Tutorial ~ Peritwinkle's Tome of Art Tutorials ~

[peritwinkle]

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Hello everyone!

As many of you know, I post quite a lot of art on this site, and out of my passion for it I decided to make a second thread, this time dedicated to sharing all I know and hopefully guiding some of you who are interested in improving. I am by no means an expert (frankly, just someone who spends WAY too much time drawing and gawking at other people's masterpieces), but I would love to share little tips and tricks I picked along the way, to make your art life easier. Please take everything written here with a grain of salt and read away knowing these are my personal tips and you absolutely, under NO circumstance, have to follow them in order to be a good artist.

That being said, I thought I should start with what I consider should be the foundation of everyone's knowledge, whether your style is more realistic or cartoonish - anatomy. Now, I am by no means saying a certain art style would not admit variations (YOU make the rules of your own art!) but I strongly believe everything is rooted in reality and, regardless of one's artistic preferences, there are some laws of physics and biology that, if overlooked, can completely throw off the harmony of an entire piece.


So here's the deal.

You don't need to know the name of every bone and muscle in your hand to have great spatial perception. HOWEVER, being aware of the major bones is crucial in... well... Making your character look like they aren't physically impaired. That implies taking a liiiiiiitle bit of time analyzing a big ol' skeleton. Here's a mistake I have seen around Instagram quite a few times:

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I highlighted the clavicle in blue, the scapula in green and the SCM muscle in pink. These structures are what show up most in portraits. The SCM muscle attaches somewhere behind your ears and goes down to your clavicle area, meaning when you move your head, this muscle and, implicitly, the little "U" it forms at the base of your neck, changes shape and shifts with it (tense your neck and try this yourself in the mirror!). Similarly, when you lift your arms, your scapula moves and the clavicles move with it, since they're attached to it by a small bone thingy called acromion. You might think - "Well, why would I need to care about that?". Let me show you why.

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Wouldn't it be weird for your clavicle to pop out of your underarm when you waved at someone? Look how more organic and dynamic the second pose looks. While respecting anatomy might look like overkill at first, this kind of mistake would distract anyone from the rest of your beautiful painting, whether they're an anatomy enthusiast or not, because our eyes and brains are trained to subconsciously spot inaccuracies of this kind.

But, yet again, you might think - "What if I always draw from reference?" - and that's a great question. Here's the deal with references: have you ever drawn a hand from reference and realized it looked... weird? You were initially proud of it at first - it looked so realistic! - but when you took a step away and started comparing it to the reference image again, well... Things started to look strange. This often happens when we try to reference a structure we don't UNDERSTAND beforehand. You still draw what you see, but given you don't really have knowledge of the reason behind why it's shaped like that, it comes out distorted.

It took me years to get the grip on how skin and fat sit ontop of muscle and bones, and I'm here to shed some light in the hopes of making it easier for those of you who struggle with this. To do this, I am pulling out of my art folder one of my old, dusty study references from a couple years ago. I chose this one because I was fascinated with the way light and shadow fell on the subject's hands, and it's a great way to exemplify the main bone structures in the human hand.

Spoiler: credit

Etienne Adolphe Piot

In this one, I largely highlighted the primary shapes determined by 3 structures:
- the radius and ulna, the bones of your forearm, fusing with the metacarps to form the wrist joint
- the base of the fingers, determined by the place where the metacarps meet the phalanges

Why is this relevant? Because these are the main bending points of your hand when drawing a dynamic pose. Pretending I don't know what's underneath the skin, I'm visualizing this area as three big blocks. The radius is the side with the thumb called the pollex. The ulna is the little bone that sticks out on the side with your pinky finger, which is mostly visible on people with thin hands. TIP: If you picture every joint in this manner (when you go for realistic and semi-realistic anatomy), you will likely find it much easier to shade correctly.



Here are the main bones and joints, highlighted on this study and a recent drawing. For starters, I recommend doing this on as many reference pictures as you can (like an X-ray). Eventually, you can switch to drawing these guidelines from scratch when trying to copy a reference pose or creating your own.



Hopefully you learned something useful today, or at the very least, this tutorial shifted some gears in your perspective. Please let me know if this was helpful and what else you'd like to see! This is a place of constructive criticism and I want it to be a positive little guidebook for everyone.

 

[peritwinkle]

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Hello hello! I'm back with another tutorial I've had in the making for a little while now: underpainting. While this only applies to a few particular art styles - mostly semi realism and concept art - I thought it would be good insight for those of you who are looking to expand out of 2D art but feel overwhelmed by the (frankly) messy process.

Every painting should start with a sketch. That can be either black on white, or straight up color, mostly known as the sculpting method. I personally prefer the former because it allows me to get into precise detail when it comes to facial features. For this, I find two things particularly essential: the style of your brush and brush opacity. As you can see in the sketch below, lines differ in darkness, allowing me to create more three-dimensional shapes.



This is NOT the time to start worrying about shadow and light. Emphasizing volume is optional, but I highly recommend it because it can allow you to cheat a little later on. If you set your sketch layer to multiply and start adding the base colors underneath, the sketch layer will morph into the perfect color for shading. Take a look at the subject's face: I only added a base brown color and mixed a few highlight shades, all while the brushstrokes from the layer above adopted the right shadow color, adding volume without any additional effort.

TIP: If you find that multiply is too dark and grey, which can happen when working with bright colors, you can choose overlay instead. Alternatively, if you're painting a portrait for example, you can do the following:
1. Create a new layer above the sketch layer and set it to Color.
2. Hold ALT and click on your sketch layer.
3. Fill the Color layer with a dark, saturated brown, or start coloring it in with a dark color varying on each area. Example: Deep plum for the hair, dark maroon for the skin.




If you had tried to paint the shadows overtop, chances are you would struggle with picking the right color and keeping it consistent throughout the dark-to-light gradient. In other words, in this particular case where the cheekbone shadow extends from the darker part of the face to the lighter one, you cannot just draw a dark line all throughout it and make it seem organic, because as it neared the lighter area, it would naturally get lighter.



In the example above, I also emphasized the process of picking base colors. There are many ways in which you can lay color down, but I find that for the most interesting effect, pairing different tones works best. That means either a cool shadow and a warm highlight or vice-versa. This tip is similar to the opposite color theory, implying that opposite colors look best together. For this painting I chose dark pink and bright green.

Choosing your base colors is crucial in determining the look of your paintings. That being said, you should focus on lights, darks and other variations and NOT on rendering details. Keep your canvas as zoomed out as possible (I recommend to keep it just fit within your screen). There is a saying that a good artist's drawing looks finished in every moment of its process, and while I don't necessarily agree, I think what we can take from here is that regardless of where you are at with your piece, you should try your best to keep it cohesive.

In other words, if you were to do your makeup, you shouldn't first do half of your face and then the other. Therefore, you should try to render each area equally and gradually. The reason I recommend this is because, most of the time, it can prevent inconsistency (i.e., your subject's right arm looking more detailed than the left OR the body looking more cartoony than the face, etc.)

Here is what one of my finished underpaintings looks like. After laying down the base colors, I played with Soft Light and Overlay to add some highlights and brightness where needed. It looks messy - as it should - but if I were to zoom out or squint, everything essentially melts together, even if my lines aren't clean at all. My shadow, light and colors are on point, which is what truly matters at this stage in the painting.

 

[Luxura]

Thank you for this Peri!
I really love the composition and colours chosen!
Also, skullzzz ​