An anon asked me for an eye tutorial 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
I highly recommend looking reference photos on the internet to get used to drawing different eyes, and also to take photos of yourself to get used to drawing different angles/expressions – Don’t just blindly draw the same eye over and over again, because without a strong basis of drawing by observation, you could get into some bad habits, and all your characters will look the same. :)
I want to introduce all of you to this amazing place called the ukhairdressers style gallery.
It’s basically a massive database full of high-quality images of different hairstyles. I mean, look at all the options in that sidebar (and part of it’s cut off):
In total they have 976 pages of hairstyles with about 17 styles each, that’s about 16592 hairstyles to look at.
Look at all the stuff they’ve got! Long hair:
Short hair:
Straight hair:
Curly hair:
Afro hair:
Men’s hair:
Hair on older models:
Extra-fancy hair:
Even crazy avant-garde hair:
So if you need help with designing a character or you just want to practice drawing hair, this is a fantastic resource.
can you give a run down on skintones?
In painting skin tones, a lot of the time I see people choose colors that are over-saturated or unbalanced. There isn’t really an exact art to this that I can explain—you just need to get a feel for what saturation balance you need for that particular skintone. Here are some examples of what I usually pick.
As you can see, I used different base colors (orange, reddish, yellow) for the skin shades in all three examples. The reason for this is because all skin tones have a different base color besides just Light, Medium, and dark. Some people divide them into categories of “warm” and “cool.” Pantone has some really good examples and references for this.
Another big part about drawing and painting skin tones that a lot of people forget is how skin thickness affects color variation. The presence of bone, blood, and muscle underneath the skin affects its colors. This is especially noticeable on the face.
The colors here are a little exaggerated to show my point, but with a little adjusting and blending…
Voila! Subtle, but more realistic.
Our skin is the largest organ on our body, and as our body’s first line of defense against the outside world, it’ll be covered with tiny details and imperfections. Things like sunburns, tans, freckles, scars, and facial hair all add character to your subject matter. Here are some examples!
TANS: Everyone tans differently, depending on your ethnicity and skin tone. Fair skinned folks tend to burn more than tan, which means you’ll need a more startling, eye-catching red.If you have a skin type that tends to tan more, the color will be more brown than red. For black skin tones, the tan is less red. (And while we’re on the subject: black people DO tan, so it’s important for you to put on sunscreen and be careful in the sun, too.)
Those are the areas that the sun tends to hit the most—and things like goggles, hats, and masks can change the shape of that area.
FRECKLES AND MOLES: Freckles are also products of the sun. Some people have freckles that stay year-round, while others have freckles that fade in the winter and return in the summer. Moles are skin cells that grow in a cluster instead of being spread throughout the skin. When exposed to the sun, they tend to darken. (Another note on skin health: if you have any oddly-shaped/colored moles, moles that have changed color, size, or shape, or anything of the sort, please check with your doctor!)
Freckles like to cluster around each other, sort of like stars, and they vary greatly in size. You can have a few freckles in one place, or a lot of freckles in multiple places. Most commonly freckled areas are your face, shoulders and neck, back, and forearms.
FACIAL HAIR: Facial hair also affects the colors of the face. For simplicity’s sake we’ll be using black hair, as it is the most noticeable. Facial hair usually grows in these areas, and can make the skin look blueish/grayish because of the darker hairs beneath the skin. If your hair is red, this also very noticeable.
There you go! That’s about all I can think of at the moment for skin tones. As always, references and practice are your best friend (and so is this neat little trick that pheberoni has.) Good luck with your arting!
I absolutely adore your art style I was wondering if you could explain how you draw faces and like heads cause I have a lot of difficulty with constructing the face without having it look like an utter disaster sorry if your busy you don't have to do this but I was just wondering if you could help a young artist out thanks :D
Aww, thanks, anon. I’m pretty haphazard with things, but I’ll try to help.
This is your new best friend!!
The friendly neighborhood scribbly circle here is your foundation for drawing heads from any angle.
Like, any angle.
Because even when viewed in perspective, the head still has the same amount of volume.
As for actually constructing a face and placement of features, you can see that when jotting down a face, I generally lay down those guidelines [here in green] so I have something to work off of when I’m expanding upon a sketch. I would mostly recommend being aware of the underlying structure of the face.
If you’re going for super-anatomically-correct, you can see that facial features line up in specific, symmetrical ways. For real though, nobody’s symmetrical and sometimes noses are long or ears are small and faces are asymmetrical or just plain different. So this is a foundation but not a cast iron rule.
I will say that the more you do it, the easier it will become! It all just takes practice. And I totally tried to screen record a sketch, but my computer is being hella slow and it keeps freezing up, so I give up. In lieu of something new, here’s an older process gif that I think shows things pretty well:
YUP. Hope this helps. o/
How I pratice drawing things, now in a tutorial form. The shrimp photo I used is here Please support me on patreon so I can make more tutorials! :)
tweet
Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
Hey friends!
Meg here for this week’s TUTOR TUESDAY! This week I go over just a little trick that I like to use when drawing and connecting arms/hands/legs/feet ect. This helps me with foreshortening as well. I hope it helps you folks as well! I have tutorials that talk more specifically about hand/foot/leg anatomy here. If you have any tutorial recommendations send ‘em in here or my personal. Now go forth and I’ll see you next week!