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.

My story takes place in a setting inspired by pre-history Philippines. I’d draw her wearing the clothes that people wore during that time frame, but they mostly wore nothing. That reminds me of a museum exhibit I saw of Native Americans. Some of the figurines of the Native Americans were completely nude. That was so weird since I was shielded from all nudity as a kid and then I’m exposed to a culture that sometimes runs around naked. I guess I learned from that how values can be way different from culture to culture.

You might think “hey, she doesn’t look Filipino.” Well, actually she’s Negrito. From the research I did, Negritos settled in the Phillippines before the Austronesians, an indigenous group from what is now called Taiwan.

That is the initial sketch I started off with. I like that sketch and might use it for a different drawing. How did she change so much? A whole bunch of reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to practice foreshortening, which is something I need to learn how to do with the body. Well, I didn’t really succeed at foreshortening her because that is tough!

What’s foreshortening? Foreshortening is how objects seem deformed at different angles. I guess I made her arms somewhat foreshortened, but their sizes are roughly the same and not large enough to show a real contrast.

So now what? I drew new torso lines in order to make her body appear turned to the side. I also foreshortened her shoulders, making one appear larger and one smaller to indicate that one shoulder is turned farther away from the point-of-view.

Next, I made her sides more shapely and raised her chest. Now she doesn’t look like she has the body of a 90000 year old woman. (I meant to say 900, not 90000).

At this point, I decided to redraw her clothes. Why? She looked like she was wearing a kimono or tunic, which doesn’t really fit with her character. But nudity doesn’t work for me, so I made up some clothes. I also redrew her arms. I liked how they looked, but they look way too long right now. I think this is where I was getting tired two nights ago because her proportions are extremely out of whack. I started drawing her legs because I wanted to shorten her dress. With dresses, its really important that you draw all of the legs out in order to make sure that you have the proportions right.

I did a little resizing and drew out the basic shape of the head.

Then I drew her face. I was aiming for a face that was both delicate and Negrito, but I ran into a problem. Most cartoon and manga faces are European/Asian inspired. Rarely do you see other races represented. I really had nothing to go off. I wanted to emphasize this character’s ethnicity, but I also wanted to keep her features relatively simple. So I experimented with the nose and lips until I got the results that I wanted.

I also added hair, my favorite part.

Then I added lineart and widened her features. I don’t know why I did this and I think I’m going to change it back later.

As you can see now, I colored her. I don’t know if I gave this advice out yet or not, but setting your coloring layers on multiply allows you to color without coloring over dark lines. This is good if you have a hard time coloring within the lines.

Then I used a handy-dandy color scheme generator at: www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Just plug in the value for one of the colors you’re using and it’ll generate colors that are compatible. These colors should pop out more when put together.

So I drew her and showed her to Marisol and she drew all over her. She took her mouse and drew all these lines all over my drawing like it was nobody’s business (joking. I asked her to).

This is sort of like an artist’s version of proofreading. It really helps to have someone else look at your artwork before you finish it because they can see mistakes that you missed. Being an artist doesn’t have to be lonely.

I took her advice and adjusted her. But I gave her brown eyes instead of blue.

Like usual, I have to finish most of my tutorials in multiple blog posts. This isn’t because tutorials take that long, but because I have to write these in gaps of time between school and work. I wish I could write more tutorials, but time is always so short. Still, Marisol and I promise that we’ll always keep updating. We won’t be those people who stop posting out of the blue.

I love you all,

Alex

I decided to create a digital character and see how far I could go in a drawing tutorial. First a little sketching. Then some line cleanup. Lay over some lineart. Erase the sketches beneath. Add details. Add color. Do cell style shading. I don’t get how professional digital artists pull that off in 6 hours. I worked on this guy for 6 hours and I was able to get the lineart done only. Now at 11 o’clock, I’m yawning too much to even see my keyboard. Since I’m on break, I want to see how far I can take him. Maybe I’ll even add a background.

When drawing or painting, the artist has a boatload of choices. Painters can choose between watercolor, acrylic, and oils. Sketchers can use graphite pencils, regular pencils, or go straight to pen. Digital artists can use a mouse, tablet, or pen tool. You can even combine different tools. For instance, you can start off with graphite pencils on drawing paper, then scan the drawing with a really good scanner, and then use the pen tool to replace the rough sketch with smooth lines. You can even print out a piece of digital art, fix a mistake, and then scan the image again.

There are lots of different approaches to all the different effects that artists go for when drawing. For instance, when using a traditional medium like a graphite pencil, you can cross-hatch, make short dabs with the pencil, or you can make really short sketch-marks. With digital art, you can fill certain parts of the picture with a shade of grey or a darker shade of a particular color, or you could use screentones. Some of these techniques are faster, while other techniques are felt to be faster for some artists. There’s really no rules with what you use and different methods can be combined.

I got this whole blockhead man thing going. By drawing the head initially as a box, I just might be able to draw a 3D head. Getting the box 100% right isn’t a big deal, since you’re going to erase the box anyway if you’re using this technique. Really, all the parts of the drafting stage are there simply to give you something to easily expand off of.

Then I drew arms. The arms look out of proportion, but that doesn’t matter because I can always fix it later. I drew what I was going to make a spear or wand. I drew circles where the knees would be, but that’s not so important if you’re not drawing bent legs.

I’m using a tablet by the way. I used to scan drawings that I created using drawing paper and a graphite pencil. Sometimes I drew with a really fine-pointed pen with really black ink so that I could ink the smallest lines. I made sure that I paid a few extra dollars to get a really good pen, so that I wouldn’t be stuck with something that would dry up halfway through a stroke.

After getting the guidelines done, I started crafting the body. With the limbs, I drew two ovals that come together at the joints. I drew an oval for the face on the front of the box and I drew the forehead on the top part of the box. I connected the top and bottom part of the body with curving lines where the waist is at.

Since I’m using a graphics program with my tablet, I’m able to do each step on different layers. Since I really don’t need the guidelines anymore, I deleted the guidelines from the character. Then I started drawing the wingspan. Yesh, he’s going to be an angel (or something).

Then I continued drawing the wings. I’m not all that experienced with drawing wings, but I tried

Next, I started drawing the face. I drew eyes, even though the hair I ended up using completely covered the eyes. But its important to draw all features so that you can more easily draw the features in the right spots on the face.

Then I got lazy and decided to plop hair that I drew earlier and liked on to the head. This hair looks really faded. But don’t worry. I am going to go over that hairdo with a pen tool. You might notice that the face vanished too. No problem! I posted the hair on a separate layer and I can use my trusty eraser tool to erase the part of the hair image that covers the face. Tada!

I also drew a cape for good measure. This was done with curving lines that curve outwards.

I had four other pictures, but I just discovered that there’s something wrong with them. I’ll have to redraw them some other time and add them to this post. For a general idea, I created a new layer. Then I used the pen tool to create paths that I then stroked using the smallest paintbrush. This is done by clicking on one point to create a vector, and then clicking where you want your line to end and holding. You can then move your mouse around in order to give the line a curve. I guess theoretically you could draw the entire character this way, but I found that characters drawn this way always end up distorted for some reason. So I’ve been drawing each individual curve instead. I then went to the lower layers and erased the messier lines beneath.

As you can see, I also added clothes and details to the wand. This guy is almost ready to be refined, shaded, highlighted, and colored. But there was one last thing I wanted to fix for today. For some reason his hand was abnormally large and his feet looked kinda on the large side. But no fear! I used my trusty lasso tool to create a selection that I wanted to resize. Then I clicked and held the box in the bottom-right corner and dragged the mouse towards the center of the selection until the hand was the size that I wanted. I rinsed and repeated for the feet.

So there ya have it. He’s not exactly perfect. If you squint, you can see all kinds of problems with his legs. He’s not exactly looking realistic yet, but I’m going to keep working on him to the extent of my abilities, maybe even give him a name.

Till next time, I bid thee adieu

Alex

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

Drawing Tutorial Part 1: How to Draw Gobs of Hair.

There’s really only four parts to a long set of hair. These are the front, back, sides, and top. The top is really the easiest to draw… most of the time. If you’re getting really creative, you might want to draw spikes and curves all over the top of the head. But for neater hair, all you need to do is draw a nice round line. Or you can draw a slight dip in the middle of the top of the hair. This is the easiest part of learning how to draw long hair.

Back of Hair

The next part of the hair usually drawn is the back, though you can start drawing from any part of the hair. Do not get the back confused with the sides. The outline of the back of the hair can be seen at the sides of the head, but the sides are actually the part of the hair that connects to the front of the hair, or bangs.

This is where hair gets defined as a gob of hair or  angled hair. Draw gobs of hair like the hair on the left by focusing on the outline of the hair. For the style on the left, all you have to do is draw slightly wavey lines going vertically. Then, you get to decide how detailed you want the hair to be by adding lines.

Draw simple lines

Draw really simple lines that curve roughly the same way as the outline of the back of the hair curves. This hairstyle is great practice for new artists, since these lines can be drawn without a whole lot of effort.

As you might see on the picture to the left, the curving lines on the back of the hair curve sharply and collide in the center of the top of the hair. This is done to emphasize that each strand of hair connects to the character’s scalp.

When you reach the bottom of the hair, you can make the hair do whatever you want it to. You can make the hair disappear behind the character’s shoulders, or you can draw a really simple straight line that neatly connects the bottom of each strand. You can have each strand end with an angle, or you can have the strands of hair curve upwards. The choice is yours.

Click to view description.

Sideburns included.

For globs of hair, the sides of the hair can be completely ditched. The sides of the hair are often brushed so that they become part of the back of the hair. The bangs seem to rest magically on the forehead. If the sides of the hair are draw, they often appear like renegade sideburns that go in directions different than the rest of the hair. This part of the hair can be really fun, since you can do all sorts of things with the sides of the hair. But this part of the hair is nowhere near as fun as the front of the hair, aka the bangs.

These bangs clump together on each side and curve outwards.

These bangs clump together in a really cute way.

The bangs are where an artist can really show creativity. Bangs vary based off the texture of the hair, the wetness, the length, and how the bangs are combed. One thing that is almost universal about bangs is that they are almost always curvy. But how they curve is up to you. They can curve in a natural way by having the curves on the left and right curving with their strands pointing towards each other. This often creates a space in the front of the head. The strands of hair can curve in all sorts of random directions. Thick, short bangs often clump up in a really cute way, creating really unique and adorable bangs. Also, a bunch of hair can really rebel and clump together in what looks like a giant strand. This curve can then swing in a really dramatic direction. This monstrous strand of hair can cover the entire face. The possiblities are endless.

Clumpy bangs: when bangs go horribly wrong!

Drawing Tutorial Part 2: How to Draw Angled Hair

The sides of the hair have little angles that break away from the sides of the hair and then return.

This hairdo is made up of almost all the same curved angles.

Angled hair is extremely common in cartoon drawing. Angled hair creates really nice points for the tips of the strands of hair. These strands can curve, or they can form nearly perfect triangles. This type of hair might seem intimidating at first, but anyone can master it! The back is sometimes drawn as really large curves. Other times, the back is drawn just like the hair globs, only with little angles breaking away from the hair to create a more messy look. The top is usually drawn just like in the hair gobs, though sometimes the artist can get really creative and draw angles that curve upwards. One of the most defining features with this style of hair is the sides of the hair. Sometimes the sides behave in a renegade fashion like with the hair globs, while other times the sides of the hair look just like the back of the hair. The

With angled hair, the top of the hair can go crazy.

only difference is that the sides of the hair are always a little shorter

The bangs sorta hang there, covering the face.

and get shorter as they merge with the bangs. The bangs can be drawn however you like, though the hairdo usually looks better if the bangs are drawn similar to the rest of the hair, unlike with the hair globs. This hair-drawing method is great for really messy hair, though it takes more effort to draw. Since this style involves more lines, there is more room to screw up some of the lines. But drawing curves and points are easier than you think and you’ll soon get the hang of it.

Drawing Tutorial Part 3: How to Draw Individual Strands of Hair

Individual strands can get out of hand.

Its really easy to screw up the individual strands of hair.

This part deserves a whole tutorial on its own. Individual strands can get ever more complex and detailed when you add shading and color. Given enough effort, you can eventually make individual strands of hair look like real hair. What sucks is that a project like this can take hours. Thus, comic artists have come up with the methods described above for drawing hair. But the angled hair and gobs of hair don’t work with really wavy or curly hair. With curly hair especially, you will have to draw each strand of hair individually in order to make the hair look right. The reason why curly hair is less common in cartoons is that it is very hard to get curly hair to look right and drawing curly hair takes forever. Drawing individual strands of hair really only involves drawing two similar lines and connecting them at one end.

That concludes this drawing tutorial and the rest of the tutorials on basic hair drawing. Hair can get way more complicated when shading, tones, line darkening, coloring, and texture are thrown into the mixture. Hair can get really messy (literally) when in motion. Sooner or later, someone on here will do a tutorial on any one of these things.

Thanks for reading!

“There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too
And up in the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say “cuckoo”

Regretfully they tell us Cuckoo, cuckoo
But firmly they compel us Cuckoo, cuckoo
To say goodbye . . .

. . . to you,”

(Sorry, song’s stuck in my head >.<)

Alex

Draw small curving triangles that vary in size and length.

Add lines in the middle of the hair to give the hair depth. If you completely screw up the lines like I did, just erase them.

Draw a curve for fun. It can curve upwards.

Draw what is almost a circle. Leave a space at the bottom of the circle. Draw two zig-zag lines that go upwards from this space. Draw two curving lines that lead up to where the bangs should be. Draw the bangs as curving triangles.

Make this weird-looking hairdo suddenly look normal by adding curving lines that go in all kinds of directions (except DOWN). This will make the hair look more round. Also, add lines on the sides of the mass of hair that curve in the same way as sides of the hair. This will emphasize some of the strands of hair.

Side profiles of hair are hard to imagine sometimes, depending on how complex the hairstyle is. Start by drawing a half circle.

The rest of the hairstyle is kinda weird. Draw a right angle right in the middle of the hair that connects both ends of the half circle. Have both parts of the right angle curve.

Draw curving lines coming out of the top part of the right angle, curving towards the front of the head. Draw more lines on the lower part of the hair mass that curve towards the back of the head.

Draw the deflated McDonalds logo.

At the ends of the deflated golden arches above, draw long, curving lines that curve in towards each other. At the ends of these curved lines, draw lines that curve upwards and away from each other. These curving lines should meet together to form a baby McDonalds logo.

Draw vertical curving lines on the sides of the hair.

Draw what looks like part of a cloud. The top of this hairdo is similar to the top of the first hairdo in this drawing tutorial.

Draw really curvy strands of hair that curve in different directions. Draw some lone strands of hair to give this style a really savory mullet-look.

Draw a really smooth curve.

Underneath the really round top of the head, draw triangles that curve towards each other.

Draw curving lines that dance around each other, forming what looks like a sparkle. This will make the hair look very round and shiny.

These hairstyles really overpopulate cartoons and the 70’s. Master them if you want to draw mostly modern characters. Also, do not write blog posts at night unless you absolutely have to. If you’re drawing a historical or fantasy setting, you’ll probably be drawing a lot more long-haired characters. Though long hair is making a comeback.

Stay tuned for Hair III: The Blob That Ate Mah Page!

Alex

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

This is a late tutorial I whipped up after a long day cranking out papers and freelance work. At least Marisol and I went out today. We read Santa Responds: He’s Had Enough…and He’s Writing Back! the whole way through at a bookstore (so we didn’t have to pay for it ). We read a book on the 501 greatest movies of all time (like 501 is an original number. Why not 44432)? I also ritualistically checked out the cartooning section.

Anyway, I’m amazed by the infinite number of cartoon eye varieties. It seems like in some mediums, the shape and style of the eye is the most crucial part of determining a character’s appearance and identity. Cartoon eyes show both emotion and personality. Wide eyes indicate emotion, while more narrowed eyes indicate a focused and confident character. Though coloring, glare, and shading can be used to add personality to a character, I believe that the most effective and reliable way to distinguish a character from other characters is to give him distinct eyes. This is especially true with anime eyes. So I decided to do 7 mini tutorials in one. Each one of these is done in a step-by-step fashion. It’s really hard to describe what I did in this tutorial, so I’m including pictures. Enjoy.

Anime Eyes

Style 1

First start off by drawing one curving line that curves upwards and away from the other eye. Then draw a line that curves towards the other eye and upwards. Once this line has reached most of the way across the lower eye

lid, curve the eye downwards sharply.

In the opening gap where the eyelid is, draw a curving line that curves towards the other eye. The draw a second line further towards the center of the eye. The curve should be similar to the curve you just drew. Then draw a third curve that curves outward. This will be the cornea. Then finally draw a line above the eye. Congratulations on drawing your first anime eye (or second or 1000^th).

Style 2

Draw a curving line that curves downward. This will be the lower eyelid. Then draw two lines that slant upwards and to the right, one over the left edge of the lower eyelid and one over the right edge of the lower eyelid. Draw a curving line that connects the top parts of these slanting lines. This will be the upper eyelid.

Expand the upper eyelid. Make the top part of the upper eyelid thick while keeping the side parts of the lower eyelid thin. On the right part of the upper eyelid, draw a curving triangle that points upwards and towards the outer part of the eye.

Draw a curving line above the upper eyelid. Then finish off by drawing a pupil as a black circle. If this anime eye doesn’t turn out the way you want it to, it might not be your fault. Maybe this tutorial isn’t that great. Keep trying!

Style 3

Draw a slightly curving line. Then draw two slanting lines that extend from the ends of the curving line. These lines should slant away from the eye. Then draw a curving line that connects both slanting lines. This will be the bade of your eye.

Draw a line a few centimeters above the sides and top of the base of the eye. This line should connect to the base of the eye on the sides. Then Draw curving lines on the outer edge of the eye. These will be the eyelashes. Finally, draw a curving line and then draw a slanting line that connects to the curving line. Draw a circle within the eye for the cornea. C’mon, keep going. You’re doing great.

Style 4

Draw a straight line. Then draw a curving line that slants up and towards the other eye that you would draw. Follow this by drawing a wide curving line that connects the slanting line to the horizontal line. Draw a second line a few centimeters above that wraps around the top of the eye.

Draw an oval within the eye. Draw eyelashes on the bottom outer corner of the eye. Draw a curving line that is a few centimeters above the eye and only covers part of the eye. Put your pencil down and go grab some pocky and take a break. Or just keep going.

Style 5

Draw a curving line. Draw a line that slants upward and within the eye that you are drawing. Draw a second line that extends from this slanting line and travels in a waving motion somewhat past the rest of the eye. Draw a slanting line that extends from the bottom line upward, not touching the edge of the top line but touching near the edge. Then duplicate the top line, drawing it a few centimeters above the top line. Draw a circle within the eye for the cornea. Draw, draw, draw, DRAW, DRAW! Drop and give me 30 pencil strokes!

Style 6

Draw half of a circle with most of the circle covering the bottom and inner part of the eye. Then draw a curving line that slants downward and towards the eye sharply when it reaches the outer part of the eye. Draw a second line that starts at the inner top part of the eye and continues until it reaches the outer part of the eye, and then slants sharply upward. Draw a straight line that connects the open part of this eyelid.

Draw a curving line above the eye. Then draw a circle within the eye to serve as the cornea. Wow, you’re doing all these mini-tutorials in one sitting. Great! Keep going, you’re almost done!

Style 7

Draw a vertical line and a horizontal line that connect with a curve. Draw eyelashes on the outer bottom corner of the eye. Draw a line that curves in a waving fashion. This line should start at the top of the line on the inner part of the eye and curve upwards slightly before curving sharply downward. Draw eyelashes on both sides of the upper eyelid. Finally, draw an oval to serve as the cornea. Then pop open a frappucino and celebrate!

Final thoughts:

Eyes are great. Eyes let characters see. Eyes help anime characters look cute. You should be proud of the eyes that you drew. If you like any of them, make sure to draw faces around them. Consider what type of character would have those eyes. This might be the start of a great new character.

And may your days be filled with sketchy-houseness,

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

I started drawing when I was two years old, and well, that was almost 21 years ago (I feel so old!), but I’m sure the tools are still the same. When I started, all I had was some receipts from the grocery store and a number two pencil or ballpoint pen. My family never had a lot of money when I was younger (and due to the recession, we have none now; welcome to the REAL world where no one cares about ya), so I had to use whatever was lying around the house. My dad has always saved receipts, even from 1959, so I had plenty of paper, even though it wasn’t drawing paper. Bah, I’m rambling; the point is: you can any type of paper or utensil to get started.

Okay, now that that is out of the way, what else do you need? Well, you need an imagination of course… or an object to get started with for those who believe they have a non-existent imagination. Look around you and find something interesting; draw it. Use any kind of paper you have handy—receipts (hey! You stole a memory from my youth! Joking! J), notebook paper, chalkboard, dry erase board, Etch-a-Sketch, Spirograph (I could NEVER draw with these! My niece, however, kicked my butt at Spirograph), balsam wood, sketch pad, computer paper, doodle pad, labradoodle (Haha—I DON’T recommend a labradoodle), etc. Additionally, find something to draw with—pencil, pen, chalk, eyeliner, nail polish (nail polish eats through stuff!), lipstick…hey, I used that stuff when I was little; I wasn’t supposed to. Bad girl! Anyway, you catch my drift; you can use anything. Now that you have all your tools (imagination, something to draw with, something to draw on, and an object to draw—good stuff), you can start drawing (check out Alex’s previous blog on free sketching)!

Additionally, I do have some drawing tools I recommend. Welcome to Marisol’s Artist Corner, where I peddle goods to you, my lovely readers. Woohoo! Ready?

MARISOL’S ARTIST CORNER—AKA, THE PRODUCT PLACEMENT LOCATION

Today, Marisol Recommends:

~ Strathmore Sketch Pad: Possibly the best drawing notebook I’ve ever used! I had to use this drawing in my university art class, and I’ll tell you, the paper quality and smoothness is AMAZING! This notebook comes in three different sizes and different varieties (sketching, pastels, oil painting, water painting, etc). I highly recommend this notebook! HINT: If you have a small art product shop located in your town, and if you attend a university, use your student ID at the checkout. Why? You may receive a 10% discount.

~Prismacolor Pencils: Very pricey, I know, but oh-so-worth-it. These pencils are easy to blend, very smooth, and have a wider range of colors than the average box of colored pencils. They’re fantastic! My mom bought me these pencils one year for a Christmas gift (the year preceding the i-Pod), and I haven’t turned back to other pencils since. If you’re a serious artist, these pencils are for you! They also don’t break easily—a GODSEND!

However, for those you cannot afford Prismacolor pencils, there are Prang and Roseart pencils. They’re not as fantastic, but they blend well and get the job done.

~Soft Pastels: They’re like chalk, but better. These are great for free-sketching! They’re erasable, blendable, and messy, messy, messy! FUN! Soft pastels are great for experimenting.

For my future posts, watch out for advice on working with clay, jewelry making, and painting.

This is Marisol, bye bye for now!

Hi! Thank you for reading my first post. If you’re an artist like me, you might have a hard time getting started drawing. “What’s wrong with me” you scream as another hour passes. Or maybe it just seems like an hour. I’ve come up with a couple ways to get myself to draw and they all have their good points and bad points. For me, one of the harder ways to get myself drawing is free sketching. By free sketching, I quickly make lines, trying to draw something. It could be a person, or it could be an object. Maybe even some type of scenery. But regardless, I put my stylus down on my tablet and just draw.

Why do I want to do it this way? There’s plenty of other ways to get started drawing like looking at a reference picture or using guidelines. But with free sketching, you truly are free. You’re not forced to follow guidelines most likely made up by some art teacher somewhere. You’re also not forced to only draw things that have already been drawn or photographed by another person. With free sketching, you can create anything. A lot of times, you can even create something that surprises you. Even if what you sketch looks bad, you’re better off than you were when you only had a blank piece of paper. You can work it into something a lot better.

Details added.

Lineart and Color

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Lineart and Color

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