Toon Time!

drawing, cartooning, and visual-storytelling resources.

[drawingden]

How to Paint Light by jonhuangart

[gaphic]

I am so serious when I say if you want to learn about light, you NEED to at least look at modeseven’s tutorials. even if you’re not pursuing a painterly style, this is all essential theory that can be easily adapted to different coloring styles. notice how none of these ever say ‘light with these colors and shade with these colors’? notice how this is teaching how light works on a mechanical level, and reminding the audience to adjust the actual colors they choose by context? THAT is good advice.

(if you’re thinking ‘wow I want to study more of this persons art!’ I encourage you to do so, but proceed with the knowledge that modeseven draws pretty much exclusively weird as hell kink art. sometimes wisdom comes from horny places)

[toontime]

Comics Tutorials

Deep Thought Balloon is a fantastic youtube channel by cartoonist Brian McLachlan with all kinds of drawing and comic-making tips. each vid is super concise and packed full of knowledge. check out this playlist of their comic tutorials!

[vintacha]

for all the artists out there, here are my favorite resources i use to learn!

Files

The Complete Famous Artist Course

Art Books and Resources

Art, Anatomy, and Color Books

PDF Files of Art Books

YouTube

My YouTube Playlist of Tutorials

How to Draw Facial Features

Drawing and Art Advice

Drawing Lessons

Art Fundamentals

Anatomy of the Human Body

2D Animation

Perspective Drawing

Websites

Pinterest Board for Poses

Another Pinterest Board for Poses

Reference Angle

Figurosity

Sketch Daily

Human Anatomy

Animal Photo References

Humanae - Angélica Dass

Fine Art - Jimmy Nelson

Character Design References

CDR's Twitter Account

iamagco's Twitter Account

taco1704's Twitter Account

takuya_kakikata's Twitter Account

EtheringtonBro's Twitter Account

Drawabox

Color Wheel

Color Palette Cinema

Free Images and Pictures

Free Stock Photos

FILMGRAB

Screen Musings

William Nguyen Light Reference Tool

Animation References - sakugabooru

Animation References - Bodies in Motion

[toontime]

SYCRA IS BACK! so glad to see his channel has been recovered after being hacked a few months back. this is a great video from about a year ago where he talks about viewing your own work as if you were helping someone else on their work. i've found it much easier to give others advice than work on my own work, so this really hits home for me!

[almakrowan]

I have officially closed the kofi membership, at least for now, so… nothing holding me back from sharing the chibi tutorials (so far, I'm going to be updating it in the future~) 🤗 ENJOY! INTRO

PEA CHIBI

BEAN CHIBI

(tbc...)

[cubern-art]

I think i’ve cracked the code

[minervafloofderg-migrating]

*looks at gay couple* so which of you is the apple and which is the banana?

[luckilyforever]

[drewbern]

“YOU DID IT, YOU BROKE DOWN CHARACTER DESIGN TO ITS BARE ESSENTIALS”

[timesquanderer]

“Just because you took longer than others doesn’t mean you failed.”

— (via hefuckin)

[neilsanders]

I’ve recorded a video of the process of animating a simple morph between two drawings. It’s the first exercise I run when introducing animation to my illustration diploma students.

[art-appreciation-dog]

Source + CC under cut

CC: If you're an artist who tends to love your sketches but hate your final product, these tips might help.

First lighten your sketch and change it to a different color so it's really easy to see how your ink lines are actually looking.

Next, take time to find a brush that you actually like, don't just stick with the default ones. I tend to like inky brushes that have a little bit of this texture on the edges, I feel like it just makes it have more personality.

Don't be afraid to keep your actual lineart a little sketchy too. I feel that it often gives the art pieces a little more of that hand-drawn quality, and it can just make your lines look more interesting. It's really not a bad thing.

Hatching can make it look more hand-drawn.

If your colors aren't looking harmonious, put one unifying color underneath and then lower the popacity. It'll make them kind of blend together.

Lastly, overlaying some texture onto your art can really give it some personality.

Hope this helped!

[toontime]

never heard this explained as a "color boomerang." interesting way to think about it, and seems easier to grasp and remember that way.

[toontime]

good advice.

[anatoref]

Rad Sechrist

[anatoref]

Anatomy of the Back Top Image Row 2: Left (by Josh Reed), Right Row 3 Left, Middle, Right Row 4 Row 5: Left, Right Bottom Image: (Source Unknown)

[makingtoons]

How TV Cartoons Are Made - A (Mostly) Simplified Guide

When I was in school and wanted to work in animation, there was very little information about how cartoons are actually made. Even my professors at college knew very little about the industry as it is today. I’m sure it would’ve been better to study somewhere in California (like CalArts) to be better informed about this stuff, but I didn’t have that opportunity.

Nowadays, many kids in school have a dream career that they don’t really know much about. There’s a lot of missing bits of information and a lot of straight up lies that get circulated as fact as people try to scramble to put the pieces together on how cartoons for television are actually made.

I’ve been storyboarding for television for a while now, and there still aren’t clear resources for those wanting to get into the industry. I wanted to make the basics available to everyone, so here’s a quick rundown through the TV pipeline. Please note: all studios and productions are different. Even cartoons made within the same studio could have wildly different production guidelines. This is not a concrete explanation of how every cartoon is made; this is simply a generalized look at the “typical” television pipeline.

**DISCLAIMER** All images in this post have been sourced from blogs, twitters, scribd and flickr pages are publicly available, and no internal studio materials have been used that have not been already published publicly online. This post is influenced heavily by my own individual experience, as well as friends’. 

With that said, this might be a lengthy read, so let’s go!

Keep reading

[mcapriglioneart]

how to draw arms ? ? 

[swagginsloths]

holy fuck

[shoutsofthunder]

holy fuck is right… but… does it work with legs???

[mcapriglioneart]

yes !!

[empresspinto]

but how much extend

[thunar]

^^^^^^^^^^

[kvothe-kingkiller]

[gabbyzvolt25]

I NEARLY CHOKED

[lifeofcynch]

ENJFDFNFATFVFDF

[deactivated-blog]

finally. i can be accurate

[shiny-charming]

This is too fucking great to not reblog

[wishem]

I give it MASCLES

BIG MACHO

[keithislactoseintolerant-deacti]

🤣🤣

[urhella-gaychloe]

LMAOOOOOO

[fernacular]

Okay but for anyone who legit wants to know how to calculate it correctly:

The elbow joint on average rests a couple inches higher than the navel, so if you measure how long the distance is from the middle of the shoulder to that point then you have the length of the upper and fore arms!

[fernacular]

So if anyone’s wondering about legs too, the simplest rule of thumb is that the length from the top of the leg to the knee is equal to the distance between the top of the leg and the bottom of the pectorals:

And I wanna stress that when i say “top of the leg” i’m not talking about the crotch (please don’t flag me tumblr it’s an anatomical term) i’m talking about the point where the femur connects to the pelvis, which is higher up on the hips:

It’s easier to see what I’m talking about in this photo of a man squatting: 

So yeah if you use that measurement when using this technique you should get fairly realistically proportioned legs:

But remember! messing with proportions is an important and fun part of character design! Know the rules first so you can then break them however you please!

[im-a-hyperion-vault-hunter-deac]

HOW THE HELL DID I FIND THIS POST OMG

[random-dragon-jtk]

@heresshawnie you never did give me those female refs

[cosmeldriem]

Oof don’t follow this if you have a cartoon style

[fernacular]

Do follow this if you have a cartoon style!!! There’s literally no downside as an artist to having a solid understanding of human anatomy, because it allows you to make informed decisions when it comes to character design. 

There’s a big difference between drawing a humanoid character in a very stylized way because you don’t know any other way to draw, and drawing a humanoid character in a very stylized way because it’s an active decision you’ve made. understanding how the human body works makes even suuuuuper stylized cartoon figures look way better because any anatomy rule you break is a deliberate choice on your part to make it look exactly how you want!

Every artist should understand the rules of anatomy, even if you then say “fuck ‘em” and go off to draw people with noodle arms, because then you will be able to draw the best noodle arm people ever! instead of flying blind and just copying other people’s styles because you don’t know how to do anything else. 

[lexxercise]

I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

BRUSHES

Pencil I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. Ink Pen Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Round Brush The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without. Flat Brush A brush tool set to flat bristle (try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. It’s just GREAT.

Watercolor Best used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects. Cloud Basically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

TEXTURE OVERLAY

To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required!

Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. Just paste the texture into its own layer above everything you want it to apply to, and change the layer mode to Overlay. That’s it!

Want a more prominent texture? Up the contrast. Something more subtle? Lower the contrast or reduce the layer opacity. You can also use a tinted overlay to adjust the overall palette and bring a little more color unity to an otherwise disparate piece! Just be aware that too much texture can hurt the readability of the work beneath it, so I’d err on the side of subtlety.

Hope that helps!

-L

[lexxercise]

Since making this post 500 years ago, I’ve gotten periodic questions about the Flat Bristle brush setting that is default on my version of SAI, but sometimes absent in others.

After much ado, I’ve rummaged around in my program folders and found an image in SAI’s elemap folder called Flat Bristle.bmp that you should be able to just grab and use! I edited this link into my original post as well, but it’s gotten so many reblogs I don’t know how helpful that will end up being…

In any case, I’ve also taken the liberty of zipping all of my blotmap, brushtex, elemap, and papertex folders and hosting the file on my site just in case whatever borked version of SAI people are encountering are missing all this basic stuff. There’s not a lot in there, but the settings in the original post don’t make any sense if you don’t have them!

You can download the zip file here.

Happy painting!

IMPORTANT EDIT: In the event that dragging and dropping these files don’t do the trick, this site has pretty extensive instructions on installing SAI brush files.