I love to write more than anything else in the world. But there are some things that you can’t really show with text and pictures. Also, some people just learn better with video. So to be helpful in that way, we’re going to be posting videos in some of our tutorials on how to draw and create other forms of art. Please comment and let us know what you think.

These tutorials were done using Photoshop CS2. Don’t worry, we’re getting a digital camera soon so that we can post video tutorials on how to draw traditionally.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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.

For both realistic and cartoon eyes, the pupil is usually the easiest part. For stylistic reasons, some cartoon artists completely omit the pupil altogether. But most of the eyes I’ve seen have pupils in them. All that’s needed is a simple black circle in each eye. Make sure that this circle is symmetrically drawn.

Thus ends the easy part. Next, we’re going to add the shading found at the top part of the eye. This is done by covering the top part of the iris with black. Make sure to leave some space between the pupil and the black because you will want to make the roundness of the pupil obvious.

Next, we’re going to take part of the black and erase it. Choose the color you want to make your eye and find a good, solid representation of that color. We’re going to be drawing over the black with the color you’ve chosen for the eye. Be sure to leave small lines of black behind after covering most of the shading.

Next, we’re going to take those parts and smudge them upwards. Why in the world would we do that? Because in real life, shading doesn’t start and stop abruptly. By throwing in a little black in gradually, the shift from brown to darker brown to black will seem more realistic. (At least I hope so)

Now it’s time to add those neat folds I’ve been rambling about above. This can be done by drawing lines that extend from the pupil to the outer edges of the iris. For these lines, pick colors that are lighter than the base color for the iris.

Next, draw a squiggly line that moves through every single one of the lines you just drew, using the same shade that you used to draw the lines.

Start smudging the lines, moving your smudging tool from the pupil to the outer edge of the eye. Do this carefully and slowly so that you can change any mistakes you made. You want the lines to sorta merge with the pupil very faintly.

To add to the gradual shift from the top shading to the bottom shading, you can use a burn tool in Adobe Photoshop CS4in order to go over the top part of the iris. This program can also be used to create the highlight effect using the dodge tool as seen on the bottom part of the iris. You can then adjust the eye with the hue/saturation feature and use the blur tool in order to make some aspects of the iris appear more seamless.

The final part is the glare. Glares can be really sophisticated, but for now, let’s just add a simple white circle. Place one or two white circles of different sizes on the eye and blur them in order to make them seem like they’re actually a part of the eye. This glare really helps make the eye appear more round.

This iris is all well and good, but what if you do not have the time to detail the iris. Or what if realistic eyes just aren’t your style and you want to create beautiful cartoonish eyes. Creating pretty cartoon eyes starts with finding an attractive color. There’s no hard, fast rules for selecting the right color so you’re going to have to trust your gut instinct. I felt like using a dark blue.

Next, pick a darker color and create a trapezoid going over the top part of the eye. Then pick a lighter color and create another trapezoid near the bottom of the eye. Finish up by drawing a curving line near the bottom of the line with the lightest color. That’s four colors total. Then blur the edges where different colors meet. One way to do this is to use a selection tool and select a particular section of the eye to run the Gaussian blur filter on if you’re using Photoshop. Otherwise, you can use a blending stick or tissue to blend the edges together so that they come together seamlessly.

That’s it for this one. Good riddance, it’s getting late. There’s a couple of odds and ends when it comes to the eyes that I haven’t covered yet and they’ll all be thrown into one big super tutorial which will come out eventually. Until then, I’ll be covering a completely different topic: shading.

Alex

Paint.net

Pros

I think Paint.net is the best starter program for those just learning how to do digital art. Paint.net lacks a lot of bells and whistles. The program runs a little faster than Photoshop and much faster than GIMP. In fact, I still use Paint.net for really simple edits because it runs faster. Also, their filters rock almost as much as Photoshop’s and you can download free plugins in order to expand your arsenal.

Cons

Paint.net is kinda skimpy on its features and their brushes really suck. The only brush that’s useful at all is the basic brush, unless you’re creating simplistic designs.Paint.net also doesn’t have a lot of the features that I’ve grown to love and rely on when using Photoshop. They have the lasso tool, which allows you to select specific parts of an image you’re working on. But they lack the polygonal lasso, which is great for artists who don’t have steady hands. They lack the pen tool, which makes it difficult to select very specific sections of the art and also makes it difficult to create complex polygons with curves (though they do have the curves tool). But for me, the most unforgivable sin for Paint.net is that they lack a blur and smudge tool. Without those tools, a lot harder to blend different parts of your image together. They do have the blur filter, which can replace the blur tool if you select certain portions with the lasso tool and you have a really steady hand.

GIMP

Pros

GIMP has most of the really important features on Photoshop. They have the coveted pen tool. They also have the essential blur and smudge tool. I can’t remember if they have the polygonal lasso or not. But that tool can be replaced by the pen tool easily. They have some good filters and plenty of plugins. This is a good program for those who want most of the features of Photoshop but never want to pay for the Photoshop program.

Cons

Oddly enough, the size of GIMP’s brushes are limited. This is a strange feature, since it can’t be that hard to increase the size of the brushes. GIMP also has the slowest running time. When using GIMP, I was met with frequent crashes. Also, for some reason, the lines that I created using the pen tool weren’t always perfectly smooth.

The Moral

Adobe is a little absurd charging nearly $1,000 for their Photoshop programs. Yeah, Photoshop is seen as the absolute best graphics program out there for most digital artists. But how do they expect starving artists to ever afford that much money?

Download GIMP http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.6.4-i686-setup.exe

Download Paint.net http://www.dotpdn.com/files/Paint.NET.3.36.zip

Alex

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Hi, everybody! Marisol here. Alex offered some ideas for free programs, but if you are heavy into digital art and you enjoy doing it, there are programs that are under $100 available. Yes, they’re not as fancy as any of the Photoshop CS programs, but they are just as good. Alex mentioned that there is Photoshop Elements and Corel Painter, both of which have their pros and cons. I own both and I was fortunate enough to receive them free with my Wacom Intuos Tablet. However, both programs are well worth the money if you’re willing to spend it, especially if you’re really in to digital art.

Photoshop Elements

I happen to like Elements more than CS. Sure, Elements is what the title implies: the elements–your really basic digital tools. As Alex mentioned, Elements doesn’t have a pen tool, but everything else about it is great. You have your blur and burn tools, which are essential in digital art creation, but you also have the option of creating brushes and downloading brushes like its nobody’s business! Photoshop Elements has fantastic calligrapher brushes which make up for the lack of pen tool. However, I never really understood why the pen tool was so important. Basically, if you use the right pressure and you go along in small strokes, any brush can dublicate the pen tool look, but that is my opinion. I’ve never had a pen tool and when I did use it, I found it difficult to handle.

Photoshop Elements is basically the same as PSCS, just without the bells and whistles. A lot of the features are the same and the program is easy to use. Personally, I love Elements because of some of the cool effects you can create with it. There is a photo fram feature and a feature where you can create Andy Warhol-esque images. Very cool. Photoshop Elements is the best bang for your buck.

Corel Painter

Personally, I am not a fan of Corel Painter mainly because I find it difficult to use. Sure, the features are great, but I find the program to be glitchy and lacks that special oomph that makes it a great program. The drawing feature on Corel Painter is hit and miss because sometimes the lines pick up, others times they don’t, no matter what the pen pressure is. I find it to be very lax on features, however, it’s a great beginner’s tool. If you are a beginning artist, practice with Corel Painter, but I highly recommend you download the free trial. However, a lot of hardcore artists do use Corel Painter and love it, so maybe I have had bad luck.

Marisol

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.

Draw a line that curves upwards. This will be a tiny line that represents the corner of the eye. Then draw a second line that travels outwards, curving slightly. Finish with a long, curving line that represents the bottom of the eye. These will be the eyelids.

Draw two curving lines in between the two eyelids. These will represent the irises. Notice how the entire eye isn’t completely shown. Instead, the top and bottom parts of the irises are covered by the eyelids.

Create a duplicate but reversed version of the eye you just drew.

Draw a line that slants downwards and to the left. This line will be beneath the eyes in the middle of the face. Yep, this is the nose. This line will then suddenly travel downwards and to the right, forming a right angle. The corner of this right angle will be rounded.

Draw a broad line that curves only slightly downwards to show a slight smile. This character is meant to be somewhat older, so I put slanting lines in the corners of his mouth that slant downwards.

Between the nose and the mouth, draw two lines that start somewhat near the nose that curve outwards and travel down towards the mouth.

Draw some curving lines beneath the eyes.

Draw two curving lines somewhat beneath the mouth that are small and very curved. Start drawing the jaw. The jaw will be less pointy than usual on this guy, since sagging skin will make his jaw seem wider.

Draw the rest of the head. Have the lines that make up the head slant outwards as they travel upwards. When you’re ready to draw the top of the head, draw a curving line that connects both slanting lines.

Draw the folk’s ears. Draw a curving line that starts at the edge of the head, curves and then travels downwards a long way becoming more straight with a slight curve. Have the line curve at the bottom until it touches the side of the head. As for the inside of the ear, you will probably need a human model
. No matter what, the ear is always drawn with curving lines near the edge of the ear within the ear. What’s tricky to draw is the opening of the ear canal near the ear lobe.

Draw the hair however you’d like, though it’s a bad idea to draw every individual strand.

Alex

Start by drawing a curving line that slants towards the head.

On the part of the ear that’s farther away from the head, draw the line as a curve that suddenly goes into a slant that moves towards the head.

Draw a line that starts near the bottom middle near the edge of the ear. This line will travel along the outer edge of the ear until you reach the top corner closest to the head. Then the line will curve downwards and away from the head until it stops.

Where the last line you drew ends, place your drawing tool slightly above the end and draw a curving line that travels downwards. Continue until you draw a half circle.

The next part looks sorta like an upside down S that is a little more elongated and attached to the half circle you drew.

At this point, draw another S that is right-side up and attaches at the bottom to the line that you just drew.

Now locate the inner curving line and draw two curving lines that travel downwards and attach at the tip like a triangle or a strand of hair.

Finish by drawing a line that travels near the inner line that you just drew on the outer side on the inner side of the ear (good thing there’s pictures, this is confusing). At the bottom of the ear, draw a small curving line that curves upwards.

Next, let’s try another type of ear (woo!). Start off by drawing a curving line that looks like a hook. The line will be curving towards wherever the head is supposed to be.

Wherever you want the bottom of your ear to be, draw a line that curves downwards.

On the side of the ear that is away from the head, draw a slightly curving line that connects both of the other lines.

Draw a curving line within the hook part of the line and have that line travel along the outside part of your line until you stop somewhere near the top.

Where the last line ended, move up a little and draw a line that travels downwards and curves, attaching to the outer part of the ear. This line will travel down, slant downwards and to the left and then slant more steeply until it touches the outer part of the ear.

Now head over to the other part of the ear and draw two lines, one that curves upwards and one that curves downwards. These lines will be curving away from each other. The bottom line will slant downwards more and father out than the upper curve.

From where you left off, draw a line that travels downwards and curves towards the character’s head.

From this point, draw a similar curving line that sorta forms a small M but stops early and slants more towards the head.

The next part’s incredibly difficult to describe. Yeah, the ear is kinda tricky. Luckily, most people aren’t experts in what an ear looks like and most people won’t notice if there are minor errors in the ear. Of course, if you’re trying to get the ear really right, you’ll need to draw from an art model.

Now, let’s draw the ear that’s really difficult to see. The ear that is drawn from the back. Start by drawing a slightly curving line.

Draw a second line that makes a pass at the first line. This line travels more downwards and is even less curved.

At the bottom of the last line that you drew, draw a second line that curves in the other direction.

At the bottom of this line, draw a small curving line that travels away from where the ear connects to the side of the head and curves downwards. Then draw a line that travels directly upwards.

Where you left off at the straight line, draw a second line that curves upwards and away from the ear.

Draw a slightly curving line that connects the two lines that are traveling somewhat vertically up. Draw a line that hangs freely to the left of the ear. Find the bottom of the ear and draw a line that curves away from the ear and upwards.

Start off by drawing a head. Theoretically, you could just draw the arm. But arms are hard to draw if you aren’t seeing them in proportion to the rest of the body and you might as well get more practice with figure drawing. So draw a circle.

Now, figure out proportions. We’re not going to draw out the entire body, but it helps to get the entire body down when drawing a picture if you have enough room. Bodies are typically seven and a half to 8 and a half heads long. If you are drawing a live model, you can then get the proportions right by using the head as a frame of reference. All you have to do is simply stretch your arm out and close your non-dominant eye, which is the eye in which objects move when you close your other eye.

Once I have the heads all drawn out, I find it easy to create markers at different places on the body in order to know where I’m at. For instance, I know that the breastbone is slightly above the third circle. So draw the whole body out. I didn’t try to draw a perfect body because I want to focus more on the arms, the whole point of this blog post.

When hung straight, the arms usually stretch far enough that the hands are level with the point at which the legs spread apart. You might want to draw these first since then you’ll know where to go with your arms. For this tutorial, do not worry too much about the hands, since we’re not focusing on hand art.

Next, draw the circles where the elbows are supposed to be at. These circles are slightly above the point where the torso and hips meet.

The rest of the arms you can draw in any order. For the outer part of the arms connected to the shoulders, draw the lines with a slight curve. With the human body, everything has a curve in it. So be sure to always include that.

Next, draw the armpits. Why? Because the armpits will connect to the inner part of the arms. Armpits are really simple curving lines that aren’t even noticeable when the arms are close to the body. However, if the arms are raised above the head, the armpits will change greatly. However, this will be covered in a different tutorial.

The elbows, when the arms are straight, have slight curves inwards.

I think the way the arm is drawn works for most drawings. But you might want to get even more realistic with the form of the arm. I decided to redraw the left arm and focus on that solely. The left arm is turned with the top part of the forearm facing outwards. What this is going to create is an arm that has the inner part bulging while the outer part is somewhat flat.

If the arm is twisted in the right way, the outer part will have the bump where the elbow is found visible. From the elbow to the deltoids, there’s a curving line like that shown in the picture that almost goes within the arm, thus the line drawn inside the arm.

For the inner part, there will be more of a bulge if the arm is twisted with the bicep facing the person’s side. The deltoid overlaps the bicep in a way, so more muscular characters with a low body fat index might have a slight fold in the inner arm as well as the outer arm.

Some people find arms easy to draw while others find it wildly hard (like me). One tip for drawing the arm also fits for drawing really anything else. If you get to a part where you’re having trouble drawing, just draw it really slowly. Take your sweet time and focus fully on what the arm should look like.

Another tip for drawing arms is to simplify. This is an especially good idea whenever you draw cartoons. In fact, with cartoon art, there is no limit to how simplified your line drawing can be. Keep the arm as simplified as possible until you have the arm that you’re looking for. Then, you can start adding details and making the arm as you see fit. Just remember that arms are never straight and always have at least some minor curves.

Once you start drawing arms frequently, you will start to notice that arms really only are made of circles. You can really draw an arm in any position as long as you visualize the circles in the arm.

Drawing arms straight isn’t too tough, but what really gets tricky is when you try to draw arms in different positions. That asks for a whole different tutorial for a different day. For now, just practice getting the proportions right and finding the muscles that are found inside the arms.

Hmm, the arms are out of proportion. Make sure that the upper and lower arm are of equal length. Also, make sure that the fingers touch the mid thigh (as quoted by the lovely Marisol! Hi Alex! I took over your post! I’m posting about arms too in a little while).

Alex

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.

Now, just take that same brush and start blending, you’ll notice how the background starts to look a little more like a scenery, here I can almost see clouds developing, which is just what I want.

Now I changed the adjustment and hue a bit so now it’s a darker blue, which I like, it blends in better this way. I grabbed a light  color blue and a small hard brush and started making the linings of the clouds, highlights give them that depth and definition.

Now to make the moon! The moon is just about the easiest step ever! Take a large soft brush and with a pale blueish gray color, make a circle, the shape of the moon. Then, take a light blue color, a little smaller brush, not too small, just a smidge smaller than the one you had and make the center of the moon for the glow. I make a custom brush for the craters, but usually I add a dark shade and make the little marks in there. After you’ve done that, duplicate the layer, gaussian blur the layer, and pick a mode that bests suits you, I tend to like Overlay.

And here, I added more highlights to the clouds, taking the dodge tool over them, making the reflection of the moon more prominent. Also, I added the little bit of background in the far off, the church which is basically a silhouette with a light blue lighting. So there, all you do is make a solid dark shape of the building, then where the light hits, add the highlight of that color, in this case blue. That’s all there is to it! Now, you could leave the entire picture like this and it’ll be fine, you’re done! But, if you’re me, and feel like it could use an extra something, try to flatten the image, duplicate it, blur, gaussian blur to 3.0 or something, and change the layer to Overlay or anything else you like. The end result may look like this:

Tada! I used overlay as my option, and though it really takes away from the detail, since everything was so dark, it really enhanced the mood and feel of the picture. I love how it made the background really bright and dark at the same time, that’s a pretty sky isn’t it? Look how smooth the skin turned out! The church in the back also looks creepy and mysterious, just how I wanted! Well that’s it for this tutorial series, maybe I’ll do another one within these next days I’m off.

So there you have it folks! From skin, to hair, to clothes to background! Hope you enjoyed. Now I’m off to sulk a bit and drown myself in music. Sayounara!

-Tala

Alright, so right now it’s pretty plain, and looks something like this 

Azcona needs clothes! This design is really simple, and quite lazy, I had no idea what kind of clothes I wanted him in, so I just threw something together.  Now this brings me to the next step.

With a soft round brush, or a hard brush with 70 percent opacity, paint the clothes with their base color. This is what I figure would be the color clothes he’d wear, I can change it later, which I just might end up doing. Anyway, fill in the shapes, clean it up a bit and it should look like this.

Alright, now start taking a darker color and fill it in, define more shapes to the clothes, add shadows where they should be, like where the creases and wrinkles are, folds and all that good stuff.

Alright, so I went to Image, adjust, hue/saturation and adjusted it so that it was a bit more black. Also, I took a small pixel eraser and started to erase parts of his cloak to make it look more tattered. Also, with about 3 pix hard brush, I drew loose strings that would come from those rips and tears, as if you know when you rip something, there are fibers that are ripped too.

Alright, here I drew  more shadows and fibers, along with doing the piece near his neck, which is like a tight turtle neck cover. Nothing much here, but I wanted to show a picture of how that works out. Just use a slightly darker color from the base color and make horizontal lines, and repeat the process getting a little darker at a time.

Ok! Now the fun part, I’m going to show a very quick and easy way to draw the cross. It’s so simple, you’ll be amazed to find out just how it’s done! So what you want to do is draw everything in a dark dark color, almost black, but in the hue you want. For me, I want the beads to be red, so I’m going to start with a dark dark red color.  Alright, now that I have that, I’m going to take a small brush, 3 pix is what I usually use, since it’s nice and small. So I take a vibrant red color and make the little red dots inside the darker ones, which gives it some volume, but we’re not done yet! Now I take an almost white color and add tiny tiny white shiney dots on the side where the light is, which makes it seem to pop out a lot. I go back to the skin layer and make shadows where the necklace is, and take a soft brush, with the vibrant red color and lightly dab it on to look like the reflection is hitting on skin.

That’s all for the clothes! It’s turning out nice, now just the background is left! I’d upload that one right now… but I’m too busy listening to this guy sing and falling in love with his voice! He’s amazing and I think everyone should check him out on Youtube! <3 But that’s for another time….

-Tala