Thanks Sami from Flickr!

Snow is falling, acting as prelude to the bitter cold that is arriving in a few days. I’m tired of cold weather, and sometimes, I’m tired of the snow even though it’s so pretty. I’m not a fan of winter; it’s depressing and drags on too long. All the bleakness makes it hard for me to feel fervent, which, if you think about it, fervent sounds the opposite of what it truly means. Anymore, I just feel so down and hopeless and it’s hard to find that silver lining or little glimmer of joy.

The other day, I had a therapy session with my boss. It sounds strange to open up to your boss, but it was one of those things where the flood gates literally opened and I didn’t know what to do. I told her about why I wasn’t teaching, talked about how screwed up the university system is, and how I feel I was going nowhere in life, which I truly feel. She told me that I needed to stop doing that and that I need to wake up every morning and say to myself, “I’m going to kick [butt] today!” Easier said than done. I feel as if there is so much missing in my life. I’m not allowed to teach at my university even though I’m above qualified, and it feels like I’m just going to be filing paperwork for the rest of my graduate school tenure. I see other people getting the teaching positions and they’re all cut from the same cloth: sucked up, kissed butt, and were so sugary sweet and amicable toward the professors that if it was time to actually argue against something, they would be afraid to fight their own shadows let alone their own beliefs. I’m not teaching because I felt a play a professor wrote was weak and I unjustly received F’s on papers for that class for no reason. I got a B in the class because I was going to repeal my grades. But now, I’m a pariah in the English department because I said something was not to my liking in an assignment that I was suppose to do that for. I would never change my actions, however, but to not give a person a chance because of an opinion is ridiculous. I hope all the G.A’s at my university crash and burn, because suck-up Eddy Haskells need to just disappear from society because this world has too many of them. Where are the people who stand for something? People all say they stand for something, but if they get picked up for something, it’s screw everyone else, it’s all about me, me, me and the fact that the professors (or insert anyone here) love me more than you and I need to suck up more. Personally, I despise all the people like this and there’s no room for them in my life, even if the person was once close to me.

For me, the above has been a bad experience and has really destroyed me. I can’t write as well I had in the past. I can’t function well in daily life without having some ounce of bitterness within me. I feel worthless, hopeless, and broken. I have a lot of anger within me and although I try to be “cool as cucumber,” sometimes that doesn’t work and thoughts of the professor who ruined my career appear in my dreams and creep into my thinking on a daily basis. I think that’s why I want to take the job is Japan and forget about graduate school for awhile. I need to get away.

Since that whole incident, the need to travel and see the United States and the world have really been prevalent. I just feel like I need to walk away for awhile and unwind by exploring the world around me. I need to break free from the traitors and toxic people and just see things from a refreshed world view. I want to see Savannah, Georgia and experience REAL southern food and charm; Kyoto, Japan, Estonia, feel the ocean at the Carolinas, Florida, and the California coast, what a tumbleweed truly looks like in Oklahoma~ I want to experience Canada, catch a Yankee game in New York! I want to see the stars in Big Sky Country (Montana), and see Santa Fe! Maybe I can go and find my roots in Italy and dance in Tennessee, work at Disney World! I want to live for once instead of going through the motions of daily life! I’m tired of living this life. I want to break free.

My life doesn’t even feel like my own, and right now, I know it isn’t. My mom pretty much runs the show for me. Whenever I gain some sort of autonomy, she takes it right it back by taking away more of my freedoms. I feel like I’m dying a slow, horrifying death. A lot of my mom’s grasp, I think, has a lot to do with the fact that she never got to live her life the way she wanted and that all her other kids left and created their own lives. I feel as if she wants me to be as miserable as her and wants me to become her.  I don’t want to be like that! I feel like a mouse trapped in a mouse trap. I writhe and scream and I can’t break free. Someone needs to release me from the trap. My tail and my paws are trapped and my death is slow and agonizing. I am bleeding. My eyes glaze over and lose life. I can feel my organs shutting down, lung function ceasing. There’s no help. The person who trapped me watches as I die and force feeds me words of “love” and protection. That person tells me it’s okay and that I’ll survive if I listen to what she has to say. I’m dying and that person refuses to see. Set me free… set me free…

I want to live on my own and experience life as not just a daughter living under my parents’ roof. I want to be a wife, someday. I want to be that before I take flight, because I want to know I have some sense of security. Plus, I love my boyfriend very much and I don’t think he’d betray me. Besides, he has expressed a need to see the world, also, so I would like him to accompany me.

I also feel depressed because I am a bit on the impatient side, but I’m trying to change that. Tala knows what I mean, so I won’t get into further details.

I want to know what life has to offer, and I feel like I’m slowly dying inside. Like my boyfriend said the other night, “I want to touch a hot stove in order to learn to never touch it again because it burns.” I want that! Besides, my opportunities are up in this little Podunk town. I have been cut loose because I am a threat to the system at my university. “Only non-threatening people allowed,” reads the sign at the graduate office door. I guess it’s time to take my show elsewhere…

Aside from all this negativity, I do feel hopeful about something, and that’s my relationship with my boyfriend. Since school let out, we’ve been working on a lot of things and talking more. We’ve also been working very hard for things, and I think we are more willing to help each other. I hope so, and I hope things continue to get better from here. More and more, I realize how much I love him and how much I need him in my life. He’s a great guy, flawed like me, but still great. I admire the fact that he has great drive and work ethic, and I hope he uses that to his full potential. He’s a writer and a darn good one. I hope he never abandons that for something lesser than that. You’ll be hearing a lot about him someday, I guarantee that. I wish I had the drive he has half-the-time, but like I said, I seem to have lost my spark for a lot of things. I hope I can get it back. If only I could teach… if only I could get married and see the world!

I wish to unclip these wings…

I will end my post with some song lyrics that I currently resonate with. The song is by Reba McEntire and is titled “Is There Life Out There.”

She married when she was 20
She thought she was ready
Now she’s not so sure
She thought she’d done some living
Now she’s just wondering what she’s living for
Now she’s feelin that there’s something more

(chorus)
Is there life out there?
So much she hasn’t done?
Is there life beyond her family and her home?
She’s done what she should
Should she do what she dares?
She doesn’t wanna leave she’s just wondering is there life out there?

She’s always lived for tomorrow
But she’s never learned how to live for today
Oh she’s dying to try something foolish
To do something crazy or just get away
Oh something for herself for a change

(chorus)

There’s a place in the sun that she’s never been
Where life is fair and time is a friend
Would she do it the same as she did back then?
Oh she looks out her window and she wonders again

(chorus)

Oh, she doesn’t wanna leave she’s just wondering is there life out there?

A lot bigger change. The feathers could be made more realistic and slender. Maybe I’ll redraw them again next time in the same way that I redrew everything else except the hair :p

My inspiration for the wings was derived from J Peffer’s angel character, though I tried hard to make my wings look distinct from hers. For me, the hardest part was getting the reflection of light on the feathers to pop out, which means that i have to tweak the shadings and highlights. He needs better shading to make him look more 3D too. Maybe a background would help (hint, hint).

The first thing I did was add some wings on the inside. This might seem weird, but it’s going to work. Trust me. The highest feathers were drawn longer and thinner, while the lower parts of the wings look like the bumpy designs they used to make everyone in my 1st grade class draw.

I started using a different technique that might only be useful for those using photoshop. First I zoomed out so that I could see my whole character. Then I sloppily sketched the wings. But wait, I’m not done yet. I then used the superpower of the photoshop to zoom in as close as I could to each individual feather (crtl + z). At a very close range, its a lot easier to draw smooth lines. I kept using ctrl + x to switch between black and white so that I could color over my mistakes. I used ctrl + h to move around the page. I think its faster, but I’m really a newbie to photoshop and there might be yet a faster way.

With traditional art, none of this really matters. But, I really recommend getting a really thin-tipped eraser for fixing tiny mistakes. They save you a lot of headaches.

Then I started drawing little half-circles to give the wings texture. I did this imitating Peffer’s angel character, though I drew way more half circles. After I finished the ones on the right side, I wiped the sweat off my brow and thought whew, that really takes forever. So I cheated and used the lasso tool (ctrl + L) to select a huge chunk of the texture and then copied and pasted it. Nobody’ll notice, and I added a whole bunch more half circles.

Unless its really cathartic and relaxing, I think its okay to take shortcuts with really simple motions like half circles. Part of learning how to draw is slowly building hand-eye coordination over time and drawing lots of little half-circles doesn’t give you a whole lot of practice.

The next part is the really fun part. I’m going to completely redraw the outer outline of the wings. I liked the original outline because it had a simplistic, cartoonish, graphic design feel to it. But they didn’t really fit the character. This whole process is all about variety and experimentation. I made the top feathers longer and bent a few of the feathers to give them character. Then I drew smaller bumps on the bottom part of the wings since I just made the upper wings thinner.

The next step was a small, but important step. I decided to define the majority of the feathers on the bottom part of the wing. With these feathers, and all the other feathers to a degree, you can draw them rounded like I did, or you can draw them triangular or like real feathers. Just don’t make them too wide if you’re drawing them in a triangle shape or else they’ll end up looking like teeth (unless that’s the look you’re going for).

The lines on the bottom are so thick that they look like a warzone. So I went through and smoothed all the lines. *Bounces up and down excitedly*

The next part isn’t necessary, but if you really want the wings to stand out, you can add shading. I’m nowhere near done with what I could do, but I did manage to add a base layer of grey. When shading, it’s really important to start off shading light. before going to heavier shades. First, you don’t want to make the mistake of making your individual feathers indistinguishable because then the wings will just look like a big blob of mess. Also, you can always add darker shading over your lighter shading. I shaded the lower feathers more heavily because I figured that the upper wings and the character’s body would cast a shadow on the lower wings. Like I said earlier, I need to redo the highlights so that they really pop out. The highlights do a great job giving the feathers a 3D look and the really make each individual feather pop out.

Thanks to every commentator. I really love reading comments and they really influence what I write. I keep referring back to what I read in the comments while trying to figure out what to write next. It might sound weird, but it feels like I’m having a conversation with people who comment and I really cherish that. Its really easy to take over this blog. I like to draw almost anything. I want to play around with clay again too. Just suggest anything and we’ll try almost anything as long as its PG rated or lower (we don’t do that other stuff here). Someone requested a World of Warcraft character tutorial and Tala’s working on that right now.

Also, we’ll display the art of our viewers. Email it to sketchinghouse@gmail.com and we’ll put it in our viewer’s gallery.

Thanks for everything!

Alex

Welcome to part 2 of my How to Draw Characters series. This time, I’m putting this guy in technicolor. But before that, I’m going to try to make his body more anatomically correct. Below is what we left off with last time.

Distorted angel, arms, hands, and feet badly drawn.

His wings could be better drawn, but drawing wings can be an entire tutorial on its own (hint, hint). But I was really unhappy with his hands and feet. His left hand (our left) was not even complete and wasn’t correctly connected to the wrist. His right hand was ginormous and his fingers weren’t proportionate at all. His feet seemed a little too long and his toes were tiny. His right arm was way too long. I also didn’t like how his right side curved in more than his left side, like he only got love handles on one side.

With Photoshop, paint.net (free), and gimp (even more free and the staple of

His hands shrunk, and now they're natural

most digital artists with zero budget), you can adjust, rotate, and resize individual parts of a picture simply by using the selection or lasso tool and then using the free transform tool. But it doesn’t help with plain bad drawing, which I had. I could have created a new layer and erased the layer beneath after finishing the upper layer, but for some reason I was feeling in an old-fashioned mood today. I ended up simply drawing over what I had already drawn and then erased the old lines. This was probably better practice for my hand coordination, though most digital artists do not recommend this for some reason.

I used a reference picture to draw the hands and feet because I think these are some of the hardest parts of the human body to draw. The only hard part is finding pictures of hands that are doing the same gesture that you want your character to do.

The trickiest part was to redraw the arms correctly. Basically, how the picture should be, my character is stretching his left arm to hold his staff at a lower angle while bending his right arm to hold the other part of the staff at a higher angle. I had my character drawn with the left arm like a Stretch Armstrong arm, while the other arm seemed to go into his socket like a turtle into his shell. I realized that when a character is really stretching his arm to reach down, his shoulder seems more flat and less perky. So not only did I have to make his right arm bent, but I had to redraw his left shoulder to make it look like it moved with the rest of his body.

Whew, that’s all done. Now time for the intersting part. Decorating the clothing. This part isn’t really necessary and I don’t really know how to teach you how to draw clothing decoration in a general way, unless you expect me to make this drawing tutorial 100000 words long. Just draw designes on the clothing. It’s fun, have at it! I drew a dragon and a snake on this guy and put a bunch of curved triangles because I’m addicted to drawing them for some reason.

Alright, now on to the fun part. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Coloring! Yeah, this isn’t always necessary since lineart can look really neat by itself and screentones give drawings a really good comic feel. With traditional art, you might want to try cross-hatching, since this can give traditional art a really classy feel. But colored artwork can look so pretty, eye-catching, and just wow. Coloring is also very easy, as long as you pick colors that go well together. This is really a matter of taste and experimentation. If you’re not sure of how you want to use your colors, find really nice artwork at Deviantart and other art communities. Look at how the artists use different color combinations.

When you color using traditioanl methods like colored pencils, make sure that you use really good quality colored pencils and not Crayola. I started off using Crayola and not only do they create gaps that are hard to fill, but they also have a tendency to have friction for some reason, making it hard to color smoothly with them. I recommend instead using colored pencils designed for artists, like Prismacolor colored pencils. Personally, I prefer doing it digitally since its cheaper, easier to fix, and you can get better results.
A really good trick for coloring without coloring over the lines in photoshop/paint.net/gimp is to use the multiply feature. You can set your paintbrush to layer and the brush will not color over the parts of the picture that are black. The only problem with this method is that each time you color over a part of the image a second time, the value of the color you use multiplies with the value of the color already there, creating a color that is a combination of the two. This is great for combining colors and shading, but might not create the effect that you desire. Luckily, you can get around this by creating a new layer and setting that layer’s blending mode to multiply.

The final things I did for the night were some simple shading and highlights. The key to shading is to find out where the light source is. For my image, the light source was supposed to be at the top right corner. Any part of the character that faces away from that light source should have darkened parts, since these parts are shadowed. The side that faces the light can have highlights, but this is optional. Since I felt that my character had way too much open space in the middle of his hair, I drew a white zig-zag to represent a highlight.

In my next tutorial, I’m going to redraw the wings. This time I’m pushing for more detail and more feathers. I’ll probably also show you how to add more complex cell-style shading and details. Until then, drive safely.

Alex

It’s currently really early for me, too. I could not sleep a wink last night for some reason, yet, I was very tired. Personally, it sucks. I’m very tired and I have that somewhat dizzy feeling I usually get when I’m very tired. It sucks more because, today, Alex and I are suppose to go back to Artist’s Square to do some antique shopping. I better get a lot of coffee in me, or else I’m not going to survive the day.

*Yawns*

I have an idea. How about instead of me rambling on about how tired I am, how about we do another tutorial? We’ve done hair–digital, long, short, and medium length–eyes, lips, but we haven’t structured a full face. I have three methods for structuring a face: anime style, unfeatured, and features first. Today, I’m going to use a style that I’m totally unaccustom to: unfeatured. This is going to be scary.

*Rubs eyes and yawns again*

Now, dearest Mari, what is an unfeatured face, you–our wonderful, yet mysterious viewers–may ask. The answer is simple, my friends. An unfeatured face is a face structure you draw BEFORE adding the eyes, nose, and mouth. I usually draw all my facial features before, THEN add the face around it, then a friend of mine–who is totally annoying me at the moment, but that’s a rant for another time–pointed out that, sometimes, my faces look goofy because I do things that way. Well, poo on him. To each their own, I suppose. But anyway, that is besides the point. So, I figured I’d try doing the face structure FIRST, then add the features. Now every character I draw kinda looks like Jennifer Aniston. Hopefully, this will not be the case for you!

Additionally, for this tutorial, I apologize for my shading looking very dark and askew. My family, for some reason, has an aversion to using lights in my house. I think it has to do with NIPSCO raising the electric bill 50% or something. Eep!

Now for the tutorial!

FACE STRUCTURE

1) First, you’re going to draw a figure that looks like an egg standing on the tip. The tip will act like a chin guideline, the fat part, the top of the head. You know, I never really noticed this, but all our heads are kinda shaped like eggs. Wow!

Next, we’re going to separate our egg into sections. No, we’re not separating our yolk from our whites; we’re not cooking today. What I mean is that we’re going to literally section off our head so the face itself will be easier to create later on. Starting from the chin, measure about an inch to half an inch up; Draw a straight horizontal line at this point. From the line down is where the mouth and chin will be. Next, measure half an inch up from this line; create another horizontal line. This sections off where the lips will go. From that line, measure, once more, a half an inch up. Draw another horizontal line; this is where the lower half of the nose guidelines will go. Now, measure 3/4 of an inch up and add a horizontal line; this is where the middle nose guideline will go. Then, from the 3/4 line, measure half an inch up and draw a horizontal line; these are where the eyes will go.

WHEW! Holy moley, that’s a lot of measuring. Did I tell you I was not accustom to this? I’m mathematically challenged. Oh, I forgot to mention, adjust my measurements to actually fit the dimensions of your image.

Moving on to step two…

2) At the top of your head, create a basic hair outline. This will determine where you want the bangs to be. This outline doesn’t have to be too detailed.

After creating the hair outline, you’re going to shape the face. You can square off the bottom edges of the egg shape to add jaw definition, if you want. To make this simple, I stuck to the egg shape. Once you drew the lines defining how you want your face structure to look, start shading. The outside edges of the face should be dark, because those are the vanishing points. Shade darkly, then, take the blendy stick (or tortillion, depending on how professional you want to be) and blend these dark lines into your midtones toward the inside of the face. Don’t forget to shade the neck, too! Create shadows to add depth. I don’t think I created the depth illusion well for this image. Like I mentioned before, my depth perception is really bad.

You also want to create jaw features. From the tip of the egg (chin), shade UP toward the inch line we created in step one. You can make this shading as wide or as narrow as you want; it depends on how defined or how hollow your jaw or cheeks are.

My laptop battery is about to die; I better hurry along.

3) Now we’re going to add ears (ear tutorial coming some to a Sketching House near you!). Where the 3/4 inch lines are, add your ears. Start from the upper line and create a C-shape; create a backwards C-shape for the right side. Create smaller C-shapes, or small R-shapes as I have done in the image to create the illusion of the inner ear. Shade the ears, remembering to start with the darker shades first.

Extend the hair outline and add definition.

4) Draw the guidelines for the eyes and nose. The eyes go in the upper 1 inch section; the nose guidelines go in between the eyes and down to the center half inch section. Remember, the nose has a circle and “wings” at the bottom.

5) Create the nose and eyes as we did in the nose and eye tutorials. Shade and blend. Add circles around the eyes to add definition and give the image eyebrows.

6) About a half inch below the nose, add your lips. Remember, the beginning of the lips consist of one horizontal line and circles. Please recall the lip tutorial, if needed.

Shade the lips and add a light source to the entire face.

You have created a face! Congrats! Oh, and please remove the guidelines; I didn’t.

Next time, I will show you how to draw the face structure using anime style and featured style.

This is Marisol signing out so she can go to work!

Love always!

Noses– most people have them and like lips and eyes, they are very useful. People can steal noses (hehehe, got your nose!), or get smacked in the nose every winter at least once. I get smacked in the nose at least once per winter because my boyfriend slips on the ice and I have to catch him, only to have him accidentally hit me in the nose and mouth. Ouch.

Some people have anxiety when it comes to drawing noses, but have no fear, noses are easy! In fact, noses are so easy that they can be drawn in four steps. This is going to be a short tutorial, folks.

1) First, you’re going to get a ruler and figure out how long your drawing’s nose is going to be. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to use three inches for my length because it’s an easy length to divide up evenly. I am math challenged. So, I’m going to draw a three inch long vertical line that has an inch long horizontal line at the bottom. Next, I’m going to draw a second three inch long line going up from the open end of the one inch horizontal line. Next, I’m going to divide this open-ended box into three equal sections; in my case, it’s all one inch sections.

2)  In the bottom third, draw a circle in the center. Depending on how wide you want the nose to be, you can make this circle any size you want. On the sides of the circle, add “wings.” These wings consist of half circles. Like the circle, you can make these as big or as small as you please. All noses are different. Now draw two lines that stem from the upper sides of the circle going up through the upper two thirds of the box.

3) Determine where you want your shading to be and create guidelines. Press dark for your dark tones, lighter for your medium and light tones. Also determine your light source. Additionally, create your nostrils. The nostrils start on the circle and extend into the “wings.” You can makes these as larger or as small as you wish, since in a drawing, the nostrils show how pointed a nose is.

4) Shade your nose, starting with the dark tones first. Take your blendy stick and soften the ark tones and “bleed” these dark tones into where you marked the midtones. Then lightly create the tones, leaving the light source white. Smooth the entire drawing with a Kleenex.

And you have created a nose for your drawing! Your drawing can smell! See how simple that was? I didn’t learn this technique until recently. Before, I just used parenthesis lines to create my noses, and that looked weird. Thanks to the Big Book of Drawing, I learned how to create noses and other facial features. It’s a wonderful book. Not only does it show how to draw realistic faces, but how to draw realistic animals and sketching techniques. Cool, huh? I got the book for Christmas about 6 years ago. I highly recommend it!

So there you have it, folks! Enjoy and have fun!

Love always,

Marisol

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