I post personal art, fanart and references!! Please enjoy your stay!! Commissions are open! Main blog: TheTinyCatbug. Also feel free to follow me on Twitter for more bullshit @TheTinyCatbug.
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I did this small “show and tell” for Instagram so I’m going to post the story slides here too.
I hope it helps!
I am self taught.
So those are just some small fun things and tricks I figured out with just drawing and experimenting! It might not help everyone!
There are also better ways to explain it but it’s always hard to pull something out of my hat if I’m not actively working on a pic. Because a lot of what I do is more intuitive and I don't know how to explain it.
But I hope it helps a bit and you get an idea it.
yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
smachajewski
Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every time I see it come around.
We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.
Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:
How do you populate your backgrounds?
Well, here’s the answer:
If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.
The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.
How do you fix this?
Well, here’s the simplest solution:
This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.
Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.
Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.
I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!
Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!
Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)
The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.
By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!
Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.
We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!
Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!
Not just poses, you can also do this with lighting. Playing with lights in Blender is pretty fun.
Another cool thing: http://www.makehumancommunity.org lets you generate a human model. Like a character creator in a game, but more flexible, and the result is ready to import into a 3d editor like Blender.
sorry, i wasn’t tagged but this looks so cute i decided to do it…
also this kinda looks like me except all the glasses were ugly so i didn’t have any, and i’m bi/pan ace but i couldn’t include three flags so i just used bi and ace
a note to everyone who’s reading this post : im by no means a master at anything. just a fellow artist here. there will also be spelling mistakes that i didnt notice probably. or words that i forgot to erase while rewriting stuff.
OHHH ANON im gonna probably make a really big post with lots of things so i hope youll bear with me, thanks
its kind of a hard question
not gonna lie i started painting again only very recently after a veryy long time
i was trying for a very long time to figure out what was wrong with all my previous paintings. and. i guess that made me realize that for digital painting you need the same principles as cel shading itself that i usually do and any other ways (weird, right? i should’ve realized this sooner but im a boo boo the fool)
- Color, Value, and Saturation
-inspiration by looking at other people’s works
(inspiration isnt infinite for anyone. like a battery you need to recharge yourself just like everybody since we’re all just humans. make a folder with your favorite drawings to be able to quickly access inspiration material. i have a big ass inspiration folder myself)
(”but what if i copy?” no one is 100% original. people repeat same ideas over and over, believe me. besides copying art masters is a nice way to learn something new, you just need to analyze what made their art so great. copying like an artist and stealing work are different things.
besides youll never be able to 100% copy someone especially if you have several inspirations you’re mixing together if you want to actually make your own thing.)
-silhouettes
-flow, rhythm
-knowing how to simplify things
(dont get too deep in details when you start, make sure the general idea works. i do that by zooming out the drawing. in some programs you can make a new window with your drawing that you can have zoomed out constantly)
-references. yeah
- there can also be many other small things like edges (hard and soft), different lightings and how they differ and others but you can learn them a bit later if you think all previous things are too much)
if you know this, believe me, you’ll spend less time wondering like me “where did i go wrong?”. i WANTED to try painting in the past years but i didnt know what i was doing.
- remember that there are no hard rules in drawing. yes there ARE tricks to make your art more appealing to the general viewers and some general theories about drawing that you NEED to know to make sure you are making consious decisions with your art.
but if you personally want to show a middle finger to some “””rules”””? you can. you absolutely can. you have the power. you can have anything you want when it comes to how you work!
heres my old work.
i make saturation -100 on the right to check values on works.
(if you work in clip studio or photoshop you can use correction layers to instantly check values when you work, like i did in my sea fairy speedpaint)
and im instantly hit with the fact that theres no atmosphere, no depth, no main point to focus on.i MAYBE checked on the values back then, but i ignored them (”wow who needs to know what it looks like in grayscale”). color pallete could be made more interesting too. theres nothing appealing.
i have some more paintings, but the problems are pretty much the same. i didnt know how to start, i didnt know what am i doing, etc. but its ok. we all figure things out as we go.
heres what my process is like now based on my recent paintings.
you can start with nothing, but if you want to, you can have a plan.
i didnt have a color idea when i started working on the colors (only lineart), so did lots of color dumping on the same layer to figure out the atmosphere of the finished piece and only polished it later.
it isnt the exact picture from my process, but its similar to what i did.
sometimes its nice to get random, so i mixed some random images together and started working out the colors on top of them. it gives you a START if you’re afraid of doing anything in the beginning like me.
at least that how i do it sometimes (i first saw it when i was watching speedpaints of backgrounds, artists were mixing different images together), you can have an entirely different progress yourself. the method i did doesnt suit everybody but maybe youll like it if youll try it. (try different things to find what clicks with you)
(a picture from my actual progress, but after i figured out the colors i wanted.)
i constantly check how it looks like in black & white to make sure it works alright.
i zoom out the thing to make sure it works.(right corner) if it aint working from such distance, it probably aint working when i zoom in.
and again, i was checking a lot how it looks in black and white. probably could’ve done things a bit better with this one in some places, but oh well. it looks pretty ok anyways and i did most of the things i wanted to do so im not disappointed.
(its ok if painting something is going well you can go back to it later and repaint it. not being afraid to go back to square one is something i need too.
its what i did with bowser jr in that pic since painting him wasnt going too well)
my sea fairy piece is pretty similar. this time i did the general color sketch! (i had a very clear idea of what i wanted the colors to be. i got an idea while watching bob ross’ seaside harmony painting episode) i liked it so much i decided to make a full piece based on it.
now the sketches for this werent exactly small but i did actually do them with my screen zoomed out a bit so i dont, again, get worked up with details.
my painting process isnt always as neat (lol) and clear as above
sometimes i just go and do whatever and maybe use basic principles. heres my color practice with wizard cookie
(again, purple and yellow, they’re just the main colors in this one. azure color is the brightest part and its yellow and purple that create the relationship here imo.)
i honestly use only a few brushes im comfortable with, usually. i use what feels comfortable the most for almost everything
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