaughter (Averil White, who is also a new contributor to Sketching House, so please give her a warm welcome. Ms. White comes to us from the United Kingdom). So, without further ado, let the analysis begin! Click to read more …

Tags: Art Tutorial, artist, Averil White, blind art, blindness, color analysis, creating textures in art, darkness, Deviant Art Altura-Tears, Deviant Art Artists, Deviant Art Culturalrider, Deviant Art ElfDaughter, Disney, Disney's Cinderella, drawing textures, drawing tutorial, Dreams, Elfdaughter, emotive portraits, How to Analyze a Portrait, Perspective, Photo Analysis, princess crowns, royalty, Strathmore Drawing paper, tutorial for art, unrequited love, weddings, whiteness

Hmm, we haven’t had an art tutorial in awhile…

I’ve been working on a picture of four women. They’re all walking towards the point-of-view, which of course means that the ones closer to the camera must be larger than the ones farther away. I want this to look as proportionate as possible, so pow! I whipped out the sliding dummy.

You might be thinking “argh! Sliding dummies? What are you talking about?”

The sliding dummy is a nice tool that removes some of the pain of giving a character the right size in proportion to other characters on the page and the point-of-view (which is basically the lens of the imaginary camera that photographs the picture). When characters are walking in different directions, the sliding dummy makes it easier for the artist to figure out where the heads and bodies are supposed to go. If you are first learning how to use this awesome technique, I recommend you first draw a scene that has a back wall. Maybe its just me, but I find everything easier to visualize when there’s a flat wall to place the imaginary dummy up against. I have a picture that I might as well make an indoor picture. You can start with a character or a background first when drawing, but I mostly prefer a character because that’s usually the most important part of the picture for me. Click to read more …

Tags: Art, artist, drawing, figure, illustration, Perspective, proportion, Tutorial

School’s almost out and we all know you’re missing it already. So I decided to throw together a bunch of step-by-step tutorials on how to draw a bunch of school-related things. Explaining drawing step-by-step is really tricky so I made sure that I saved often when drawing so I could break each part down into as many steps as possible.

This guide is all about perspective, something an artist needs to know in order to draw crowds and settings. Follow this guide if you want to put your knowledge of perspective to the test. It took me forever to learn how to do perspective right and I owe everything I know about perspective to  Putting Things In Perspective. Even though this is a how-to-draw-manga book, this has definitely the most helpful book on perspective I’ve ever read, especially the parts on one and two-point perspective. Click to read more …

Tags: guidelines, Perspective, school, Tutorial

Proportions are Hard! But Possible.

Tags: angle, face, frontal, Perspective, profile, proportions, quarter, side, view

From a frontal perspective, features are mostly symmetrical. An artist doesn’t have to worry about the size of one eye in relation to the size of another eye. Drawing a face might become pretty easy, even routine. That is, until the artist is forced to turn the figure’s head. The eye that is closer to the point of view suddenly gets larger, while the eye moving away from the point-of-view shrinks. One ear gets bigger, while the other ear might completely vanish. The sides of the faces become distorted, with one side becoming rounder than the other. The face changes, and one of the illustrator’s biggest challenges is to adjust the proportions so that they look natural. Click to read more …

Tags: 3-D, 3D, draw, drawing, Eyes, face, features, frontal, illustrator, Perspective, profile, quarter, side, sketch, sketching, symmetry

New artists sometimes panic over proportions. I remember when I first tried drawing at age 7, all my character’s hands were bigger than their heads. Later on in life, I struggled to draw legs that looked right. My legs looked enormous while my bodies looked like oompa-loompa bodies.

Well, it turns out that I wasn’t completely off base if I were a Japanese cartoon artist. Really short, stubby arms and legs are the style found in chibi-style drawing. Really long legs are common in Shoujo manga, while really big heads are given to characters in order to increase their comicalness. Click to read more …

Tags: anime, cartoon, cartooning, chibi, comic, draw, drawing, figure, manga, Perspective, profile, proportion, shoujo, sketch