yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
A friend asked recently: how do I start animating? So here I have a quick example of happy running squirrel.
Start simple, I recommend, that is, to simplify your animation so you don’t get caught up in the details in the beginning. I observe there are two basic ways you can make a rough animation – by Contour and Structural animations.
Animating is basically to draw a lot and link these drawings together. Some of us draw naturally with contours, the best way for them to begin animating is perhaps simply by animating the contour! So here we link all the drawings by animating the outline and silhouette that are represented by curves, straight lines, and angles.
Some other of us draw more comfortably with the structures, because that how most of us are taught to understand forms in school. With balls and springs, it’s maybe easier for them to understand what’s happening underneath the moving body, and what drive different parts to move differently.
Personally, I’ve always animated with contours because that’s how I draw naturally. Since it’s convenient for me, I could then focus on delivering a more dynamic action. But there are occasions where the character design is based
heavily on forms which requires me to animate structurally.
So you could consider trying either of these two by first understand how you draw – do you draw better by jumping straight to the outlines, or by first representing the body with a skeleton. Contour and structure are like the two ends of a spectrum, once you master one method, you could try the other way to improve your animation! I believe good animations are based on the knowledge of both.
I hope this helps!
Extended ref: I made a contour animation of a squirrel using the sine curve, and you can see how linking the curves could help to bring out the flow. (x)
Animation software is, by and large, very expensive and out of the range of most people seeking to get into animation. As of March 26th, this software will become open source and available to all prospective animators!
The less time you have to draw something, the less detail you can put down.
So, instead you want to put down as much information about the pose as you can with as few lines as possible!
This is called finding the gesture – the essence of the pose. Forget about form, forget about contour, gesture is about the feeling and the motion!
It’s the first stage to any drawing, it helps to have a general idea of what you want to draw down on the page before you jump into the details.
When working from life, the image of what you want to draw is already in front of you. So before you draw anything, take some time to look at what you are going to draw.
Look for the motion, the lines that travel through the body.
Once you’ve found the motion, you can then draw it.
This is the gesture – it does not yet look like a person because there is no form or contour, but it should still give you a sense of the pose and its motion!
You can then build the forms on top of the gesture.
It’s essentially like drawing stick-men, as you’re drawing lines rather than contours.
Those are gestures I spent a couple minutes on to make them look nicer lmao, but this stage is really quick – this one took about thirty seconds
Also a lil tip: When drawing the gesture, you want to use long continuous strokes.
You’re trying to convey as much as you can in one line, because you’re only spending a couple seconds on it! The more you can draw with one stroke, the quicker it’ll be done.
In a life drawing session, you’ll generally be given a minute to two minutes to spend drawing before the model changes pose.
Most of this time you should spend looking for that motion rather than drawing. If you have a minute to draw the pose, spend thirty seconds studying the model!
If you jump right into the drawing, you’ll actually take longer because you don’t know what you’re drawing.
Late last year I wanted to start a series of short tutorials called Tip Jar, as a way of saying thanks to my fans and giving back to my patrons. This is the first of the series I have made, showing my technique on quickly filling in lineart so you can get to painting without coloring outside the lines faster.
Someday I hope to turn these into video tutorials when I have the income and the time, but for now I hope that I will be able to share useful tips in this infographic format.
Worth sharing because this is exaaaaactly how I do my flats! I get this question all the time when I post my process videos, and this explains it far more succinctly than I ever could. 🙂
Guys this is EXACTLY my process. If you wanna make it go a bit faster go under Photoshop preferences to edit shortcut keys where you can change keyboard shortcuts to quickly modify and expand/contract your selections. It’s a good habit to get into instead of clicking the drop down menus every time :>
Do you cry whenever you sharpen your lead because you know how expensive that lead was? Then dump that dust out and use it!
You now have free powdered graphite! (If you don’t use a lead pointer, you can buy a solid graphite stick and take a hammer to it – yes, I’ve done this – or you can just go ahead and buy powdered graphite.) You can use a dry brush to paint it on your pencil drawings for a soft, light blended effect. Or…
Add a drop or two of water and mix until it dissolves. Remember that softer lead will produce darker effects, so add more or less water depending on how dark or light you want to go.
You now have powdered graphite AND erasable paint!
Paint whatever the crap.
Lift that crap out with an eraser. Darker graphite won’t come out completely, but you can soften, blend, and lighten it. You can also smudge it with a finger or brush.
Then you can go in and detail it with the same pencil you cannibalized to make the graphite powder, and it’ll all blend together because it’s the same crap.
But painting with graphite is nice because you can block in large areas and detail on top of it. And sometimes you just want to have a “brush” effect, which isn’t so quick and easy with a pointy pencil, or maybe you want to be free and loose the way only a brush can let you be.
There you go! Graphite paintings from repurposed waste materials!
something I accidentally discovered today! (I’d imagine a lot of color theory stuff was involved with computer fonts that makes them readable and not all pixelated)
(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ✧ 