some thoughts about shading, particularly with a pen! :) I do also find it a good technique to have in mind when using colored pencil, as well - it's a subtler sculpt with softer lines

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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Peter Solarz
hello vonnie

Kiana Khansmith
Misplaced Lens Cap

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shark vs the universe
styofa doing anything

Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tumblr dot com
One Nice Bug Per Day

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we're not kids anymore.
occasionally subtle

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AnasAbdin
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@maridotnet-art-process
some thoughts about shading, particularly with a pen! :) I do also find it a good technique to have in mind when using colored pencil, as well - it's a subtler sculpt with softer lines
A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)
Disclaimer: Though I have been using a cane for 6 years, I am not a doctor, nor am I by any means an expert. This guide is true to my experience, but there are as many ways to use a cane as there are cane users!
This guide will not include: White canes for blindness, crutches, walkers, or wheelchairs as I have no personal experience with these.
This is meant to be a general guide to get you started and avoid some common mishaps/misconceptions, but you absolutely should continue to do your own research outside of this guide!
The biggest recurring problem I've seen is using the cane on the wrong side. The cane goes on the opposite side of the pain! If your character has even-sided pain or needs it for balance/weakness, then use the cane in the non-dominant hand to keep the dominant hand free. Some cane users also switch sides to give their arm a rest!
A cane takes about 20% of your weight off the opposite leg. It should fit within your natural gait and become something of an extension of your body. If you need more weight off than 20%, then crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair is needed.
Putting more pressure on the cane, using it on the wrong side, or having it at the wrong height will make it less effective, and can cause long term damage to your body from improper pressure and posture. (Hugh Laurie genuinely hurt his body from years of using a cane wrong on House!)
(an animated GIF of a cane matching the natural walking gait. It turns red when pressure is placed on it.)
When going up and down stairs, there is an ideal standard: You want to use the handrail and the cane at the same time, or prioritize the handrail if it's only on one side. When going up stairs you lead with your good leg and follow with the cane and hurt leg together. When going down stairs you lead with the cane, then the good leg, and THEN the leg that needs help.
Realistically though, many people don't move out of the way for cane users to access the railing, many stairs don't have railings, and many are wet, rusty, or generally not ideal to grip.
In these cases, if you have a friend nearby, holding on to them is a good idea. Or, take it one step at a time carefully if you're alone.
Now we come to a very common mistake I see... Using fashion canes for medical use!
(These are 4 broad shapes, but there is INCREDIBLE variation in cane handles. Research heavily what will be best for your character's specific needs!)
The handle is the contact point for all the weight you're putting on your cane, and that pressure is being put onto your hand, wrist, and shoulder. So the shape is very important for long term use!
Knob handles (and very decorative handles) are not used for medical use for this reason. It adds extra stress to the body and can damage your hand to put constant pressure onto these painful shapes.
The weight of a cane is also incredibly important, as a heavier cane will cause wear on your body much faster. When you're using it all day, it gets heavy fast! If your character struggles with weakness, then they won't want a heavy cane if they can help it!
This is also part of why sword canes aren't usually very viable for medical use (along with them usually being knob handles) is that swords are extra weight!
However, a small knife or perhaps a retractable blade hidden within the base might be viable even for weak characters.
Bases have a lot of variability as well, and the modern standard is generally adjustable bases. Adjustable canes are very handy if your character regularly changes shoe height, for instance (gotta keep the height at your hip!)
Canes help on most terrain with their standard base and structure. But for some terrain, you might want a different base, or to forego the cane entirely! This article covers it pretty well.
Many cane users decorate their canes! Stickers are incredibly common, and painting canes is relatively common as well! You'll also see people replacing the standard wrist strap with a personalized one, or even adding a small charm to the ring the strap connects to. (nothing too large, or it gets annoying as the cane is swinging around everywhere)
(my canes, for reference)
If your character uses a cane full time, then they might also have multiple canes that look different aesthetically to match their outfits!
When it comes to practical things outside of the cane, you reasonably only have one hand available while it's being used. Many people will hook their cane onto their arm or let it dangle on the strap (if they have one) while using their cane arm, but it's often significantly less convenient than 2 hands. But, if you need 2 hands, then it's either setting the cane down or letting it hang!
For this reason, optimizing one handed use is ideal! Keeping bags/items on the side of your free hand helps keep your items accessible.
When sitting, the cane either leans against a wall or table, goes under the chair, or hooks onto the back of the chair. (It often falls when hanging off of a chair, in my experience)
When getting up, the user will either use their cane to help them balance/support as they stand, or get up and then grab their cane. This depends on what it's being used for (balance vs pain when walking, for instance!)
That's everything I can think of for now. Thank you for reading my long-but-absolutely-not-comprehensive list of things to keep in mind when writing or drawing a cane user!
Happy disability pride month! Go forth and make more characters use canes!!!
I feel stupid for asking this so im using anon, but how do you draw the hijab? Whenever I try it looks like an egg www
also, Ramadan Mubarak! May Allah bless you
Don’t feel stupid for asking! Drawing is hard no matter what you’re drawing, so don’t be afraid to ask for help^^ But honestly even I feel like the best of my hijabis look a little egg-like, and that’s okay!
This tutorial is already taking so goddamn long, so I’m just gonna link my coloring and shading tutorial I did a month ago 😭😭
Gosh, I hope what I wrote made sense 😅 But thank you so much for the well wishes! Happy Ramadan (Eid Mubarak at this point WAHHH), and the same to you, may you and your loved ones have many blessings!!
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Winchester Meg's Hijab Drawing Tutorial
Souratgar's Hijab Drawing Tutorial
General Tips for Drawing and Shading Fabrics
More art tutorials by Disney artists Griz and Norm Lemay
A compilation of tips ive made per request of others
5 min tutorial for trcelyne, hope it helps!
Tried this out REALLY roughly just for fun and WOAH!?
IT WORKS WELL!!
IT STILL WORKS WELL!
Huh, that worked pretty well
v rushed but it works!!
What an amazing little tutorial!!! Highly recommend!!!
I’m so mad that it’s this easy and I’m a struggle boi
reblog to save an artist
Fucking really??? That’s all it took?????
wow! this works really well!!! now i can start easily plotting out how the hallways of my new children’s hospital are going to look :)
I love color theory
That ol’ chart of mine makes the rounds online periodically and it drives me crazy because it’s frankly not very good. So, I finally got around to remaking it.
I doubt this will get anywhere near as popular, but I wanted to make it.
Good reference for animation, comics, and for visualizing phonetics!
I compiled this a while ago but I was just looking for references and found the file so...
Best places to find reference photos:
Body types, poses, and anatomy:
http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en
https://www.posemaniacs.com/
https://quickposes.com/en
https://www.characterdesigns.com/#home-section
https://www.adorkastock.com/sketch/
https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/
https://www.proko.com/browse/tools?af=242
Giant anatomy reference tutorials Pinterest board:
https://www.pinterest.com/deedee1232/body-reference/
General:
https://unsplash.com/
https://pixabay.com/
https://www.pexels.com/
https://stocksnap.io/
https://www.freeimages.com/
https://kaboompics.com/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://morguefile.com/
https://www.flickr.com/
https://www.dreamstime.com/
https://pmp-art.com/
https://www.freepik.com/
https://photobash.co/
https://picjumbo.com/
https://burst.shopify.com/
https://magdeleine.co/
https://wordpress.org/openverse/
Historical:
https://nos.twnsnd.co/
some anatomy tips for drawing cat legs - works for big cats too
A long time ago an anon asked my thoughts about drawing backgrounds, so I finally got around to putting this together. It’s more prop-centric, but it still represents my philosophy to backgrounds.
I’ll try to do something more about drawing actual background spaces in the future! Please let me know what you think, if anything is unclear, or if you have suggestions for other tutorials you might find helpful!
Today’s Art Tip is: there’s a flexible slab of skin between your thumb and pointer finger called “The Web of The Thumb,” and it can be used to make your hands look more solid and dimensional.
(There are also smaller “webs” between each of your fingers but they’re more subtle.)
How I draw brown hair
Heres a google drive folder filled with art book pdfs, if anyone has some others that you'd like me to add to it thats missing, please let me know and send me the link
I added more
I forgot I have to be active here so here’s my Twitter tutorial on how to draw folds I made a while back to help a friend!
@bugaboooooooooo mentioned really liking ladynoire’s braid on this post, so i drew up a quick tutorial for some ways i draw braids!
Hi!! I was just thinking about your Very Sad piece for day 23 and wondering about your drawing process, particularly because of the complexity of the water - do you sketch in pencil first? If you have the chance and feel comfortable, do you think you could share a couple of in progress shots of your beautiful art? <3
ARGHRHGH okay i had MOST of this answered and then my page suddenly crashed, so I'm very frustrated, but I'm DETERMINED to type it all up again! First of all thank you for the ask! :D I don't usually take very many in-process photos, although I might do that for today's so I can give you a better look. :) For this piece, I started off filming myself dragging around a body pillow as reference footage for the pose. Meet Chat Noir!
(My room's a mess because I still haven't finished unpacking, don't mind it lol) If the poses I want are very simple, or don't interact with each other, or I've drawn similar ones, I don't always need a reference. In most cases though, I'll either spend some time on Google Images or photograph myself to help. I went through my footage and found some frames that I liked, and sketched some of them out in a different sketchbook. It's bigger and I like using it for planning and reference practice. Here's that page!
Because I draw with traditional media, and I'm trying to do all of these pictures back to back in one sketchbook, I try to plan it out in a fair amount of detail before starting on the actual page. Once I get going, it can be tricky to shift things around, especially because I always sketch in colored pencil. (I think it looks nice, it's not as messy as graphite, and it also has a subtle bearing on the mood of the final piece. This one is a dark blue-green because I wanted it to look really waterlogged, but I've used pink, purple, or yellow for a lot of Marichats so far.) The pose here was something I put a lot of thought into because I wanted it to be close enough to show how protective and intense Marinette was, but also with enough distance that I could clearly show the strain on her body and his weight in her arms. The story is also important to all of this, especially in the sketching stage. I knew Chat would be floating partially, so that would affect his weight. I knew Marinette had been looking for him for a while, so her hair was plastered to her face - and she'd gone out in a hurry, so her raincoat was unbuttoned. Chat had been slumped in an alleyway for a while as the rain fell, so the blood was diluted and darkened. etc etc I picked the Place des Vosges for the background because a) it was simple b) trees and fences are pretty easy to wreak havoc on! (this is so long sorry) I sketched the people first, to make sure the pose fit into the frame, then added in some background markers, and a few directional lines to remind me of the water flow direction (I knew I wanted her fighting against the current to bring him home). I lined the people first too, leaving out the pupils and mouths til later, because those are the main indicators of emotion, and I wanted to make sure they would still work if the mood of the piece shifted. From there I lined the people in ink, added more detail to the background sketch to make sure it fit around them well and was still clearly readable, and then inked that. For the water...idk what to tell you, I was winging it which is funny because that's the part everyone's commented on the most sdflkjdf I did use some references (I googled like, "water moving past rocks") to see how water responds to obstacles, but water is really difficult to draw, so I just kinda...wung it and tried to create something genre-appropriate! I steered clear of realism bc I knew I wouldn't be able to pull it off very convincingly and would get bogged down in all the deatil it's possible to include. (@davey-in-a-minivan of the very big brain pointed out that the water looks like peacock feathers) After that, I think I lightly colored the people first, then the background, so I could keep a handle on how they affected each other. Again, the story is important here too, because it makes the clothes shiny, and darker if they're absorbent, and the water darker and with more debris because of the turbulence. I do have a picture I sent to a friend part way through:
After that, I just kept going until I was happy! I like dramatic shading, so I added in a bit more as I went, but because light on a foggy day is pretty diffused, I didn't do as much as usual with that. I added more detail to the trees and sky behind because it didn't fit well with the rest of the piece, and eventually I got here!
And voila!! I hope that offers some insight hahaha - thanks again for the ask :))) (I might take more progress pictures of today's project for the future)
Finding Good References
I’m a HUGE advocate of using references when you draw, and today I thought I’d talk a little bit about finding a good reference, and what separates it from a bad one.
A theme that is common to my earlier art is that I tried to make it as generic as possible, so it could be more broadly appealing. Unfortunately, that also tends to be kind of boring! Lots of people might like it, but it’s unlikely anyone will love it.
I found that when I had some kind of story in mind to shape my piece, the end result became wayyy more interesting. This is something I worked on a lot during my Marichat May project; now, most of my art these days is drawn with a story in mind. I've dubbed my approach as “story-guided art” in my head, which I’ll talk about more at some point I’m sure!
Anyway, back to references, here’s an example of a bad reference vs a good one:
(When I say good and bad, what I really mean is, “useful for my intentions vs not” - I’m not here to make deep value judgements.) The first one isn’t very useful because it’s SO bland. A conventionally attractive couple in a static pose, with no movement in their hair or clothes, and no strongly discernible dynamics in the way they’re holding each other or emoting. Also, the lack of contrast between their clothes makes it hard to see where one figure ends and the other begins, and clarity is important here.
Versus that second one!!!!!! It’s super easy to pick out some strong points here - the beaming, genuine smiles on their faces most of all. There’s also the very close way they’re held together, which speaks to intimacy and familiarity. The man is leaning forward and pulling the woman’s hand towards him, a show of his eagerness and affection. The woman has her chin ducked in a little bit of shyness or tease, but her smile is just as bright, and she’s holding him tightly too, while letting him take the lead. THAT is a story we can fit our blorbos into!! (I used this reference for this ladynoir post, by the way.) Even the angle of their heads his more interesting than the first one, which is a very stolid straight-on shot.
Those are my thoughts for the night! <3 -viv