Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
That closeup, in particular, is so dynamic. I can imagine the demon moving with the "goop" swirling around. That first pic would seriously look good as a painting or other wall hanging, like a lithograph print. 🤔 😍
my full pieces + cover for the Moonlight Melody xiaoven zine! i partnered with yans who wrote about xiaoven and a leyline disorder resulting in a different first meeting... 🎵
getting inspired to create stuff is honestly the meaning of life. like i found a great story and now i wanna make a cool story too. literally could there be any better feeling
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
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!
Sketchfab is a fantastic resource for environments/props. It’s a huge database of models people have made for fun that you can rotate and turn. I usually rough out a shot and then use sketchfab to approximate angles for vehicles, streets, interiors. While not always in the style I need it’s super helpful for learning perspective and adding depth to drawings. It’s fantastic to use in conjunction with film studies & shotdeck to make/study compositions for storyboarding.
@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!
I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.
If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.
Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)
A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.
But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!
By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.
These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.
This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.
For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.
We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.
The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!
Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.
Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.
By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.
By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!
These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.
The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.
For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.
Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.
Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.
A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.
Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.
Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.
By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.
An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.
We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!
In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.
You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.
The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.
Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.
For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.
With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.
Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.
Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!
I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.
can’t stress enough that this is where they make you start in your freshman year of art school foundational classes. this is The Place to start. put down the AI and lock in
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