Quick Art Tip - Child Proportions

tusky business

i literally love how your color and shade if it’s ok do you have any tips on digital coloring? you don’t have to answer this if you don’t feel like it :) thanks!!

hello friend!! i have a tutorial i made on twitter a while ago which is more or less how i make my colours more interesting. i still use the technique and in general it’s just a lot of colour adjustment nothing too special LOL here!!

Do you have any advice for maintaining a celebrity's likeness in a drawing without compromising your art style? When I try to draw real people they look completely different from how they should be and my art style ends up totally skewed as well. Thanks in advance!

This is a tough skill to develop! but with some hard work and research you’ll be able to do it!!!

 My recommendation is to study professional caricature! Even if the end goal isn’t to do exaggerated crazy portraits of the the celebrity, studying the art form can help you learn to apply those concepts more subtly in your own style! 

The key element of caricature is studying a persons face and looking for what makes them unique or different from the ‘standard’ anatomical face model, eg how do their proportions stray away form the ‘rules’.

once you take note of these things experiment by exaggerating them in different ways through quick thumbnail sketches 

thumbnails by Court Jones for Proko.com

They might not look like the person right away but keep experimenting! trial and error is your friend!!!

(for more info on Caricature the Proko youtube channel has a whole in depth series by Court Jones the artist above!  I  Highly recommend checking it out and the other lecture series the channel!)

Once you have done this research you can apply it to your style and design the celebrity just like the design team on Netflix’s BoJack Horseman designed Character actress Margo Martindale! She and many other celebrity cameo’s on the show look like themselves but also like they belong in the world of the show!

The final thought I want to leave you with is: don’t worry too much about art style or let it get in the way of learning new ways to draw. There is a lot of pressure on the internet to find your own unique art style and have everything be consistent all the time but this thinking can actually get in the way of your artistic growth if you focus on it too much or to early. 

I Personally dont care about consistency at all in my art, I design the style of the drawing based on the project (eg. am I  going to animate this character, is it an illustration, what age group am I targeting? what Genre? if you want to see examples of this I have plenty on my instagram)

I have a lot of feelings on the topic of art styles but I dont want this post to be essay length or take me a week to write so please watch this video by Kesh on youtube about it : Stop Trying to Find Your Art Style He talks about this issue way more clearly and concisely then I ever could!

Hope this Helps!!! 

-Mod Todd (ko-fi) 

Here’s the first half of slides from my comic class on Lettering! 

Rest of the slides: https://gingersnappish.tumblr.com/post/616487287636803584/the-rest-of-the-comic-lettering-slides-first

I have two questions! First: have you ever thought of doing a tarot card suit for your characters? I think it'd work really well for them! And two: help me how do I draw legs

@gravitality

Hi!! I’ve absolutely been thinking about that, yeah, in fact I recently talked about that to my boyfriend just recently. It’ll likely happen after october! And to answer your second question! I made a thing on legs that i hope you’ll find useful!!

So. I’ve already explained basics on legs here, but I don’t think it hurts to go through some extra details to help you understand legs some more.

The very basic thing is to imagine legs as teardrops. Again, this has already been covered in said tutorial above, but I figured it’s still good to mention even the most basic thing that I know of. I still highly recommend you check it out to get in more detail and to see some other examples and practices that you do. But basically, think of legs in the shapes of teardrops, when it comes to shape. If you need a simple stick-figure to connect the legs in the first place, make sure that they bend at the knees a bit so that the legs don’t come off as stiff and unnatural. 

As you can see, this method works perfectly for realistic legs as it does for stylistic ones. Remember to use these as a guideline, never to be the exact base of the legs you will be drawing. If you draw traditionally, remember not to draw these guides too hard, or they will be hard to erase/do freestyle!

But how do you actually draw out the legs without drawing them perfectly straight, as shown to the left? The trick is to add volume to them, and how you do that can be winged to your own liking. The idea is to think in curves. As no leg is perfectly straight. You may make these curves minimal if you don’t want them to be curvy, but keep in mind, still, that not even your own bones are perfectly straight, so it is highly recommended that you make them bend, at least a little. 

It all depends on how you draw them as well. Say you put your legs together, as shown in this picture, what happens to the fat and muscle? Naturally, they press together, much like how thighs squish on the surface when you sit down (I’m sure most people know what I’m talking about). Make sure this shows in your art! This is very important to keep in mind, because it makes it all look more natural and believable. Try to cross your legs or stand up and sit down again for real-life examples!

The same applies for stretching your legs, more or less, except they appear to become more ‘hollow’ and slimmer. They become less soft to the touch, too, and might show. Try stretching your legs and feel where the muscles tense and where it feels ‘hollow’. This is very helpful with your art.

Many leg tutorials talk about legs without mentioning the behind. It requires a tutorial on it’s own, in all honesty, but this is the most simplest way to draw it connecting to the legs. Remember that it comes in many different shapes, and this is just a super basic guide! Two circles overlapping, while following the line and flow of the legs. Remember the muscle/fat as mentioned above!

Okay, so we got the basics of leg shapes figured out? What if you want o draw them in a certain pose, or with a certain silhouette, but perhaps do not have the reference for it? Or you want to blend your style into it? The key is to not shy away from doodling the form. Make mess, draw lightly and don’t care about the anatomy. That way you’ll get everything down without it appearing stiff. You can clean up the sketch later, always, and if you can, use a reference after you have drawn your pose, to correct your drawing.

Remember that the hips do a lot to the pose of the legs! Make sure they are in flow with your legs, so that it can look more natural. Remembers that hips ‘rotate’ with the spine.

I’ve talked about this method before when it comes to posing, and the same applies for the legs. One way to make legs appear ‘steady’ is to picture them standing in a line, and one of those legs need not to stray from the lines too much, making it steady. If you want a dynamic pose despite the steady pose, you can always have the other leg stray from the line, since it only matters that one leg is steady. This method can create good, casual poses without making them appear boring. (also notice how the teardrop shapes are used here, despite the highly stylized legs)

Do you want a highly dynamic pose, or them to appear unsteady, then skip the line entirely and make both legs aim away from it completely. As you can see, the legs appear more moving, in action, as if they’re fighting, falling, or dancing. As you can imagine, this is not a pose that one could stay steady on, suggesting that it’s taken mid-movement. More about posing and this ‘line’ method is talked about in this tutorial.

Hope this helped you, if you have any questions let me know, and if you’d like to check out all my tutorials they can be found here!

No one asked but here’s a brief tutorial on digital underpainting and how it can add some extra flavor to your art!

(I got asked this a couple times so just to clarify: I used “overlay” in the second slide… but the rest of these examples are JUST painted on, no effects! Try playing with the opacity on your pencil/water/brush tool to allow the base color to show through!)

So, you’re planning on drawing characters with certain undertones but you sure don’t want to make some racist yellowface/redface mess. This subject has been touched on a few times, but I figured I’d give my tips to digital artists out there.

Here’s another really quick tutorial from me:

Start with your base colour on a Normal layer.

Open a new layer ontop of it.

On that new layer, use a very pale yellow, orange, pink (or if you want a cool blueish undertone use a slightly purplish light pink) to cover your base skintone with.

Set that new layer to Multiply, and you’re done.

Note: Multiply layers make the colours of the layer underneath it darker, if you’re drawing someone super pale, mess around with an even lighter colour or change the opacity on the layer. Don’t change the layer to Screen or Luminosity, it’ll completely wash out your image. 

The undertones in dark skin are a little richer in colour (in fact most yellow undertones in brown skin are more of a golden undertone), so you can make that Multiply colour that’s a darker pastel yellow or red or what have you.

You can also use this trick to show a blush on any skintone as well!

(Though, with blushing, you can’t really blush with dark skin, but if that’s what you want to go for anyways, this trick looks way more natural than random pink circles or lines on top)

And if you want more references on undertones on real people, beauty blogs man. They’re the way to go: 

[blog for undertones in pale to light tan skin]

[blog for undertones in tan to dark brown skin]

heres a skintone pallete!!! feel free to rb/use it!!!

left to right = light to dark top to bottom = warm to cool

All images are used purely for educational purposed and are credited to their sources and owners.  Any image without credit was created by me.

Quick art tip - child proportions

Ok this is a real quick one but let me show you how to get more-or-less accurate sizes for child characters. Kids are tricky to draw, they are - from toddler up to about teens people change radically almost every year so pinpointing character’s size during those years is pure hell.

What you need to do to make everything super easy for yourself is to check their Head Proportion. What makes kids look like - well, kids, is that their heads are proportionally large in comparison to their body.

Average adult is about 7,5 heads tall in comparison to their own body, however with children under 10 that number is just under 6 heads with about 1 head shorter the younger you go down to 3 heads as an infant.

Easiest way to figure the so-so head-height of a certain age is to find images of said age group and do a quick count on them

at which after you can replicate it in your own works - don’t mind if it’s not 1:1 with reference, finding images that are actually of the age you need is tricky and kids in general vary a lot so someone might be a lot taller than others. You have a bout  0,5 -1 heads of wiggle room before it starts to look way older.

Proportions are super important in art and i lovingly recommend everyone to figure out basics of them - it’s the easiest way to get notifically better with art. I could go on about proportions but let’s wrap this up. Need to note however that head proportion is not same as character height - a character can be 15 feet tall but still have head-height of 6, HH is simply a way to scale out the body.