A Cartoonist's
Playground
In this blog I'll share my
experiences navigating digital art and cartoons. |
In this blog I'll share my
experiences navigating digital art and cartoons. |
For my birthday, my Aunt and Uncle got me several art books by Christopher Hart as they knew I loved to draw! I was so happy and started looking through them instantly! In fact, those books marked the start of a sharp increase in my skills as an artist.
The most valuable things in guide books for me is looking at how other artists draw people, which these books have plenty of! When I started to follow the underlying shapes of bodies and poses, I made my art more dynamic and realistic. I also learned a lot about using dramatic angles and organizing frames for comic strips and books. Image Credit1: https://www.bookdepository.com/Figure-it-Out-Chris-Hart/9781933027807
2: http://amazon.co.uk/figure-human-proportions-christopher-hart/dp/1936096730 3: https://www.ebay.com/p/72421356?iid=113386030596
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In this post, I am going to talk about some of the tips and tricks I learned doing digital art. Software and Technology
The BasicsOn many digital art softwares, you are going to have many different tools available to you. You have many different types of brushes with different shapes, textures, blending, and other effects. You also have layers to your drawing. You can change the transparency and blending of these layers, which can be a really useful tool. LayersLayers are a really useful thing about digital art that you can't really get on paper. Layers are useful for when you want to draw a foreground and a background which you may want to adjust and move around. Having parts of your drawing on different layers allows you to move parts around over top of others without having to erase the lower layers. They are also really useful for shadows and lighting. Often I will draw shadows and special lighting on a semi transparent layer above the subject so I can change it more easily later if I want. Layers are also really useful if you're going to have a very full foreground with something like rain, snow, or dust. That way if you want to change part of the midground you don't have to try to erase all the drawing in the foreground and then try to redraw it to match. It is much easier if you use layers so you don't have to try to mess with things you drew in other layers when you only want to change one thing which is in another. Layers can also be useful if you want to use one of the drawings more than once. You can often duplicate layers that way you don't have to redraw what you drew. From left to right: using transparent and duplicated layers; Using layers to have multiple overlapping midgrounds; Using layers for shadows; All created by me Brush TricksSometimes there is a brush that draws exactly what you were needing without all the time it takes to draw it. For example, drawing snow dot by dot would be really hard, but if you use a dot brush you can do it really quickly. The software I use (Sketchbook) has some nice brushes for drawing vines too, which I use often in my comics. Dot brushes are also useful for drawing spots. I also really like to use blending brushes to draw lines to indicate motion and speed. I also really like using the blur brush to create different effects such as focus or gradients. Sometimes hatching brushes can be sued to create lines to indicate rain (as shown in Rain on Window Tutorial Below). From left to right: Example of using brushes to draw snow and vines; Used dot brush in conjunction with an eraser to create spot patterns on the cheetah as well as a blending brush to indicate speed; Used a blur brush to create a blur affect around the edges; All created by me EffectsUsing digital art tools, you can make really cool effects using certain brushes and layering. Here is one thing I like to do: Rain on Window I really like the effect of rain rolling down a foggy window. Here's how I do it: Step 1: Draw the scene behind the window. Step 2: Duplicate the layer and blur the duplicate Step 3: Create a semi transparent layer of a light yellow Step 4: Merge blurred layer and transparent cover layer. Now you can use the eraser to draw drops of rain by erasing the top layer. (Tip: vary the size of the brush to create different sized streams of water) Step 5: Draw the window frame and outside wall on another layer Step 6: Draw rain on the next layer! (I like to use a hatching brush as it draws many diagonal lines; you may need to increase the size of the brush a lot to make it look like rain) I think I may do more tutorials for tricks like this in future posts. Let me know what you guys think in the comments! Also let me know if there are any other things you would like me to write about in future posts. Image Credit
One of the first things about art is the medium. Whether you use paint, or pencils, or computers, you have some sort of medium. When I started drawing comics, I used pencil and paper. I would draw the picture on paper, outline it in pen, take a picture of it, get rid of noise, send it to my computer, get rid of noise some more, color it, put speech bubbles in, and finally edit the multiple frames together. This is a complicated and tedious process that took up time with only decent results. Occasionally lines from the picture of the paper would remain in the final, as would lines I erased on the paper that still had imprints. In the picture below you can see that in the final the lines still have some white around them. Then I found Autodesk Sketchbook. I started with the mobile version on my ipad, and then switched to the PC version when I got my new computer. At first when I was using my ipad, I still had to transfer the drawings from my ipad to my laptop, but it was much less hassle and much less steps. When I started doing it on my computer, I had it all on one device. This made it much faster and more convenient. I soon also switched from putting the text in using PowerPoint's speech bubbles to putting them in using Autodesk sketchbook itself. I've also learned some tricks over time, but I'll share those a different time.
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Art: Comics; created by me
My name is Loren SinclairI am an artist and amateur cartoonist. I have been drawing my own comic strips (the biggest one about superheroes) and improving my art along the way. Archives
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