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drinkme-gt

*does this to you*

drinkme-gt

drawingden

Colour Painting Tips by slawekfedorczuk

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wurmzone

elvi-loci

How to do “extra” facial expressions!

Drawing basic facial expressions is not the hardest. Most people can draw a sad face, a happy face, angry etc., but making more multidimensional expressions is more of a challenge. I have gotten a lot of compliments on how I draw facial expressions, (specifically “angsty ones”) telling me that they are very dramatic and well… expressive! And there are actually only a few things I think about when I draw faces that take them to the next level, so I thought i’d illustrate them all here!

SUPER IMPORTANT TIP BEFORE WE START: Look at your own face when you draw faces. Even making the face when you are drawing (you don’t even have to look at it), will give you some sense of how the face muscles pull and where things fold and stretch, because you can feel it. You are the best reference when it comes to facial expressions!

Angles

Draw the head in an angle that matches the expressions you want to make. It is not a requirement, but is going to add to the effect.

Symmetry vs asymmetry

A face is rarely symmetric. Unless the face the character is making is 100 % relaxed or even dissociating, the eyebrows, mouth and facial muscles will have different placements of their respective side. This image shows the dramatic impact asymmetry has on a face:

That’s the difference between a smile and a smirk!

The first one’s like “oh yeah?” and the second is like “oH YEAH??”

The “balloon squishing principle”

This is something I did subconsciously, and I didn’t know about until I made this tutorial. And this principle goes hand in hand with an asymmetric face. Basically, if you squish one part of the face, you need to even out the empty space by “inflating” the other part of the face so that it doesn’t appear shrunken. The picture hopefully explains it:

Teeth

Don’t forget to add the gum when the mouth is open to its full potential!

Squinting and folding

Adding folds around the eyes when a character is squinting makes a HUGE difference. It makes a smile more genuine and a growl more intimidating. Adding folds to the face in general makes your characters more lifelike and ‘visually relatable’. Like, they look human, and less plastic or fake.

and so on..

Pupils and irises

The placement of the iris and pupil in relation to the eyelids is very important! The less of the white you see, the more relaxed the character is.

And then of course eyebrows and eyes go hand in hand!

Gestures, spitting, sweating…

Adding more elements than just a face is key to making the character actually look like they are feeling what you want them to feel. Just the tiniest sweat drop adds to their anxiety, spitting adds frustration to their rage, slouching shoulders, waving hands, a double chin, extreme angles, the list goes on! Add whatever and see what kind of impact it makes! Does it do the trick? Great! Add it!

Over exaggeration!!

Remember that you can almost always exaggerate more. Don’t be afraid to do draw “too much” because you’re just experimenting. See what works and what doesn’t. What do you like to exaggerate?

Now that you know some theory, it’s time to practice!

Practicing!!

The 25 Essential Expressions (a classic! I’ve done it multiple times)

And the one I do when I’m bored:

Fill a page with circles and fill them in with different expressions. Try and exaggerate as much as you can!

This is mostly for experimenting. They are quicker to draw than complete faces, but the same rules should apply!

And that’s about it!

I don’t know if I covered everything in this tutorial, since some things might be obvious for me, and this post perhaps only scratches the surface. So feel free to send me a message if you want an explanation about something more in depth! Thank you for reading! And now DRAW!!! ✨🎨

fireflysummers

Attention Hollow Knight Artists:

If you are doing arts that require extensive environmental references (you know, like a long-form comic) that go beyond even what our excellent wikis contain, please consider using the interactive, high-definition Hollow Knight and Silksong maps by scripterswar. It will potentially make your life so much easier.

Hollow Knight Fanart Masterpost

donutsbagels

Part 3: Combining shapes, braids, and textures! And utilizing parts and fros!

💬 0 🔁 290 ❤️ 409 · Final/Part 4: Messing with straight hair!

donutsbagels

Part 2: shape, style, and length with femme styles!

💬 7 🔁 779 ❤️ 1177 · Part 3: Combining shapes, braids, and textures! And utilizing parts and fros!

selectkus

While I was taking a shower, I came up with questions for the character to help me write him better. I don't know if this already exists, but when I searched for something similar, the references and questions didn't help me.

I just hope that someone will find this useful. I didn't get a degree in writing, I just love creating characters. P.S. It's not necessary to answer all the questions. The main thing is to answer in more detail.

I'm a little hesitant to publish this

sabertoothwalrus

any advice for picking fun and vibrant colour palettes that still feel true/recognizable to an object/setting/character's base colours? something about intense lighting?

I've been asked about how I choose my colors by a lot of people and I finally sat down and made a whole ass youtube video about it!

redstonedust

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

bincliff

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

haemey

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

creatingblackcharacters

THE LONG-AWAITED WEBSITE!!!!

It's not perfect- Strawpage's design tools are... not great- but I did my best to bring you all a Tumblr-free transcription of all my lessons. This is probably the most labor-intensive thing I've done for this page (next to the character polls). Four months of blood, sweat, and tears... and now, she LIVES!!!!

Some Notes:

I created it with the intent of Desktop use, so Mobile might have some issues. If it's not working on your phone, try desktop.

Out of the multiple browsers tested (Firefox, Google, Edge, Brave, Safari), Firefox had some issues sporadically.

I'm still going to post lessons on here, first. This page is priority to me, and the website is more of an archive.

The fonts are normal past this opening page.

I will be adding a portion to send funds soon, if'n you are feeling kind and generous.

Thank you all for your patience while I worked on this. It was a labor of love and I hope that it shows. 🙏🏾 Happy scrolling!

tutorialdrawix

Welcome to the official Learn&Draw's Website!!

Here you can see the index of all the different resources you can access.

Divided into various sections so you can find the websites and links more easily: I could now gather all kinds of websites thanks to the artists and art blogs that talk about it. If it weren't for them I couldn't have discovered all this information and resources.

I just hope that this is useful for you. I hope that you all are kind enough to donate for the effort! And I'll keep updating the website so all of you can know about this.

Thank you a have nice holiday and a new year!

mcnuggyy

i felt like there wasn’t enough polyam trio art memes so i decided to make my own <3 self indulgence be damned

❤️💛💙

( feel free to share and tag me in any of the cute art you make i would love to see!!! 🥺💕)

scribbletropolis

[WIP] Color Tests + Shading Mockup

Aight so I posted some colors over in my WIP acc on Twitter, a lot of people kindly gave their picks. I won't be going off on the most votes but the way I interpret some color combos changed after reading all the feedback. It gave me an idea of what vibe I wanted to go for thanks to all the replies I've received

Notes: A. Looks like he's facing a light source and kind of gives a hopeful look. It does show off some of my linework, particularly on the suit and bowtie. I like the colors and how vibrant they are, like neon. B. Reminds me of Hilda somehow? I like how dull the colors and how the light and shadow contrast with each other. With how dark the values are on the shadows, maybe I should start adding bounce lights? The shading took me like 3 hours, I don't really mind. C. I like how it has more blue in it, like he's actually in a digital space, similar to B, I like the contrast too. I like how vibrantly blue the shadow is. D. Seems like he's rotting away with the tint of green? And there's the warm light coming from his back to contrast the vibes. I also like how his eyes and teeth are more readable, like you actually focus on them. E. This one is overall darker, and it looks like the situation is hopeless. This one is literally A, but the light and shadow were switched. I still like the colors like this. I should also add bounce lighting here too ig? Also make the light stronger F. I tried slapping green against pink, cuz they're complementary. It looks like he's mad here? Not really what I was going for because he's supposed to be dejected here I've also been away from streaming and working on this cuz got really anxious from posting in twt cuz of a misunderstanding, but I think I should go back to it tomorrow? In the meantime, I want to catch up on Witch Hat and play games

chervellefryer

do you have any tips for learning to stylise animals? I have a habit of drawing them too realistically, and want to learn to style them more simple & effectively. Yours are awesome so I thought I'd ask the best :')

I took half an hour aside to hopefully make something which might help you (or might confuse you further) .

Alright, so you need to start thinking of animals as shapes, and not so much as animals. Here’s a bog-standard but ugly as ass pony for you.

You need to start seeing this pony as this. Mr Pons is showing his main shapes. His head is circles and connecting lines. Every part of him needs to be some sort of polygon which you can envision with your head.

All of those shapes can be pulled or pushed to make something new. I took our ugly ass Mr Pons and made him into some hunky warrior horse. So you’re wondering, what the hell Velle, how the heck did you get him there. Well, his shapes are still the same.

I just made them larger and pulled those lines out. Every straight line that connects the dots can be bent, every shape can be pulled, misshapen or distorted. You can also squash elements. As you can see, I moved his legs up, I gave him shorter limbs. Shorter and stockier can mean stronger which is what I was aiming for.

Alternatively we could pinch those lines in and make a pretty weak looking animal. I mean look, he has basically no ass. This is kind of where your foundations in anatomy start to play a major role, even though I pinched this animal a lot you can still look at it and think “That’s a horse.” His neck is still long, his withers are still prominent, it still holds himself with a good posture.

Anyway, moving on… I find the best way to get a good but unique sort of characterisation of a animal is to pull, push, bend and pinch. I will distort each part. This horse is a combination of strong characteristics, and weaker characteristics. He is pretty balanced, but he ended up as strong horse who might have some speed which his light limbs. I want a fellow like this one to pull me in a carriage as I drink Champagne or some fizz or something.

Another good way to characterise an animal is to exaggerate areas which stands out to you. So this is a quick sketch of my cat Winnie who is currently asleep next to me. She’s a pretty standard looking cat to most people.

Working on that image I made something which is more of a play on how I like to describe her to other people. When I describe her to other people I usually revert to, “She has large ears, chunky cheeks, kind of skinny with a saggy belly, long black tail and teeny white toes.” There we go, we have our aim. If look at that description and look at the image below you can see where I forced out those characteristics.

I quickly slopped some colours in for you guys because my cat is adorable ok.

Also being cruel to their image can make you draw a really good representation of them. Here’s my brothers pug bitch Frankie. As you can see, I was not kind at all in drawing her. I made her wall eye really obvious, squished her face since pugs are just a big squish, chunked her neck out since she has a shit tonne of skin there and gave her these long ass legs. Seriously, this dog has the longest legs I’ve ever seen on a pug. However taking how mean I was, it works in a representation of her. She is a just a big happy wrinkle with a lot of quirks.