Heehoo, I decided to do one more with some feedback I got and I like this one a lot! I tried to go more witchy and ghosty with this one, adding details inspired by jiangshi this time around. I think it turned out pretty neat :3
My initial inspiration for the first one was victorian/gothic lamps and gothic churches with stained glass windows, and I do like it a lot but I wasn’t fully satisfied with it
So the second is inspired by the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e and I kinda like how simplified and elegant it looks. But yea, which one is your favorite? ^^
Hey! I’ve been following you for a while and I really love your art, it’s absolutely stunning and I love the way you paint and capture anatomy. I know this is a bit of a broad question but I was wondering if you had any tips on getting better at painting digitally and studying anatomy, maybe more specifically blending, colour picking, and structuring anatomy in a way that looks somewhat realistic?
Thanks and I’m glad you enjoy my work long enough to be following me for this long!
I definitely love drawing a naked body that’s for sure haha. In terms of tips for getting better there’s a few things I can mention but it’s going to fall broadly in the general answer of “study”, because this is the most sure fire way to be able to understand what it is you’re trying to emulate in your art.
There are different ways to study, and they teach something slightly different. For example, doing studies from life (live drawing classes) help me understand movement in a way studying from a photograph cant, simply because you’re seeing the same model in different poses in real time, you can see how the fat and muscle moves around as they shift to different positions. So they’re not technically moving the whole time, but you’re still seeing some movement there, and understanding what sticks to what while it rotates and bends.
Studying from photographs can help give you time to do some real deep dives and investigate where different bones/muscles sit while someone is in a particular position. There’s also the opportunity for understanding how shadows may be formed by the body as typically photographers are more conscious of how the subject may be lit than what may be available in a live drawing class. Beware though, as more things are photoshopped than you realise, not all photos represent reality. Especially glam and fashion photos. It doesn’t mean its bad to want to have these effects on your work but just be conscious they might not always be anatomy accurate if that’s what you’re striving for. I sometimes make a conscious decision to go against what is anatomically correct for a certain effect myself.
A book I have been recommending for years for anatomy is Dr. Paul RIcher’s “Artistic Anatomy”. It’s great for understanding muscle structure intimately - it’s designed specifically for artists, but with the idea of trying to stylise the diagrams as little as possible for the sake of understanding the human form. There’s a lot of great info and detail in here, but beware, there is not a lot of variety in body structure (at least not in the edition I have which is missing female anatomy I think already so I’m not sure what else I don’t have in here). So you’ll be able to understand function a lot from here but you wont be able to learn a lot about fatter body types sadly.
Colour picking is probably the most difficult for me to explain easily, as I have spent a long time winging it, then studying it, then being really experimental with it. I could write a lot a lot about this but to spare making this post any longer I’ll refer to another fun book just for getting started on some frequent and common terms called “Color and Light” by James Gurney.
I also love that he uses like, dinosaurs for everything in here lol. It’s a great starting point that can give you some go to ideas that you can then experiment from there. It’s not very authoritarian (or at least that’s what I feel), and doesn’t push anything forward as a hard and fast rule, just showing what affects some colour combinations might instil in someone.
As a whole, I’ve gotten better at painting digitally by studying traditional painting techniques. They theories are basically transferrable one to one with some few exceptions. I tend to blend my colours by simply using a soft round brush in Photoshop with a low opacity. Much the same way I would with a real canvas, with a large round brush and diluted colour.
I hope this answers your questions in some way. I tried to be not too specific only because this answer would be at least another 30k words lol because this is something i think a lot about! I love technique! If I ever stream again, feel free to pop in and ask more questions where I might be able to show some stuff in real time! Not sure when that will happen though!
Also the way i do stuff isn’t a “correct” way either. I like painting from imagination so this is how I make that work. Some people like to only work with references for every piece, and that is a completely legit way to create stunning art as well.
Calling all artists, animators, and fans of fun and useful pose references! In 2 weeks time I will be taking part in @adorkastock & Friends' MASSIVE Group Poses for Artists Shoot.
We've got a bunch of models of different sizes and shapes, more props than you can shake a stick at (including bows, a pole and a POOL), and two full days of shooting to get as many reference photos as we possibly can. It's gonna be awesome, and there will be some PHENOMENAL references coming out of this.
If you'd like to pre-order Photo packs, you have until the 25th October. Get them here:
Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.
DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).
Your art is SO gorgeous and I’m so jealous of how you have this super clean line art, but then it totally blends in with the final rendering. Do you have any advice on how to do that? I always struggle with that part of adding color.
that’s because in my finished work you’re never seeing my linework unaltered. i put my lineart on multiply and then color it, and then i paint over my lines at the end.
so here’s my lines
my initial coloring under the colored lines
my first pass rendering over the lines
final rendering including color adjustments and lighting