So Tala, Alex, and I have been super busy with school and work (bummer, real life is getting in the way!). I’ve been trying to juggle a few jobs, and it’s been hard because one requires my undivided attention all the time. But, I think it’s getting better.

Trust me, we’re working really hard at trying to juggle everything. Once tax season is over though, we should be  okay. *Nod*

With that said, I’ve worked on a few new drawings that have minor coloring tutorials, so I hope to get those posted within the next few days. Here are the images:

Marisol's Path to Power character, Solei'na.

With each of these, I have tutorials prepared for hair, skin, clothes, and backgrounds, as well as another wood texture tutorial that is an improvement upon another wood tutorial I did earlier.

So hang tough, chickadees! We at Sketching House didn’t desert you!

Love always,

Mari

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

First off, Alex and I apologize for being down for the time being. We forgot to update our publisher, so we were hacked. Alex contacted the wonderful support people at PowWeb for being amazingly awesome and rescuing the site. They truly are THE BEST! Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart! I say it again: YOU ARE THE BEST!

In other news, Sketching House is now on Facebook! Type in Sketching House in the search box, and become a fan!

It’s the wonderful and beautiful month of September! The color begins to fade from the trees, the air turns more crisp, children are back in school, and fall festivals are about to start! I can’t wait! With the fall festivals comes pumpkin roll, and with pumpkin roll comes a very happy Mari! I LOVE pumpkin roll! If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend that you do because you will NOT be disappointed!

Class started again today, and so far, I love the composition class. Tomorrow’s class I already know I will not like. *Yawn* But like you guys care, right?

In that case, how about a tutorial?

I just recently discovered how to create a wood texture in Photoshop, which is really neat and very simple too. So, if you want to create boxes and even trees, this is the tutorial for you.

First, pick a base color that you feel will be fitting for your wood background. Use lighter browns for oak and ash wood, reddish-brown for cherry wood, dark brown for mahogany, and black for teak.

Once you have done this,  choose a light shade that will serve as your light grain. When I first did this, I used a shade that was three to four shades lighter than the color I originally used. Next, choose a hard brush and set the opacity to 45%-55%. On the box, add random lines for graining. I used a brush that was between 13-23 for the graining. Also, make sure you don’t but your lines too close together, because the wood will looked warped later on (I made this mistake!).
Now, before I continue, I must add that my tablet is currently MIA, so my lines are sloppy and hanging all over. Blah!

Next, pick a shade that’s somewhat darker then the light grain shade you used. Keep the opacity the same–between 45%-55%, although I do recommend increasing the opacity slightly– for your hard brush. However, change the size of your brush until it’s between the sizes of 9-18. Begin adding the darker lines. With this, don’t be afraid to overlap your light and dark lines. In fact, I think doing this makes the wood look more interesting. With this, though, make your lines somewhat shorter than the original light lines you created.

Next, change the brush opacity to about 75%. Change the hard brush size to between 1-8. Choose another dark color for fine graining. I used a color that’s brighter, yet slightly darker than the color used in the previous step. Add these thinner lines on top of the thicker grains, and be sure to add them in more frequency. Once you’ve added the desired lines,  use the blur tool on them. Use a soft brush for the blur tool and set the opacity to below 50%. Lightly blend these lines.

Next, choose white or a color close to white. Keep the paint brush at the same opacity and width as the previous step, and lightly add some white lines on the wood. Once more, use the blur tool to smooth the edges.

Now that the wood texture is complete (easy right?), add embellishments to complete the look to your liking (as you see, I have already done that). Once you’re happy, you can start shading the wood. Please, use different layers for this step.

With wood shading, choose a soft brush and set the opacity to around 30%. Pick a smaller size brush, like between 5-20. For dark shading, I choose a brown color that is almost black, but don’t worry. Since the opacity is low, it won’t look black, but just like a regular shadow. If you created a box like I did, add your shadow along the creases. If you have ornate edges or gems like I do, shadow the along the bottom portion of these adornments to create depth. Additionally, shade areas that are hidden by overhangs as shown in the image below.

For the top shadows, choose a light brown color that is almost white in order to create a light source. Add this along the top portions (or wherever your light source is) in order to create more depth using light.

Once you’re happy with your shading, you’ve created a wood texture. Now, you don’t have to get as fancy as I did, but this was the only way I could how to do the shading.

And with that, this concludes this tutorial. I’m glad to be back!

Until next time,

Mari!

I decided to start doing what a lot of artists recommend to see how it works out. Lots of artists tell you not to paint on white and to instead pick a dark color, usually grey or a dark shade of the most dominant color in your picture. I picked grey for now and I will try the skin tone next time. So far, it makes it a lot easier to see what you’re doing as you add progressively lighter and lighter colors. Plus, for me it feels easier to control how much you shade different parts when you shade this way. For digital art, just fill the background with whatever color you want to put in the background. For traditional art, just pick a canvas that has the color you would like to have as the base. Of course, none of this is 100% necessary and you can always just use a white sheet of paper when following this guide.

To sketch the character, choose a color that is light enough to show up on the dark background, which is the whole point of using a dark background to begin with. These lines will show up very well.

After getting the lines out, you can now start to throw down the colors. Start with the darkest colors. On the face, the areas that are the darkest depend on what you’re drawing. For this character, the darkest areas will be under the eyes, between the nose and the cheeks, under the nose and under the mouth. If you’re drawing a neck, the area under the chin will be darkened too. With take one, don’t worry so much about getting it accurately. Just get the general area colored because you can always color over areas that need to be tweaked.

Next, start laying some more shades on the side of the nose facing away from the light source, the edges of the ears, the chin, and near the darker shades. When two different shades come together, blend them at the edges.

Now select the lightest skin color. Add highlights to the middle of the nose and the cheeks for this drawing. Where the highlights land depends a lot on the light source, but for an area where light is all over, those areas get the most light.

Cover the areas that you haven’t covered on the face yet with the base color that you would like the majority of your character’s skin color to be made up of.

Now start throwing down those special colors over the character’s face. Put reds in the cheeks, yellow on the forehead and blue or green on the chin (or nothing). For some characters, these colors are stronger than with other characters.

I finally got sick of staring at vacant holes where there should be eyes. You can do that too by simply filling in each eye with a colored circle and a color that is not pure white, but close to being white.

Then, start shading all around the eyes. Shade under the eyes and above the eyes lightly. Shade between the eye and the eyebrows very lightly, though strongly enough so that you can see the shading. Add a little yellow to the corners inside the eyes. Add highlights on the tops of the eye sockets.

Now, start adding details to the irises. Add black circles in the center of the irises where you want the pupils to be. Draw one or two rounded white objects on the eye to indicate the glare, where the light bounces off of the eye. Off of the pupil, start drawing lines, alternating between short and long lines. Surround the iris with a darker version of whatever color you used.

Next, move on to the mouth. Mouths are really interesting in that they come in different sizes and different people have lips of different thickness. This character is an Asian girl with tiny lips. The top-middle part of the mouth has a little dip, which sorta reminds me of an M. The lips are thinner near the corners of the mouth and thicker near the bottom. The lips also tend to curve inward on the sides on the lower lip. Some bottom lips are wider, while others just seem to dip. Painting lips can be very fun and lips can be very, very intricate. Some lips are very reflective and there are also nice little folds that curve outwards and travel upwards and downwards. I decided to not play around too much with the lips until later.

For the ears, draw the basic shape of the ear. The outer edge of the ear has a fold on the top half that wraps around the ear until it reaches the middle of the ear. The ear canal is drawn using shades.

When drawing the hair, I happily discovered that the whole laying down darker tones helps with the hair in Photoshop because you can still see the light strands when you create a new layer and set it to multiply. I guess using that method is better for darker hair. Anyway, regardless of whether or not you’re using traditional or digital methods, fill in the hair with the mid-color. That’s a color that you sorta pick at whim, since color shade really depends on lighting and whatnot.

This is only part 1! More details will be added soon.

Alex

The technique you use is partially based off your tools of the trade. Thus, this guide is going to be categorized based on what tool you are planning on using. The only tool I haven’t used for shading is pen. Based on the guide found here, shading is done similar to with a pen, though you can’t really smudge pen or use some of the other neat techniques that you can use with pencils.

Digital

Digital has a lot of techniques that can be used to shade, so I’m not going to cover all of them here. The best digital art program is Adobe Photoshop, though there are a bunch of other options like Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, Paint.net and GIMP.

Cell Style:

Cell style involves creating polygons filled with color. These polygons have hard edges and can be created much faster than any other kind of shading. Pick areas where you want to shade and then decide whether or not you want to use the lasso tool, pen tool or a brush.

Lasso tool:

The default lasso tool allows you to drag the mouse and draw out the selection. How the selection works is that you will basically draw out the outline of the area where you’d like to shade. You have to have good hand-eye coordination for this one, but there is also a polygonal lasso that allows you to lasso very fine lines. The only problem with the polygonal lasso tool is that you cannot create curving selections.

Pen tool:

The pen tool takes slightly longer to use than the lasso tool, but you can create perfect curves. How the pen tool works is that you create things called vectors wherever you click. Lines travel from one vector to another. When you click to create a new vector, you can click, hold and drag and a curve will be created that can be manipulated by how you drag your mouse. It’s really hard to explain but you’ll see what I mean if you try it. The pen tool’s kinda rare, but you can find it on Photoshop and GIMP.

Paint bucket:

The paint bucket is the simplest tool to use. Just click within the selection and the selection will be filled with the color you choose.

Brush tool:

The brush tool requires a steady hand. You can use the brush tool with a mouse or a tablet. Tablets are tools where you use a special pen called a stylus to draw on the tablet. Then whatever you draw appears on the Photoshop. This tool does take time to get used to, but it’s much more natural than using the mouse. Still, if you take time to master drawing using a mouse, you will be able to create art that’s just as good as art created using any other tool.

You can use all the same techniques with the brush tool that you would use with a pencil, pen or marker. You can even smudge the shading just like you would with a blending stick, tissue or your finger by using the smudge tool. Or if you want a more even and gradual blending, you can use any one of the blur filters or the blur tool. The blur tool is on the toolbar and allows you to blur wherever you click and drag your mouse. With the filters, if you want to blur all of your shading in one fell swoop, place your shading on a separate layer and run one of the filters. My favorite filter is Gaussian blur. If you want to blur a specific section, you can use the selection tools above.

Pencil

Techniques:

Like described above, most of the techniques for using a pencil are the same as using a pen. There’s the contour method, where the lines follow the edges of the part of the body or object you are drawing. There is crosshatching where contour lines cross over each other. You can also shade by placing several lines close together with the lines getting closer and closer together as you get farther from the light source. The stipling method uses lots of dots with the dots farther from the light source being closer together than the dots closer to the light source. Crosscrossing is just that, lines that crisscross getting closer and closer as you get farther away from the light source. Finally, like mentioned earlier, there’s a unique method only possible with a pencil. You can push harder or lighter with the pencil, pushing lighter the closer you get to the light source. You can also use different artist pencils with different lead weights.

Blending:

You can definitely leave the shading alone if you like how it looks. But if you want a more natural shading, you can try to smudge all of the shading together in order to create a very gradual shading effect. Skinny blending sticks are useful in smudging very small areas of the picture, while the tissue can be used if you don’t want to run off to an art store. You can also use your finger if you do not mind getting some pencil lead on your finger.

Markers

I guess markers can shade the same way as pencils, but I prefer the cell-style shading for markers. The best markers to use for art are Copic markers. In order to get straight edges, you can use a ruler and create the polygon edges before filling them in with the marker.

I hope all of this was useful. Shading will completely transform your picture and make it pop out in complete 3Dness.

Last night, I was looking at Marisol and the light source completely struck the side of her face. The majority of her face was completely shaded, but there was a highlight on the right side of her face. The lighting effects look so cool when the light interacts with the nose, cheeks and eyes. I tried to take a mental snapshot so that I could cover that type of lighting. We both looked at each other’s faces and it was really need to see all the subtle features that you normally don’t notice when you look at someone at a distance. For instance, you kinda forget that your skin, when you look at it really close, is made up of criss-crossing lines.

Also, I decided to try a lineless piece of art. This is the second time I’ve tried a lineless piece of art and it was really fun, though sorta time-consuming. The good news is that the more you draw, the faster you get at drawing and the less time it takes. I remember the last very realistic drawing took all day. Of course, it had a bunch of colors mixed in for the skin tone and I’m probably not going to get to that until some other day.

I did a really quick, rough sketch. Though this is going to be lineless art, I started with lines just to lay down some guidelines and get a sense of where everything will go on this character’s face. In the absence of lines, you have to rely on different tonal values, shading and highlights in order to make up the features. For instance, the nose is made up of nothing more than shading and highlights that are done in such a way to create a nose.

Photoshop Tips: Place the outline, base colors, shading and highlights all on separate layers. Then you will be able to remove the outline layer when you no longer need it. You will also be able to run blur filters on the shading and highlight layers in order to get a more natural blending.

So before shading, figure out what your base colors will be. In reality, skin is made up of a variety of tones and colors that all blend together beautifully, but for now let’s start with one base color for the skin, one base color for the iris, one color for the hair, one color for the top eyelids, and one color for the lips.

Now, start laying down the shading for the face. This face is relatively smooth and rounded, so the shading on the side of the face is going to be in the shape of a crescent with the rounded side touching the side of the face. There will also be shades underneath the mouth where the cleft of the chin is.

Highlights are the next part. The concept is basically the same, except you will be using a very light color and then blend. Create small crescents for any parts where light is reflecting directly upon the skin.

Now, remove all of the lines off of the picture. Use a tissue, blending stick or smudge tool on Photoshop and smooth all the edges so that they look more natural.

For long hair that is mostly just falling downward, draw several lines that extend from the scalp down to the bottom of the hair outline. Draw these lines very faintly and use at least 3 shades for the lines in order to give them diversity. After all the lines are down, use a blending stick, tissue or smudge tool to smooth the lines together.

Shade over the part of hair away from the light source and the part of the hair that blocks out the light source.

Then highlight the part of the hair closest to the light source.

With the eyes, be sure to draw glares that face the light source.

I think a lip tutorial is due, since lips can look really ultra-realistic if a lot of time is put into them. I’ll be creating a skin tone tutorial soon too.

Till then, see ya!

Alex

There is nothing quite like shading in the world of drawing. Shading is one of the most important parts of realistic drawing. Shading also plays a major role in the stylistic aspects of animation. Shading tricks the eye into seeing 3D on a 2D plane. With shading, an object can really jump out at you.

Shading can be as difficult or easy as you want it to be. Light from a powerful and consistent light source like the sun, creating a gradual increase in the darkness of tones the farther you get away from the light source. Objects can block the light source and create shapes that have defined or blurry edges. Shadows can occur gradually or can be cut off abruptly. Highlights shine and sometimes even reflect images opposite of the object you are drawing. Shading can be a pain and creating guides on how to shade can be a pain. But the results are oh so worth it.

There are tons of ways to shade. Since there are so many factors that affect shading, one of the easier ways to shade is to break shading down into different components. Also, since different kinds of lighting and different objects interact to create different shading effects, with this guide I am going to focus on skin and hair with an overhead sun.

Learn to love shadows. The only way to truly learn shading is to observe objects and their interaction with light.

For this picture, I’m going to lay down different shades of the character’s skin tone. Then, I’m going to blend these shades together in order to create a gradual change in tone. Then I’m going to cover highlights.

For an overhead sun, think of crescents and V’s. The sun is coming directly downward and brightens the top parts of the body. The further downward you get on the body, the less light you are going to see.

Now I’ve laid down a second layer. As I move more towards the top and the center, the shading will become closer and closer to the actual skin tone.

Okay, now all of the shading has been laid down. Next, you must decide how shiny you want the body do be. Shiny parts have less blurry edges and do not gradually blend in with the rest of the body part. If you decide to have a less shiny body, lay down the highlight already. Place the highlight where you think there will be the most light.

Now that all of your tones are laid down, it is time to blend them all together. If you are drawing with a pencil, there are many ways to do this. One way is to use a tissue or blending stick and rub over the skin until you have a gradual shade that gets lighter as you near the center and top. If you are using Photoshop, use the blur or smudge tool. The blur tool will create a more uniform blending, while smudge allows you to control how the tones mix together. Think like you’re finger painting. Finally, an additional trick is to use the lasso tool to select an area and then run Gaussian blur. Sometimes the blur tool just won’t blur to the extent that you want to blur, but Gaussian blur does a great job. However, in order to make the selected area match the blurred area, you will probably have to us the blur tool to blur the edges. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably will when you try this technique.

Now that everything’s blurred together, if you chose to have a shinier character, you can add the highlight. In this case only, be careful with how clean and symmetrical the highlight looks.

On this character, I haven’t shaded the clothes yet. Can you see the huge contrast between the shaded character and the non-shaded clothes. The clothes look flat while the body seems to pop out.

Are we done yet? Heck no! This is just a gradual shading that results from the light source. However, the human body is not perfectly round and bumps and crevices on the face create all sorts of shadows. There is often shading around the bridge of the nose and the cheeks also create shadows. Also, the torso and neck need a good amount of shading to indicate the throat and collarbone. There’s also highlights to add to the lips, eyelids and eyelashes.

While not completely necessary, eyelashes and the lower eyelid often are shiny enough to need highlights. If you don’t feel like adding these tedious highlights, don’t worry about them. But do consider highlighting the lips, since they can add a lot to a drawing.

Finally, there are objects that might be blocking the light source, casting shadows in the shape of the objects. Things can get even trickier if there’s multiple light sources hitting the character from different directions. The character’s also wearing clothes that haven’t been shaded because much of the shading depends on the type of fabric. Do not worry, all of these will be covered next time.

Cordially,
Alex