This is Captain Sherbet. We love her to bits and she is absolutely the best cat we could hope to have!
Since we adopted her this summer, however, she’s been sick half a dozen times with GI problems. After several tests that turned up nothing, the vet now believes that she has Inflammatory Bowel Disease and needs to do an endoscopy on her. Unfortunately, it’s going to be expensive.
To help fund the procedure, I’m going to be doing a live-stream event this Saturday, Feb. 11th, starting at noon (PST).
Starting today, any donation of $10 or more gets a drawing like one of these–live on Picarto!
What a great deal, huh? You get cool art and you get to help Captain Sherbet!
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!
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.
reblog to save a life
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.
Great comments and tutorials!
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!
easiest thing is probably to widen the shoulders and up the muscle mass! it really helps to study anatomy so you know which areas to exaggerate. a more muscular/masculine person will have a more defined sternocleidomastoid (in blue) and bigger traps (green); basically a thicker neck. playing with the shoulder to hip ratio will help as well. i guess if you want a super manly man just make him look like a dorito
I see a lot of positivity posts about 12-year-olds just learning to draw. Posts cautioning us to be mindful of 11-year-olds with no grasp of anatomy and 13-year-olds whose characters are all the same person with different hair and clothes, and I love those posts. Those are great posts. Keep those posts coming, tumblr.
But can I ask, what about the 25-year-old who just bought their first ever sketchbook? What about the 32-year-old who’s been drawing for a month and has just about got the hang of a human-looking face? What about the 67-year-old who finally has time to sit down and learn how to paint like they’ve always wanted?
Not everyone starts drawing as a child. Not everyone learned as a preteen. Some people start in college. Some people start when their career is going well and they feel like it’s time for a new hobby. Some people start after they’ve retired.
Not all beginner artists are kids, and I just think the adults ones deserve some encouragement, too.
I think one of the kindest things you can do for yourself as an artist is to accept that you will make bad drawings sometimes and just…stop caring about it. It’s not like that bad sketch you drew was your one and only chance to ever draw the thing. It’s so much easier emotionally to just say “lol what is that?” delete it and start over than it is to spend the next six hours crying about it. Once you stop treating every single thing you draw as something precious and learn to just throw stuff away it takes so much stress away. One bad drawing doesn’t make you a bad artist, or a fraud. Even the best pro artists are gonna have moments where they draw things wrong. You’re going to make bad drawings so just go out there and make them so you can move on with your life. Chances are your second attempt will be better.
A Beautiful Monster 