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.

There’s a ton of ways that characters sit, so covering them all in one tutorial would be crazy. So instead, I’m going to focus on how to draw characters sitting in chairs. The way a character looks when sitting in a chair varies depending on how the body is shaped and what the character is wearing, but there is a general shape that the legs take when in a sitting position.

(Click the picture to make it larger).

Side Profile

Start by  drawing a slight vertical line that curves outwards to the right (or left). This will be the character’s butt.

At the bottom of the line you just drew, continue with a very slightly curving line that curves downwards and to the right. This line is part of the character’s butt and thigh.

Continue the line as it travels more and more horizontally, becoming less and less curved. This forms more of the thigh.

Draw a line that attaches to the last line you drew. This line will be drawn vertically and curve slightly outwards. The bottom end of the line will travel to the left (or right).

Here I switched the line I just drew to the line of a pair of pants, but you can keep the original line if you want. Draw a horizontal line that travels to the left and slants slowly upwards. Then have the line curve dramatically upward and to the right, forming the toe of the foot. This will form the bottom and front part of the foot or shoe.

There should be a point where the thigh and the calf intersect. At this point, draw a curving line that travels downwards and to the left. The line will also curve outwards and to the right.

Have the line that you just drew curve outwards to the left (or right). Have this line travel downwards, forming the back part of the other leg.

Continue with the line you just drew, drawing a small bump where the heel should be. From this point, draw a curving line that curves slightly upwards and travels to the left. This line curves slightly upwards because it is forming the arch of the foot.

Draw a line that travels upwards and to the right, curving upwards and to the left. This will form the top part of the other shoe or foot.

Now, switch over to the other foot, drawing the curving horizontal line that makes up the shoe or foot for that part of the body. Have the line curve slightly upward and travel to the right.

Draw a line that curves horizontally and slightly upward. This will form the top part of the other thigh.

Continue this line by drawing a line that travels vertically, curving to the left until the line reaches the ankle, where it then curves to the right. The line finally curves to the left again to meet the lower foot.

Make adjustments to the leg.

That concludes part one of the sitting tutorials. I’ll be covering different positions and different sitting styles. I’ll keep covering this until I’ve run out of sitting styles or until someone emails me at sketchinghouse@gmail.com with a different topic. Just no dirty or degrading requests. I really want to cover how to draw every topic under the sun, but if this bores you to tears, send me an email and I’ll teach other things.

Best wishes,

Alex

Today, Alex and I went to Dunkin Donuts for coffee before we went to our Literary Study class. While we were there, we were greeted by a guy dressed as a pig. The pig made Alex and I laugh, then we found out that the pig was part of a dance troupe that dresses like animals in order to encourage young people to stay in school and get an education. I really hope they succeed in their mission and that they’re around next year, because Alex and I were planning on hiring the animals to entertain one of our professors! *Giggles.*

Anywho… time to get down to the nitty-gritty… we gots some learnin’ to do here! Git-er-done!

On November 18, I did a tutorial about Photomashing—a technique I created for unique character creations. To refresh your memories, oh mysterious viewers, Photomashing is a technique that involves taking facial features from different photos and piecing those images together to create a unique image that looks like Frankenstein’s monster. We left off with this image on the left.

Now we are ready to move on to the second part of this tutorial.

Take a deep breath…

One…

Two…

Three…

Welcome to the second part of our Photomashing tutorial! In this tutorial, I, Marisol Dominguez, will be teaching you how to draw your mashed drawing. I promise, that Frankenstein-looking image will look far from freaky once we’re finished with it! Here goes!

1) First, you’re going to open your Photomashed image using a photo editing program. I prefer Adobe Photoshop Elements 7. Then, you’re going to open up a blank image so you can start drawing the mashed picture, just don’t die because of the image’s ugliness.

2) We’re going to draw the frame of the face first. I usually draw the eyes first and work my way out, but in a Photomash case, I have to draw the facial frame first. Why? We need to keep all the proportions correct and by drawing the frame, I can assure that all proportions will be correct. To draw the face frame—if you are right handed—start from where you think the left ear should be. Draw down, creating a slightly lower right-slanted line which will then curve down to indicate a chin. Next, mirror this step by doing the same thing to the right side of the face. If you’re left handed, the steps will be reversed.

One either side of the chin, draw lines for the neck; when you get about two-three inches down, make your lines go left or right—depending on the side—for shoulders. Create a shirt any way you want.

I know it seems like a lot of steps for step two, but I have faith in all of you mysterious people out there, so don’t expect me to make things that simple for you.

3) We’re going to draw the eyes now. Eyes are really scary when you’re trying to create realistic eyes (Alex’s tips for anime eyes can carry over for realistic eyes), but it’s not as hard as some people think. First, draw a line that dissects the face ¼ to ¾ — the ¾ portion should be at the bottom of the face. On the ¼ line at the top (near the forehead), split that line in half vertically. About a quarter of an inch away from the center line, draw a circle on either side that is about half an inch in diameter. Draw smaller circles in the center of those circles; here are the irises and pupils.

Now, we’re going to draw the lids. Examine the eyelid on the Photomashed image and take note of the lid placement over the irises. Draw the lines to the upper lids FIRST, because the upper lids are the hardest to curve. Start from the inside corners and draw the line slightly up and then to the left or right, depending on the eye. Then, curve the line down slightly when you’ve reached the desired eye width. Then, start at the inside corner again and draw the lower lid. The lower lid is only slightly bent.

Add eyebrows, also. You can make these look however you want.

Whew! That was a lot of steps!

4) Draw the nose. To draw the nose, if you’re right-handed, start from the left and vice versa, and draw a line going down from the inside of the eyebrow. Make sure the line goes down about 2-3 inches, depending on how you want the nose to look. Then, add an outward arching line—like a comma—to the bottom to indicate a nostril. Repeat this step on the other side. Next, in the center of where you drew the nostrils, add darkened circles to indicate nostril holes. You can make these any size or shape you prefer.

Now you’re going to draw the lip lines. First, start with the center line (where the lips part) and draw the line until it extends a little past the two upper circles you’ve created (about a half inch). Follow the bottom curves of your circles so you can create realistic looking lips.

Next, start at the top of the two smaller circles, and add another line the curves up over the circles and bends down toward the center line for the upper lip. Next, do the same for the bottom lip. You have just created a pouty lip. I will do a tutorial later that shows how to create different types of mouths, don’t worry. Oh yeah, and erase the circles you created; they’re no longer needed.

6) Now that you have created the face, it’s time to add hair. You can do whatever type of hair you want—long, short, realistic, anime—it doesn’t matter, just have fun. In my image, I somewhat mimicked the hairstyle from the original Photomashed image simply because I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to create my own style. I attempted to create curly hair. For help with hair, check out my tutorial on digital hair which can be used for traditional drawing methods, or check out Alex’s post on short hair. When drawing hair, start with a basic outline and go to town and have fun. WOO!

Now look at your completed and compare it the freakish mesh we started off with. If you notice, the drawing looks a lot better. YAY! So now we can move on to coloring the image…

CLIFFHANGER ENDING!

Hehehe. When I get home tonight, I will create the coloring tutorial unless you all decide to get ahead of me.

Have a great day, mysterious viewers!

Love

Marisol

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.

You might decide to play around with the size of the eyes and ears. You might distort the nose and mouth. You might change the sides of the face. But no matter what you do, the face looks flat or incorrectly proportioned. Not only are the proportions off on the face, but the face also lacks 3-dimensionality. In order to draw a face that is meant to be 3-dimensional, you could try to study a real 3-D model. But oftentimes, you will not be able to get the 3-D image to look exactly like the 3-D model. This is because you need to see the basic dimensions that make up a 3-D image. This can only be achieved by taking the time to draw out the guidelines for the 3-D model.

I decided to draw a quarter profile. This is the profile that is halfway between a frontal profile and a side profile. All the facial features should be visible, though the features on the side of the face that is turning will be somewhat smaller and farther towards the edge of the face. The ear that is closer to the turning part of the face will be less visible, while the hair on the opposite side of the head will be more visible. Constructing these guidelines took me 15 minutes and should take you even less time, since I had to keep stopping in order to save new files.

The first thing I did was draw the flat part of the face. This is the easiest part of the guidelines process, since you simply have to draw a polygonal with one side slightly flatter than the other side. The farther you want the head turned, the flatter you will want to make the turning part of the head.

Next, I added the side of the face. I drew lines that nearly duplicate the side of the face that is turning closer to the point-of-view. The character’s face looks like it is cut from a thin plank of wood.

Now I added guidelines. These guidelines are going to eventually help me map out the facial features. I had these guidelines extend past what I had already drawn, since I will be soon adding the part of the face that will be the hair.

The most important thing I did here was add the hair guidelines. Even though that part looks a little distorted and even though the ear looks tiny, I can always redraw this part. The key is to get the general idea of what the face is going to look like.

I also added the neck. My goal was to make the neck look as much like a cylinder as possible. I know that no necks look like tubes, but I’m just trying to get the general idea of how the neck will be shaped. I can draw over this later.

I added tons of guidelines so that I would have an idea of where the forehead, eyes, nose and mouth would go. By doing that, I now have a mannequin that looks carved out of wood. All I have to do now is clothe this mannequin with hair and facial features. The key to drawing these guidelines is to connect different portions of the face together while having lines stretch across the parts of the face where you want to add features.

Using Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, I created a new layer and drew all over the guidelines. The guidelines helped me position and size my eyes. The only difficult part was drawing the nose, so I drew a nose based off a reference picture.

I deleted the guidelines. How does it look?

To delete the guidelines, simply click on the layer in the layer panel that has the guidelines. You can delete the layer or simply erase the guidelines manually. All that’s left to do is color, shade, add screen tones, ect.

Extra tips for 3-dimensionality: look around a room full of stuff and try to see the 3-dimensionality of each object. Right now, I’m in a room full of computers and I can clearly see the cubic nature of the computer towers. A wooden chair directly in front of me has all sorts of dimensions, though the direction I am facing it, I can really only see the top, front, and left side of the chair. If I were to draw this chair, I would have to keep these dimensions in mind in order to make the wooden chair 3-D.

Drawing guidelines for every face might become really time-consuming, but if you are struggling to draw a quarter profile, you should try using guidelines until you have finally taught your eyes to see everything with 3 dimensions. Art and drawing is all about trying new ways to construct artwork.

Keep your mind open or else,

Alex

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.

You might be thinking, “what the fudge?” These characters are all deformed. They don’t look like real people at all.

Okay… maybe you’re not really thinking that. You probably already know that art, especially cartoon art, can bend the rules as easily as Neo can stop bullets in mid-air. Abstract artists put ears where the noses are and put toes where the ears are supposed to be. Newspaper comics often are drawn with very little attention placed on realism. Many artists really do not care if their drawings look like photographs that have had the pencil sketch filter run on them. This is especially true for manga, which tries to stylize real life, rather than duplicate real life.

I created a gridline to show how four different figures can have much different proportions. I created each of these figures based off trends that I see in cartooning. I noticed that the two biggest differences in the proportions of the body seem to be found in the head and the legs. I broke down the drawing of each figure into sections in order to show how each figure is drawn (of course, not all figures are drawn from the head to the feet, but this is for illustrative purposes).

Above is a bunch of floating heads. No, they’re not victims of Sephiroth. Notice how they still have shoulders attached to them. The first head (the one farthest to the left) is drawn with the realistic style in mind. All the other characters are deviations from the realistic style. All of these characters are meant to have the exact same height in order to emphasize the difference in proportion. The second head is drawn slightly smaller than the first head in order to make more room for the body about to be drawn. The second head is larger, filling in the top section of the grid. The last head is the most comic head. The head’s so big that it doesn’t even fit in the first section of the grid.

Next, I added most of the torso for each body. The normal figure’s torso is the largest. The other figures seem to give more space to the head and limbs. Perhaps this is because the head and limbs are the most animated parts of a character. There isn’t much a character can say with his chest unless he’s standing in front of a mirror making his muscular chest dance (I’m not sure what that says and I’m not sure if I want to know). The second character has the smallest body, since the majority of the space is going to be taken up by the incredibly long legs. I gave the third character a decently sized body. The fourth character has a childlike body. If you want to give a character a really childlike body, make the shoulders more rounded and thicken the body. This will give the character the short stature of a child. Big heads also show that the character hasn’t grown into her head yet.

Next, I drew the lower half of the body. For most of the characters, I completed the arms at this level. Real-life hands, when held at the sides, extend slightly past the hip. This rule is not followed at all with the second and fourth characters. The really long arms that the second character has are meant to match her enormous legs. The fourth character only has arms that are slightly longer than they’re supposed to be. As for the lower half, I’m not always too great at drawing a lower half when I’m drawing the figure, so any patterns you might notice are all in your head :p .

For all of the figures, the next portion was almost entirely devoted to the legs. I tried to make the realistic character’s legs look the most realistic by giving them more of a round shape. The last figure, on the other hand, will have really simplistic legs. As you can see by now, the second character’s legs are going to be really long. Why is that? I’m not too sure. I know that Shoujo usually has characters with really long legs, but I can’t figure out why? If anyone has any idea, please email me.

In the final section, I added the legs. Again, I added a realistic roundness to the first figure. His body looks kinda solid, like he’d be a great martial artist. The second figure has really long arms and legs (I told you they would). The arms look ropey and the legs dominate more than 50% of the space. This character would definitely make fantastic basketball player. The third figure had a bigger head, with slightly longer legs. This character could pass as a run-of-the-mill anime character, except she still looks realistic enough to look attractive. The fourth figure has a head that dominates the character’s body. This character will rather be a egg-headed Ivy League type or a really cute mascot. Most likely the latter.

What do we get from all this? I think we’ve already figured out that an artist can draw whatever the heck he or she wants, but it’s probably also a good idea to keep the style of your character consistent. When you use a certain style, most viewers will get a general idea of what you’re trying to express when designing your character in a certain way. Most viewers will notice that you’re trying to draw a hard-edged realistic type or the emotional and eternally adorable mascot. Why confuse them by adding a huge head and extremely long, yet realistically defined arms. Unless you’re trying to draw Stretch Armstrong’s head exploding in space, why weird out your viewer with contradictory elements.

Then again, maybe you should prove me wrong. Some of the most successful innovators in this world were told that their idea would never work. If you could really visualize something great and fresh that mixes different styles, go for it. That’s where these styles came from in the first place. New ideas don’t come from artists following the same old tired conventions, but rather by experimenting and coming up with new conventions.

Happy drawing

Alex.

A great icebreaker is the reference picture method of getting started. Find a picture of something you’d like to draw and look carefully at the edges and features. Decide what style of art you want to do (traditional, manga, digital) and figure out how much of the features you want to show. For me, this is the easiest way to get started drawing and poses are a lot easier because you don’t have to wrack your imagination to visualize the correct anatomy and positioning of a certain pose. You just look at what’s in the picture and try to draw it.

With this picture, I tried to stay minimalistic. I didn’t make an effort to emphasize the bridge of the nose and I didn’t care too much about texture for this tutorial. But as I played around with it, I decided that using a reference picture makes drawing way too easy sometimes (maybe that’s just me… something else might work better for you). I could have made the picture look digital, but that’s usually an entire day’s work for me and I only have 3 hours today to create this. So I decided to play around with animeitizing a realistic picture.

First, I made the eyebrows have less roundness in order to give them an edgier look. I did the same for the eyes and erased a lot of the eye lid while making the rest of the eye lids less round. Then I added pupils and a lens flare to the cornea. Really, no anime eye is complete without a lens flare.

When I got to the nose, I decided to erase the entire thing. I was trying to decide whether or not I should leave it blank. With anime noses, the general rule of thumb is that you want simpler noses for younger characters and more complex noses for older characters. Said goodbye to the nose, but I thought the face looked freaky with no nose in the middle (I think all noseless anime looks kinda weird and how hard is it to draw a little triangle there). So that’s why there’s that triangle where the nose should be.

Moving on… I shrunk the mouth a little and got rid of those freaky teeth. The thing about teeth is that they look fine on real people, but anime characters look manic when they have teeth. The teeth seriously pop out at you. But a nice, white square works fine for toothers. So I did that, shrunk the mouth a little bit, shrunk the teeth a little more, and then erased the lips.

On a side note, I’m a big fan of empowerment for everyone. Yet by making the mouth smaller I’m almost conforming to sexist ideals. I heard somewhere that Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because Hello Kitty is a metaphor for the way Japanese society wants women to act. That is… Japanese women are expected to be cute and have almost nothing to say. They are supposed to be silenced. But on the flip-side, tons of anime and video game women kick butt very seriously. Anime is jam-packed with empowered women who can take care of themselves and pursue what they want. Not that they every draw these action-packed Amazon fem-warriors without their mouths. *Draws even bigger mouth on face.*

So next, I shrunk the face a little bit and made it more heart-shaped. This is really common in anime. Then I made sure to create a new layer (I’m drawing this whole thing on tablet) and use the pen tool so that my lines can be really smooth and round (pen tool rocks when creating anime characters). Using the pen tool seems time consuming, but eventually you learn to move quickly and it would take me a lot longer to manually clean up pencil strokes. A good piece of advice is to do each part of the pen tooling process in chunks so that if you make a mistake, you don’t have to start all over. And save often!!! *Beats with newspaper.*

Alright, she’s been animeitized! Now you might ask yourself, “why did he animeitize what could have been a perfectly good realistic picture.” One reason is that anime looks cool (yea, that’s the answer you’ll get from most manga-heads). But a less obvious reason is that I don’t know how to draw realistically using a tablet yet. Okay, I never learned to draw realistically period. Go ahead, beat me with a newspaper. They say you should always learn to draw realistically first before learning to draw anime. Well I learned to draw realistically perfectly fine using colors, blending tools, and the smudge/blur tool. Yeah, I know that people learn realistic first because “you have to know what anime is imitating before you can imitate it.” I think that’s a bunch of hooey. It’s like saying that in order to learn English, you have to learn Latin first and that if you learn English first, you’ll never be able to learn Latin. Hooey!

Stay tuned. I’ll be posting something new tomorrow or the day after that (depends on if Marisol’s muse visits her). My muse just got back for vacation from Sioux Falls. Hopefully she’ll stick around this time.

Signing out,

Alex

I added some color too