How to Paint Light by jonhuangart
wallacepolsom

oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.
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Andulka
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
styofa doing anything
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
h
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON
Jules of Nature
Cosimo Galluzzi

Janaina Medeiros
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Three Goblin Art

titsay
Misplaced Lens Cap

seen from Australia

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@drawtism
How to Paint Light by jonhuangart
the suffering never ends
This is the real process
Resources for you!
Character Ideas:
Character creation masterpost
Character Alignment Chart
More character alignment descriptions
Muslim Character questions
Characters with magical powers
Building a new character advice
How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)
Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page
Basic character profile
OC masterpost
Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)
D&D Character Building Tool
Character Design Ideas:
How clothing affects a character’s personality
Character Design Inspiration blog
Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by
Character design references and inspiration
Sources for POC character design ideas and models
Create your own character model using HeroForge
For horned characters
Body and hair types guide
Random outfit generator
Naming Help:
Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources
General advice on avoiding naming appropriation
Hispanic Surnames
Gothic Victorian names
Huge master list for character things in general
Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more
Another name masterlist
How to pick a character name guide
Yet another names masterlist
Creating Background/backstory:
Character Sheet/Development Sheet
Another character development list
In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet
320 talents and passions for characters
On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous
Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary
Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes
Random backstory generator
Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid
Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:
Comparing character height/height references
Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science
Describing what different voices sound like
Describing skin tones
Writing friendship interactions that are platonic
Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea
Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing
Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)
How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters
How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero
On platonic OC and canon character relationships
How to avoid Godmodding in RPs
When it’s cheap to kill off a character
Writing dialogue
Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters
Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs
Slang resources
Dialogue tips
Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships
Bonus art masterlist!
BLESS EVERYONE IN THIS POST.
I really wish you could save post on here
This post saved my life
line art tutorial
hot artists don't gatekeep
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
Homie gonna share this
dear newly-out trans girl: you need to wear yr skirt up on yr waist, not on yr hips. trust me on this one
Dear newly-out trans girl: your waist is NOT where you thought it was, and it is actually 1-3 (estimate) inches (2.6-7.6 cm) above your belly button. The thing you thought was your waist (because that’s where your pants’ waistbands go) is indeed your hips
best foolproof tip I have for finding your natural waist (as someone who sews and has covered lots of ways to measure it), is to bend side to side, the middle of where you hinge from is your natural waist.
This is also useful for online shopping because you are probably not measuring the part they are expecting you to, which can throw off sizing
diagram to visually demonstrate what I mean. I find this a better explanation than saying "the narrowest part of your waist" because that is not always easy to visually see on all people for all manner of reasons.
Theres also a difference between "natural waist" (see above) and "wearing waist" which can be a few inches lower than that natural waist, but knowing the general area that most womens clothes are expecting you to wear them can help with any fit issues and if its just placement or if you need to go up/down a size.
The same artist made these two 35 years apart:
1750s Henry Robert Morland (British artist, 1716-1797) A Girl Ironing Shirt Sleeves
1785 Henry Robert Morland (British artist, 1716-1797) Laundry Maid Ironing
WHICH IS SO COOL and also shows the change of fashion.
I’m sorry, but aren’t we collectively tired of all our clothes being made of polyester?
"microfiber. viscose. rayon blend. ripstop. fleece. jersey knit. pet. vegan leather. polyurethane vinyl. lycra. vegan shearling. acrylic yarn. dacron. performance velvet. organza. china silk. broadcloth. flannel. sateen. elastane. taffeta. moisture wicking. antimicrobial" - so pretentious. it's plastic.
For the record, some of those can be real natural fiber fabrics. China silk, jersey knit, broadcloth, flannel, sateen, and taffeta are weaves of fabric, not fibers themselves. Fleece can be a form of wool, too. I have a skirt made out of wool flannel and evening gowns made out of silk taffeta. I lined my winter coat with 100% silk habotai a.k.a. china silk. My favorite sheets are made out of cotton sateen. Etc.
And I think part of the issue is that people are often just… Not taught about fabrics anymore. a lot of the terminology has completely gone by the wayside and we don’t know how to recognize different fibers (or, as seen above, know the difference between a term for a fiber and a weave). I research 19th century clothing and textiles as part of my job, and there are terms even I can’t fit to a certain weave or fiber in my mind. Just the number of different types of natural fiber textiles that used to be in people’s lives is absolutely mind-boggling considering that now it’s all just different forms of plastic 99% of the time
People don’t stand up and demand better because they simply don’t know another way, most of the time. And that’s so sad
Yep, pretty much.
"Microfiber" refers to a variety of different essentially plastic fabrics which all use a very fine thread.
"Viscose" is related to "rayon" and "acetate". All are made from cellulose fibers, most often wood pulp, through a chemical process. They are not plastic, although they are heavily modified.
"Ripstop" is a kind of nylon used for rugged outerwear and luggage.
"Fleece" is a weave, not a fiber. It most often refers to sweatshirt knit, which can be anything from 100% cotton to 100% polyester.
"Jersey knit" is a weave, not a fiber. It's the sort of plain knit fabric they make t-shirts out of. It can be made from any fiber.
"PET" is ethylene polyester fabric made from recycled plastic bottles. It's sold as eco-friendly, but it really is not.
"Vegan leather" is most often pure plastic. There are plant-based imitation leathers but they generally have to be bonded with plastic for greater durability and thus are neither compostable nor recyclable.
"Polyurethane vinyl" is a kind of plastic.
"Lycra", a.k.a. "Spandex" a.k.a. "Elastane" is a stretchy plastic fiber. In the US and Canada "Elastane" is called "Spandex".
"Vegan shearling" -- Uhh, I don't know what this is, sorry. If it's the combo of faux suede and fake fur that it sounds like, it will definitely be made from plastics.
"Acrylic yarn" is a form of plastic.
"Dacron" is a trade name of polyester (plastic) fiber.
"Performance velvet" is a polyester fabric chemically treated to be water-repellent and stain-resistant, used for upholstery.
"Organza" is a weave, not a fiber. It is stiffly-spun threads in an open weave and has a texture sort of a cross between a veil and a soft window screen. It's very common in silk, although there are poly versions too.
"China silk" is silk. Of course. What the heck. It is a very fine, thin, plain weave lightweight silk. (The only thing called "silk" that is not silk is "art silk" which is short for "artificial silk" and means "rayon" (see above). It was big time illegal to call rayon "art silk" for a long time because of deliberately misleading advertisers, but I have seen the term creeping back in online discourse.)
"Broadcloth" is, again, a weave, not a fiber. It's a densely-woven smooth medium-weight plain cloth mostly used for shirts. Historically it was always wool. More recently it was made from cotton. Nowadays poly-cotton blend broadcloths are most common, though you can still get pure cotton and wool broadcloths.
"Flannel" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a soft fabric brushed to have a nap on one side. Flannels used to be all wool or cotton. Microfiber is depressingly common these days.
"Sateen" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a satin weave, but not using silk, popular for bedsheets. Historically it was cotton. These days you can find it in polyester.
"Taffeta" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a crisp, plain, lightweight, tightly-woven fabric. The nicest taffetas are silk. They also come in nylon and polyester, sometimes rayon if you're lucky.
"Moisture-wicking" just means a fabric acts a certain way. It's neither a weave nor a fiber. Wool is naturally moisture-wicking. The term is mostly used these days to describe artificial fibers.
"Antimicrobial" is a chemical finish. It's not a kind of fiber.
on a whim I made a palette game dedicated to…. UNUSUAL color palettes. feel free to participate in any way you’d like
anyways send me some requests and a palette combo and i’ll try to draw stuff for my own challenge lmao (though i might just draw stuff on my own idk)
hi!! do you have any advice on drawing body hair? I've been working on a character who's supposed to have hairy legs and I am Suffering trying to get it to look right
i couldn't be bothered to draw a body for this so you get a ken doll. this is just how i do it and think about it, definitely not a one-size fits all guide since thickness and distribution of hair is different for everybody.
naturally what you Should do is just observe it on real humans. look at your own legs my brother. what's the hair doing down there.
What do you all study when you're doing art studies??
Heeeeeyyy, I love me a good fucking STUDY
for environments:
shot deck is a massive database of film shots searchable by grading, tod, shot type, characters and content! Studying from films really helps improve your values and composition as the shots are usually very carefully constructed! It helps you find ways to maintain realism while still packing mood and narrative into your work!
master paintings! I recommend the orientalists like Jean Leon Gerome in particular their environments had great compositions and throw around a ton of colour and light! I like the modern artists Craig Mullins and Richard Schmid also, as there is so much impressionist lost detail and simplicity yet the environments feel so real.
The 1960s era disney background artists like eyvind earle are a masterclass in stylisation and simplification and make a wonderful choice for studies. (That being said modern disney visdev artists like Nathan Fowkes are just as fantastic to study for the same reason)
architectural photography can be a great resource too- I love to look for work by urbEX people!
thumbnailing and comp studies- trying to break down a photo into as few values as possible and still have it be readable- this really helps train your brain in the relationship between light exposure and local value.
Im begging you if doing it in colour is too hard to start with just do it in black and white!!!!! Greyscale painting is an essential step in learning to paint and understand lighting scenarios!! Colour is hard!!!
there is no substitute for going outside and doing some plein air painting- really looking first hand at how the light effects different materials and objects, how it bounces around, what edges your eye naturally loses in certain lighting scenarios. Just go outside and draw and try to notice stuff.
for characters:
figure studies!!!! from life if you can but if you cant there are a ton of great resources out there- personally I love croquis cafe and posespace, but if you can afford it (and are interested in intense anatomy study) then scott eaton has a site called bodies in motion which is fantaaaastic. I think by now everyone knows nyx and senshistock, I also use a lot of grafit studio photorefs to study more complicated poses!!
Master studies (again). I particularly like to study the work of John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, Edwin Austin Abbey, Alphonse Mucha (his le pater compositions are out of this world), any of the New Rochelle artists (e.g rockwell, tom lovell, those 1950s illustrators REALLY knew their shit).
I literally have a resin skull on my desk that I've used to do quick studies with different lighting, just 10 mins a day back when I was doing it and it levelled up my skill a lot!.
Material studies are essential to leveling up your character painting!!! Look at fur, look at metal, look at the way something embroidered reflects light vs tooled leather!!
gesture studies! Look at a dynamic pose and see how you can exaggerate the motion in away that captures the sense of movement. This is tricky to start with but its really worthwhile especially when you combine it with other exercises. Mixamo is a cool library to look into for this kind of thing as you can pause and rotate the models in the middle of their actions!
breakdown the work of artists you admire- it's ok to study other living artists (and try to reverse engineer how they are making their decisions) it's a very effective learning tool! Really figure out what it is about that persons workflow you like, and how you might incorporate that element into your own. Obviously, dont post studies of living artists work!
The most important thing is that when you do a study you go into it knowing what you want to learn. Dont try to do everything at once! It's ok to focus on the muscle structure and not give a damn about the gesture. It's ok to focus on the texture of the fur and completely ignore the characters face.
The best way to keep doing studies is to find refs you like- things you are interested in and that capture your imagination! Follow your curiosity and remember that just a tiny little bit a day makes a huge difference.
Gunna take a sec to recommend the tutorials of Devin Korwin. He talks about how to study and how to breakdown art fundamentals in a way that is at once both very advanced but also digestible. I highly recommend his pdfs!
Word Disassociation - Submitted by @plaguedemon
#FACADE #EFFACE #DEFACE #BEEFED #BEDDED #DECADE
Manual Wheelchair Tutorial by Fade31415
So... I technically drew this 3 years ago but forgot to post it. I think I was going to clean up the end and make a nice recap, but I ran out of steam and then just left it as a wip for years. I got reminded of it because I was talking to a friend about how to draw wheelchairs today.
This covers most of what I view as the most common errors when it comes to drawing characters who use manual wheelchairs. I hope it helps you a lot.
Image description is in alt text, but there is a back up image description under the cut in case that does not work for some reason
I love it when my creativity spurs other creativity. literally no better feeling as an artist than when someone looks at something you’ve made and goes “I saw this and liked it so much I could do nothing more with myself than turn it into drive for my own creativity” like that’s really what creativity is huh!! an instrument to further human expression and community and connection
literally most things that people write off as just ‘textures’ to use in graphics are stolen & unsourced material created by artists or photographers NOT meant to be used as elements in projects without royalty payments. you can say ‘it’s just random tumblr posts they don’t care’ but you wouldn’t want someone to take your work and edit into their work so they can be praised for their beautiful style and creativity even if they just post it on social media w/o profit, would you?? so maybe if you browse pinterest or google images for pictures without finding the original source, you’re using images that you’re not allowed to use without realizing it.
you see it on here a lot especially in (i won’t link anything but i’m sure you know what i mean) those album track ‘aesthetics’ posts, au ‘aesthetic’ posts (you see these less in kpop, but where people use non-royalty free images to kinda craft a visual au), and even just rather typical graphics that have a lot of ‘texture’ elements. and texture packs too!! that’s often where the problem starts; people just collect images (often literal art), compile them in a folder w/o sources, then insist no one can repost those images w/o crediting the person who compiled them. what???
SO may i suggest some of my fave places you can get FREE, ROYALTY-FREE elements that are totally legal to use
creativemarket has 6 free high-quality resources (textures, brushes, fonts, etc), different every week! wow awesome i check it every week
search ‘freebie’ on behance. awesome stuff!!! lots of v nice templates textures and fonts
mockup zone freebies
unsplash: tons of very nice free photographs, not shitty stock photos
pexels: same idea. + they have an adobe plugin so you can get photos without closing your editor damn nice
pixelsquid is a super cool free program (again w a ps plugin that i love) with lottts of super cool hq 3d elements!
as to not make this too long: spoongraphics, lostandtaken (textures galore), pixeden, freebiesbug.
I’m gonna add a few more:
Morguefile is my favorite free stock photo site
Texturemate is full of excellent free textures, brushes, and patterns.
Transparent Textures actually lets you combine colors and patterns to build your own texture right there in the browser.
Hey guys! I’m a sort of designer enthusiast/hobbyist and I do my fair share of freelancing, so overtime I’ve accumulated a list as well which I would love to share with you.
Freepik has anything from textures to layered psds, icons and so much more that is actually free to use.
Unsplash is a community of photographers which provides daily content that you can use! You don’t have to credit them but you should. They’re amazing.
Icons8 is basically a library of icons and icon sets, they have a little over 60,000 icons for you to choose from.
The Pattern Library is a very generous project of Julien Renvoye, he’s basically created a library of amazing seamless patterns/textures you can use.
some images i made for my paper titled “How to create artwork in Microsoft Paint with greater skill than that of your 12-year-old self”
hwhaat thhe fuck..
Layer Effects Tutorial by Robin
Cleaning up my files and forgot that I had all these wing studies from circa. 2015 so thought, y’know what, I don’t need to hold onto these, so have this as a little gift from me to whomst ever needs some quick wings for their OC’s, AU’s, and Art.