F A T Z I L L A Draws

[succubusboyfriend]

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

[succubusboyfriend]

someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help

me: my what

[suave-eddboy]

[thepioden]

What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.

[sparksel]

when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much. 

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings! 

[concerningwolves]

[t-c-art-inspiration]

How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense

[justpickupthatpen]

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

[stupidlittlesideblog]

Reblogging to save a wrist

[justpickupthatpen]

[briarbramble]

Hi I have a literal animation degree and I learned fucking ✨none✨ of this

[kizzer55555]

So what I’m hearing is…circles. Circles everywhere.

[maudiemoods]

What do you all study when you're doing art studies??

[venomous-qwille]

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!

[necronatural]

Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.

Morpho Fat and Skin Folds on Archive.org (for free!)

[marat]

i know we joke about cis artists having the weirdest sense of anatomy, but also even when the anatomy is fine, no one seems to want to draw women doing normal things

[marat]

Drawing challenge: draw your favorite male characters like this

[thatdemonbish]

this is exactly why i’m a huge fan of posemaniacs!

you get 3d model pose references with the option of having a male or female anatomy for each pose

they have a WIDE VARIETY of poses that you can search for using a TAG SYSTEM

(as you can see by the scroll bar in the second image there is Even More Tags)

you can select a pose you like for larger viewing and the convenience doesn’t stop!!!

you have full 360 viewing range of the pose plus zooming in and out

and what’s that? a TOOLBAR?? MENU?? THING??

Correct!

the eye button hold a very fun menu

negative space blacks out the background and fills the pose with a solid white silhouette

the “texture” refers to the skin situation of the model with the “color” and “grey” shown below

(i usually use color personally)

then there’s the option of different sized drawing grids(4 and 16 below)

idk wtf bounding box is about but it looks like this if it matters to you

“floor” toggles all shadows on the floor, “floor grid” you guessed it puts a like perspective guide grid on the floor that goes to forever, and “shadow” toggles ALL shading. there is NO lighting happening if you turn that off. NONE.

NEXT ITEM! that box thing with the line through it? flips the pose horizontally.

the little person symbol? lets you switch anatomies

camera icon? you can choose from a selection of preset camera angles PLUS an option for … idk what to call it but you can do this!

less flat right!! i’m sure there’s a word i just don’t know but this is maximum *that* so there is less *that* if you want it

the lightbulb gives you a menu like the camera one but it offers a selection of lighting styles with variable intensity

CHARMING!

and that’s not even everything this site provides!!!!!!! they have tutorials, instructional videos, lessons, all sorts of shit!!! (although they are vast majority if not all in japanese just a heads up)

AND ITS ALL FREE

DONT EVEN NEED TO SET UP AN ACCOUNT OR APPROVE OF COOKIES JUST GET IN DO YOUR THING GET OUT NO STRINGS ATTACHED

and if you don’t have ad blocker or are on mobile(like me) NOT TO WORRY

the ads are few and far between! ZERO video ads, NONE take over your screen or glitch you at all, they are of no concern i forget they’re there!

(this is not at all sponsored btw i’m just a genuine fan of this site and i’m happy to spread the good word unprompted)

[zmariottaxdraws]

Tavi and Sesto!

Covid quarantine paused Tavi’s job as a restaurant bus boy and made his college classes go online, so he gained a substantial amount of weight never leaving the apartment for large stretches of time. Plays a lot of FPS and online games. The kind of guy always belching into the mic.

His long-distance relationship with his girlfriend at another university ends when she sees how much weight he’s been putting on since quarantine. He is professedly “straight” but has begun experimenting with his gay roommate, Sesto, which started with the boys showing off and comparing their covid gains.

This is Tavi’s roommate, Sesto. He is a short king, who works at his family’s butcher shop. A few years older than Tavi, but just as immature. Has to work out just to keep extra weight off. Jealous of Tavi’s tall, slim metabolism… until quarantine hits them both.

[zmariottaxdraws]

Tried drawing a furry halfling for practice tonight. He’s a former acrobat in a carnival.

[zmariottaxdraws]

Uh oh… Timber’s a big, hungry boy and you’re awfully snack-sized…

[zmariottax]

Efren has found himself downtown and gigantic. He’s curious about Timber’s macro fantasies. He may not be able to eat as much as his boyfriend, but he’s gonna try his best.

[zmariottaxdraws]

I drew my boy Timber for the first time! He’s probably just finished a competitive eating challenge and getting belly rubs from his boyfriend, Efren.

[filibusterfrog]

Dear magic froggie, have you any advice on learning to simplify things like shapes and so on? All my stuff is terribly indistinct and sketchy, and I seek to improve on line quality. Help?

basically just try to smooth stuff out, clarity matters more than detail imo so when youre drawing a line, dont try to make it perfect, especially not by doing this

just do one light long one. overshoot if you have to, the point is to be confident; i suspect your shape language will improve on its own after u start doing this as you try to create the right shape with fewer lines

[zmariottax]

It’s swimsuit beach party time for some of my OC’s. These guys come from an underground steampunk world, but eventually find themselves in an overworld solarpunk AU. Naturally, they’ve gotta check out the beach!

[thechekhov]

I made a thing! I was thinking about this for a few days - because I realized that when I was young, I was also frustrated about being given the same advice over and over - without really knowing what it meant!!

Here’s 5 techniques which I have done before which have helped me grow as an artist, which are good for 5-minute warmups or just straight up challenges for your sketchbook! 

Obviously, these are not the ONLY techniques - they’re just the ones I find most fun! And maybe they’re not the most ‘correct’ ones out there, but it’s better than another comic about practicing more, right? 

Good luck to everyone on their drawings!

[thecaffeinebookwarrior-deactiva]

Honestly, as an artist and illustrator myself, seeing all the posts yelling at newbies to “practice” is so frustrating to me. It feels condescending, and would have had me running for the hills in no time if I was just starting out. This is much more helpful.

[gatobob-deactivated20240303]

REAL GOOD POST

Thank you! I will stop saying ‘Practice’ by itself now!!!!

[zmariottaxdraws]

Which of my characters or stories would you most like to see an all-new rewrite or continuation of?

[zmariottaxdraws]

A ttrpg setting I’ve been working on. 12 regions with 12 stories. This is Jesper, a griffin-riding human spellslinger from a fantasy wild west. His orc lover disappeared, an elf fell from the sky, and an undead posse is gearing up for a big showdown.

[zmariottax]

‪Alright I’m back and not feeling anxious anymore, so it’s monster boy OC creation hours this weekend. Message me if you wanna talk about ideas!!‬

[zmariottaxdraws]

For those playing along at home, you may recognize Timber, and many of the requests and commissions I’ve gotten of his fat and macro shenanigans (mostly by the talented @verzisnsfwblog ). On the left is Spruce, his father.

Spruce is tall and lanky, 44 years old. He had Timber at 26. His young wife and he moved together into a polyamorous art commune in their early twenties. Shortly after they had Timber. Though Timber’s mother passed away when he was young, his father still lives in the same art commune that resides in a warehouse-turned funky shopping mall-turned apartment building. Spruce is bisexual, laidback, open-minded, optimistic, warm, friendly, oblivious (like his son) and more than a bit airheaded. Mostly a painter. He has a fluid polyamorous relationship with most of their art commune.

Timber, despite being a very basic dudebro, grew up in this creative, offbeat, freelove situation, and as such, he is incredibly open-minded and accepting. His father was accepting of him coming out, both as gay and a gainer eventually.

[zmariottaxdraws]

A little lockdown sketchy. His name is Caden, and he owns a hardcore fitness center. Did a fit-fat-fit challenge for youtube, got divorced, and got fat again (not intentional). Has a good sense of humor about the juxtaposition of owning a fitness center with such a hefty belly.