Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^
ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z
now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)
we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.
here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.
rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!
now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?
you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.
and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.
now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.
on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.
ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.
for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.
if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.
to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border. i uses a mid-brown with a very soft brush on a layer set to overlay here (3).
for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:
a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!
and to summarise, here’s a process gif:
colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍
should i be trying to master like each feature before i try drawing a face? like should i be able to draw eyes really well, then move to the nose, mouth etc? i dont know when i should be moving on to the next step. right now, mouths are a frustrating thing but i also try to draw the whole face because proportions practice, so its all very over whelming and then i get discouraged cause drawing lips is so hard and putting everything to make a face is hard ;-;
I think if you’re having trouble with a feature you should definitely do some studies of it! I practiced the face all at once so I don’t really think there are any rules to this haha. The downside to trying to master one feature at a time is, like you said, not being sure when to move on. You might end up drawing amazing eyes but the rest of the face will always be a little off because you haven’t put enough time into studying the other features. I’m sure you’ve also come across artists who draw nice heads and it all falls apart when they try to draw a fullbody. Personally I’d just tackle the face all at once, take time to study the separate features but try not to neglect any of them and don’t think you can’t draw a face because you aren’t a master of a particular feature! You can do it * V * Here are some quick notes on lips, I hope they help a little.
Hi. :3 I love your art and you're totally awesome! I just had a quick question. I saw your post about hair tips on Dean and Cas, and I was wondering if you had one for Sam. Thank you, it means a lot. ^.^
Sure no problem! Just part it slightly to the right and have the hair flow down from that line. Don’t forget his killer sideburns lol
Hi! I love your tutorial on how to draw a character, it's really useful. However, I can't get the eyes right for Dean Winchester and Castiel. I draw them too elongated. What shape would you advise me?
Something like this probably haha;; Dean’s is rounder/wider and Cas’ is more angular and droopy
Tuesday Tips - Handling Objects — To show a character handling an object, think of merging the hand and object into one simple shape. Think of how you would wrap your fingers around it and how you would use it. Function is key! Norm #100tuesdaytipsvol2 #grizandnorm #handlingobjects #arttips #arttutorial
Sorry if someone has already asked this but can you show us a colouring tutorial please?
ya take a babi
color da babi
make a fuckin uhhh multiply/shade layer then u take ur fuckin sai marker brush
pick a shading color or something
cel shade that motherfucker
but be messy with it, literally just go fucking ham, dont be too precise and don’t make it look so clean
ysee that residue there? yea man, it looks really messy but it also kinda looks like a painting right
make a screen/luminosity layer on top of the multiply layer
then ya pick a lighting color
then u do the same thing as earlier
bam you got,,, a child
this is the simple n easy way i do it, i got more complicated ways but hewe u go
OH YEAH HERE’S MY PEN SETTINGS
Hi! Idk if my qn got sent before (tumblr mobile yeesh) I wanted to say i really really love your blog and art style! I was wondering if you have tips to draw Dean's and Cas's hair??
REALLY LATE REPLY BUT UM Dean’s got a hair parting on either side but his hair kinda all comes out from a spot on the back of his head. Keep the sides short but flip up the hair in the front
And here’s Cas again! Recapping: part on one side and have the hair come out from the parting and flip up in front as well. He’s got a longer fringe than Dean’s
can you show us your painting steps?
I start with a base of sketchy lines (on grey so i can see the lines better)
2. Then I put down a base skin tones
3. From there I create a new layer and start adding shadows/highlights/other tones (i call them roughs)
4. I add some overlay/soft light layers to help me figure out the mood (I change this A LOT)
5. Then I work on refining/ smoothing
6. My final steps are all cleaning up/adding details/texturesHere’s the finished work!