I recently found these—and I am SERIOUSLY in love.
They do well for imitating traditonal media:
Hope you guys have fun with these~
Hello new brushes, lemme add you to my already large collection of texture brushes~
A handout I made for a coloring workshop I’m teaching tomorrow at CCS. TEACHING HERE IS SO MUCH FUN ALL THE TIME OMG OMG
Just an easy trick I learned a few years ago that I thought I’d share. May not work 100% all the time, but works well for simple hand/arm placement.
Reblogging for great justice.
oh neato burritos
yes
This is really clever, actually. Thanks!
This is REALLY useful!
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ArtsyPoses - Relatively new, but very cool. The 30 second drawing tool seems to be glitching a little but that could be my computer being a dumb. Lots of unique poses and they’re looking to expand to other body types (if you read the FAQ they even said there are too many fit models).
PoseManiacs - Everybody knows this one! Great poses, you can interact with them (rotation, etc) and has a very cool 30 second drawing tool. Also I belieeeve this is available on iOS.
Pixelovey - Another fantastic drawing tool - I prefer it over PoseManiacs’ but I can NEVER FIND THE LINK :( Lots of options here, too.
CedarSeed - The drawings here aren’t great but there is so much information here.
Color Is Value - Handy coloring tips and things!
Ctrl+Paint - So many digital painting tutorials. SO MANY. Ridiculously helpful in everything ever, and constantly updated.
The Angry Animator - Because come on, all sorts of handy animation tips. I linked directly to the walk cycle because I found it to be most useful but there are other things floatin’ around there if that’s your thing~
Constructing the Head/Face - Done by Stanislav Prokopenko, an instructor. Also really seems to know what he’s talking about. Saving images off of Tumblr seems to be hit-or-miss so keep this link handy as it may not save correctly.
Drawing Muscles - Some of you may remember this from all of James Phegan’s classes ever! Super handy, and this is a printable version of the giant jpg he used to e-mail us.
Drawing more Muscles - The same artist; she’s really damn good at drawing beefy dudes.
Nude models in all sorts of poses
Color Scheme Designer - Allows you to quickly and easily create specific color schemes for a wide variety of purposes! If you’re like me and terrible with color, this will help.
Things to keep in mind while gesture drawing
Super Obvious Secrets I Wish They’d Teach In Art School
A sample of the article:
Figure things out for yourself
Tish did a pretty amazing write-up on this over on her DeviantArt Gallery that’s really worth checking out for more of an in-depth exploration of the subject. The short of it is, things will ALWAYS look wrong if you learn to draw them from copying the way other artists have chosen to stylize them rather than understanding how they work for yourself. This really seems to be a hangup that kids who learn to draw exclusively from copying anime or comic books have to get over. You need to think of a character as a three dimensional object sitting in space and figure out how to best represent that, don’t treat them like a composite of two dimensional symbols. People who base their entire artistic repertoire on what they have seen someone else draw will never really understand why they’re making those choices, so everything they make is going to seem slightly off-kilter. This doesn’t just apply to cartoonists, I have heard professional portraiture artists complain that their students just learn the formula to drawing a face, place those features on the head, and end up with something incredibly flat and uncanny valley.Figuring out how to draw by studying “this is how artist-I-like draws a nose” or “this is how artist-I-Like draws eyes” is a little like playing telephone. The artist has created something one generation removed from the original image they were trying to capture. You drawing what they drew is another generation removed from that. Things can become lost in translation and if you don’t understand why an artist chose to represent something a certain way you won’t be able to move the character properly, apply those conventions to other situations, or alter the idea to suit the requirements of a different setup. THAT SAID;
Reference other Artists
It actually seems a pretty common occurrence that people who want to draw cartoons then focus on nothing but realism have a really hard time with their cartoons when the time comes. There’s some myth out there that stylized drawings are “easy”, so once you learn to make “real art” you can just backtrack and do anything. This is not the case, drawing cartoons, figuring out the right amount of exaggeration and making an obviously abstract 2D representation of something real look like it has life and mass is a whole art form unto itself.Referencing is not the same as copying as I just finished defining it a couple paragraphs back. Referencing is just studying how an artist handles a situation so that you can decide a way that you might want to approach a similar situation in the future. Referencing is figuring out the hows and why of style conventions, copying is just accepting that they do work and taking them for yourself. Referencing is a tool that helps you make decisions for yourself and grow as an artist, while people who flatly copy their idols at their absolute peak will only ever be just as good as an imitation of someone else. If you spend your life following someone, you will always be behind them.
We are all the sum of our parts, every one of us is influenced by everything we ever see, hear, say, or do. What we bring to the table is our interpretation of all of those happenings, which we try to present in the most appealing or interesting way possible to the best of our abilities. Studying the ground other artists have already broken is nothing but a tool to help us figure out how to look at something from a new perspective, and there’s no reason to shy away from it.
You can tell by my expert vocabulary that I know what I’m talking about.
i kinda keep to these rules, being a glasses wearer and being ULTRA AWARE OF HOW THEY LOOK ALL THE TIME…. unless i’m being lazy.
but this is much more helpful, especially for those who don’t wear them and don’t have on-hand reference.
ye i need this /saves
[This is off one of Neonnoodle’s posts from SomethingAwful, but it’s such a useful technique I wanna repost it here.]
Here’s one approach I’ve found, which is based on the gamut mask idea, but a little simpler and tuned to working in PS:
1. Start with three color swatches: a red/magenta of some kind, a yellow of some kind, and a blue/cyan of some kind. They don’t have to be crayon-box “red” “yellow” “blue” — the nice thing here is that you can decide how warm or cool you want the overall cast of the color to be. So, for instance, you could pick a cool yellow, a purplish red, and an electric blue. Or a very orange red, a warm yellow, and a greenish blue. Or even substitute green for blue. Experiment here. Even colors which are completely hideous will mellow out, so don’t be afraid.
2. Draw your 3 swatches in a tight triangle so that they are bumping up against each other in the center. Then use a smudge tool with scattering on for a blender, and blend the edges of each color into each other:
(I also had pressure set so I wouldn’t blend too hard, but that’s optional. Scattering is the important one.)
3. Now you have a neutralized color wheel. The closer toward the center you go, the more neutral the palette becomes:
(here they all are against 50% gray)
4. Now you can start establishing the values for the colors you might want to use. Use the L (Lightness) with Lab sliders on the color panel (even if you’re using RGB or CMYK color for your document) because “Brightness” (HSB) is a load of horseshit.
5. By the way, here’s what the color wheels from those other colors from the beginning would look like:
And one other with more swatches:—————————————————————————————
I AM HORRIBLE WITH COLOR PALLETS THIS WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME.
e1n:
Had a class on inventing figures for animation by Rad Sechrist (Dreamworks) today. Here’s a few pages from my notes on breaking down head structure and tips on varying head sizes and shapes. Some of these you might already know, but it’s still very useful to keep in mind while drawing.
Also a tip on how to draw jawline when the character is looking upwards. Most common mistake is in drawing the jawline facing at an angle above horizontal, because when heads look up, jawline is still either in line with the horizontal, or slightly below it. The only time jawline point at an angle above horizon is when the character is looking up at an extreme angle (almost straight up!)
So many people have asked me for character design tips over the past couple of years. Here’s a whole list of rules I keep in mind with my own character designs.
In no specific order:
- Simple is good. Streamline your design to its essence. The more shit you add on your character the more you make it about what they are wearing, and not who they are.
- Popular ideas of beauty are limiting. There are only so many ways to make a character conventionally beautiful before you start noticing they all have the same face (i.e. “Six Faces Syndrome”). What most people consider “ugly” or undesirable is actually features that make your character unqiue. Who would you likely remember more: A perfect-faced model or that model’s twin with buckteeth?
- Understand typical archetype designs and visual stereotypes to use them effectively. What are characteristics found in a “hero” character? In a “villain” character? In a “child” character? What can you do to mix them around, or play it straight?
- Don’t draw the lines of the character, rather: draw the character in the lines. In other words: if someone told you to draw a horse, don’t just draw a plain old horse—draw the personality in the horse. A Royal Noble Horse has a much different character from an Old Sickly Stubborn Horse, for example. There’s a difference between Hark! A Vagrant!’s Fat Pony and Tangled’s Maximus, for another example.
- Make your characters relatable. Making a character as wildly unique as possible (a pink-purple-blue haired goth wearing nothing but Hot Topic gear, for instance) actually is one of the most alienating thing you can do for your audience. It’s trying too hard to make your character a special snowflake. Limit this extreme to very specific characters and roles, be calculating and precise about going crazy. It will be more effective.
- In addition, find what makes a person special through the boring features. Not everyone has crazy tri-colored hair, but there are a lot of people who have short brown hair. Can you draw five different characters with short brown hair and make them all unique? Try it out.
- Silhouettes are important. Are you varying body mass? Are you utilizing basic shapes? We are able to recognize people and objects just from their shadow, and we do it so often we don’t even notice we do it! If all your characters have the same “shadow,” challenge yourself to mix it up more.
- If you drew your characters naked and bald, could you tell them apart?
- Be consistent in the ‘tone’ of your design style.
- All these rules can be broken according to how calculated your irony is for your story. But you need to know what to do right before intentionally doing it wrong.
There is a multitude of expressions and 21 views of each. You can slide around each picture as well as zoom in and out. It’s great for reference, especially since it’s in black and white it’s good for seeing only the values.
Here is the site.
oh COOL BEANS
