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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Just a few Tips....

Hello everyone! Let's get this started!

So jumping right into it. I'll say this now, I'm by no means an expert, or even professional, but I do want to share with you the tips and tricks I've learned so far. I've only seriously been drawing/doing digital painting for about a year now, and there are some things that I learned only recently that I wished I knew when I started.

So with that being said, I have a few tips I'd like to recommend to any and all beginner/novice artists out there.

First and foremost, I have discovered that this little secret. Drawing doesn't usually involve talent. On the contrary, it involves skill. Practice. Did I mention practice? More practice!

My drawings looked like utter crap when I started out. They had absolutely no form and structure, and looked like a 3 year old drew it. (No offense to 3 year olds)

After doing a bit of research, I realized that unstructured practicing just got me no where, and that was what I was doing for the first few months.

I did some further research, and discovered that when doing drawings that involve characters, I had to know anatomy. You don't even really need to know the names of the muscles/bones and such, you just need to know their placement.



Learning anatomy has really helped me improve. Though I think that many artists out there can sympathize with me when I say that doing folds/clothes is a pain in the neck, not to mention I'm a bit of a dunce when it comes to making up outfits/fashion.

So, learn your anatomy for character drawings. For landscapes/cityscapes, the only advice I can offer you is to study real life photos, or just go outside and observe.Note where things are places, how some appear 'higher' than other. For example, trees or mountains may appear higher up, and usually have a haze, which usually indicates distance.

So! Learn anatomy, observe from real life, and do gesture drawings whenever possible. (Youtube provides many tutorials on this subject, and in the near future I will post my own gesture drawings as an example) Gesture drawing is important to create flow and movement.


I hope this has helped some of you out there! If you guys want, I can do a tips and tricks feature each Thursday. (Since today is Thursday!)

(Disclaimer: This video is made by Proko on youtube. The image is from shutterstock. I don't own either the image and video)