The Candy Jar

A place to post art tutorials, references, and resources. ♥

[feefal]

Composition, anatomy and perspective! the primal forces that humble all artists

[feefal]

Foreshortening (derogatory)

[lazysmirk]

Just in case you forget this exists.

It exists.

[dragonofdarknesschaos]

With those “when you want to design a character but you don’t know color theory” posts flying around I thought this would be relevant again.

[secretsivekept]

SLAMs THE REBLOG BUTTON

[niyarest]

there’s also Coolors website that gives you randomized palettes!

[tf2humbug]

Don’t forget ColourLovers, either! It’s a social media-esque site where you can browse tons of palettes and share your own.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

ColourLovers is my go-to for when I’m having trouble coming up with a color scheme! It’s also been around for over a decade, so there’s plenty to browse through.

[yufei]

I do studies warm ups everyday for about 45 min - 1 hour before drawing my comic. I have a folder with references that I keep saving photos whenever something piqued my interest, so each day before doing warm up I pick something that I want to study that day: poses, lightning, color, clothes.

Uploading studies here is a nice way to track my progress. I do feel like I'm slowly getting better at coloring.

(some musings below)

Also lately I decided to try changing my mindset to "1% progress a day" as in "Small changes, big impact" or as I call it "baby steps". Like screw the ego of "this is too easy, you should be better than this by now". So I pick the bare minimum of the task that I personally can't fail no matter what. And when I get into the motion and get comfortable with routine I add stuff and make it just a little bit more difficult. Like with studies. First, it was just:

"try to make it look like the reference at least 50%" ->

"try to make it look like the ref - 75%" ->

"try to stylize the studies but keep the color the same as ref" ->

"try to add some color variations" ->

"try to combine 2 refs into one: shapes and lighting from one, color palette from another"

I do tend to set a goal that is above my skills and then get upset at myself that I failed to achieve it. So baby steps.

[saintecare]

Omg do you have any advice for rendering color studies? I love you art so much!!

aw thank you so much!! color comes naturally to me so its kind of hard to explain my intuition with it, but generally when i do color studies i try to punch up the vibrancy of my references! finding and laying down the overall undertone of all of the colors in the reference can also help get rid of the overwhelm of trying to pick every color just right-- once you have that base you can usually just eyeball the local colors of each part with a low opacity brush and the undertone(s) will naturally correct them to more unified hues. i also mentioned this somewhere before but everything that looks like one color is secretly like 20 colors, so putting other hues into an object or using a color jitter brush or a program like heavypaint that heavily relies on color jitter can be helpful in capturing that depth and life-- i use the posterization tool to help me with that aspect sometimes! as far as the rendering itself, it's extremely helpful to try and focus more on shapes and light and form than rendering every detail on every object. and always go from big shapes to little shapes! here's a few crunched process gifs of old studies i did if that helps at all!

[pbjpawprints]

i've gotten a lot of very kind feedback about how i draw fat bodies, so i thought id make a little guide showing my thought process!! this is far from comprehensive, but maybe it'll be helpful to anyone who feels intimidated drawing plus size furs :)

if anything is unclear, please feel free to ask questions in the replies or reblogs!! <3

[iniro]

HII my character & shape design tips PDF is now available! ^_^ hope you enjoy !!

BUY HERE or HERE

[anyrava]

I made a detailed rock painting guide (Includes some rendering basics too!)

You can find more tutorials on my Ko-Fi Shop if you've found this helpful! 🫶🍃

Visit Anyrava's Shop!

I've opened a shop. Come take a look!

[loish]

Have you tried the new Procreate brushes? I was trying to get a creamy, painterly look, but it all blended together into a muddy mess 😅 I still love the painterly style, so I suffered through many disastrous over-blended paintings and figured out some tricks to make it work!

My latest tutorial video is about how you can achieve a painterly look at Procreate, using some of the new brushes that came with the latest update. Watch it here! ✨

[caemidraws]

Hi! I love your art and admire your style and skill. <3 You are amazing!!! Every time I see your new work, I want to cry from the beauty. If you don't mind, could you do a compositional analysis of a couple of your recent pieces? This is one aspect of your drawing that I would like to understand.

Hi!! Thank you for the ask (´｡• ω •｡`)

As I said in a previous one, I haven't really studied how to make compositions work, so instead of proper tutorials I can try to explain what I was thinking when drawing a piece!

I'll link the other post if you're interested!!

But anyway, for my latest pieces:

I've been drawing lots of art using an arched frame, as in the example below - which is a little more complex than the previous ones!

(Mars is the blorbo holding the sword btw but if you're following me you probably know already fdkgdjf)

I hope I've been clear or at least close to it,,,

[svndvn]

for the 3 people in the back who thought I had painted a white Ged (forgot how this website can be sometimes...) here is a reminder on how light works. Yes I know Ged is brown skin, yes I have read the version with Leguin's introduction texts where she talks extensively about earthsea's charactershave been whitewashed, I have read her blog and how deceived she was with the movie adaptations. I understand how this topic on representation is important and sensitive but please learn to read an image before jumping to conclusions. will probably delete this in a week or 2

[genicecream]

a series of composition tips i’d been sharing on twitter!

and since some people had asked, i’ve put up a pdf version of this on gumroad along with a layered psd of one of the example images too

tips would be really appreciated, but it’s up for free!

[nkim-illustrates]

How I paint an apple! 🍎

[nkim-illustrates]

How I paint strawberries! 🍓

[nkim-illustrates]

How I Paint Grapes! 🍇

[nkim-illustrates]

How I Paint Orange slices! 🍊

[nkim-illustrates]

More ways I paint plants! This is how I paint to make my plants look less muddy. I use bolder colors to help me out. Again, this is how I like to go about it! 😀

[donutsbagels]

Okay I JUST realized I never posted these on here—- BUT BASICALLY, about a year and a half ago I started doing these experimental black hairstyle posts that were threads long on Twitter, to give artists a source of inspo for their black ocs whose hair they wanted to try something new with! There’s more to black hair than just the selected styles portrayed in media, and I thought it would be fun to show people how much texture, shape, fades, length, and style can be combined when drawing black hair—-cause it’s a kind of manipulation our hair can do irl! The OG thread from when I made these a year ago were lost with the hacking of my original Twitter account (@/bagels_donuts) but I’ve since reuploaded the whole thread to my new Twitter (@/ItsDonutsFR)! I hope artists on tumblr find these useful, sorry it took me so long to post them here😭🙏🏾 I’ll upload them all in parts!

Part 1: Long masc hairstyles + playing with fades

Post by @donutsbagels · 7 images

💬 2  🔁 715  ❤️ 1008 · Part 2: shape, style, and length with femme styles!