Drawing Advice?

[littlemissruthie]

I've practicing how to draw fan art for a while, anyone here have any adivce that chould help me out? Please and thank you!

[DP]

Anything in specific you need help with?

Here's some general advice: when you watch cartoons, always pay close attention to how the characters look. Observe the characters' designs, expressions, poses, outfits, etc. Also, a technique that's good practice is looking through wallaceb's screencaps, and redrawing some caps of your choice. You'll learn a lot from doing that.

[shallow15]

My big thing is, while i'm usually satified with my pencils, when I go to color them in PhotoShop, the colors never look as smooth as some of the artwork that gets posted on here, or indeed in the show. Any coloring advice that DOESNT' involve the eight million tutorials on dA, none of which I have found even remotely helpful?

--Erin M.

[Slyrr]

Practice, practice, practice.

[shallow15]

slyrr said:

Practice, practice, practice.

You are soooooo not helping me right now. ;D

--Erin M.

[Levelord]

shallow15 said:

slyrr said:

Practice, practice, practice.

You are soooooo not helping me right now. ;D

--Erin M.

But it holds truth.

First attempt :


Few more tries later:


Few more tries after that:


Then I got better:




Yay, shameless plugging, but my point is we all start somewhere. My first tries were rather pathetic :S

P.S. I also looked up coloring tutorials on DA and the net. It takes effort.

[ArtFan88]

Indeed, practice makes all the difference. Being dedicated to it also helps.

Now me, My KP art isn't all to great yet; my strength is ships. As an example; I started drawing the Titanic years ago and originally it looked horrible, but I kept drawing her and studying the ship untill eventully my pictures looked as good as a photo. It's all practice and dedication. Keep that in mind and your art will improve by leaps and bounds.

[lordnakagawa]

Go under Image menu in photoshop and
click CREATE GREAT ARTWORK

I wish it were it were that easy
True, practice is essential.
I find copying originals - and even tracing - repeatedly helps a lot.
Too many artist give up when their first few attempts don't meet thier expectations.

But seriously, lets help you with your question.
I am not an expert but I'll give it a shot.

"Help me out" is understandable but kind of vague and difficult to answer as well as difficult for you to improve your work.
Can you narrow it down a bit?
What is the one thing you want to improve?
You mention coloring but I not sure exactly what you mean.
Accuracy? shading? inking? emoting?

Posting some work you are *not* proud of is difficult but is helpful.

[Slyrr]

You are soooooo not helping me right now. ;D

And of course, no advice helps unless it's TAKEN.... You can have all the tools, all the tutorials, all the software in the world at your fingertips - but if you don't put in lots of hard, slogging time practicing, they won't make any difference. Like playing football, or dancing, or even flirting, art is a skill like any other that needs time and effort to make it look good.

If anyone out there has indeed developed a method to suddenly endow yourself with such skill, please let me know - I want to bottle it and see if I can apply it to playing the stock market.

But if it's photoshop techniques you need, there are lots of free tutorials that can be turned up with a simple google search. If it's drawing itself you want practice with, or drawing the human form, there are lots of free tutorials on that too. When you want to find something, there's nothing quite like looking...

[shallow15]

Okay, all kidding aside, I know that practice is the key, but it doesn't help if you aren't certain how exactly to go about what you want so you CAN practice.

My main goal here is to try to get my colors to come out looking smooth and natural as in Levelord's car wash pic above, as opposed to what I've had happening in my work of late, which just seems flat and dull. Such as...



Now, let me clarify something, I'm using Photoshop 5.5 (Pre-emptive strike: I don't pirate software, and I can't afford a later version of PS), so a majority of the tutorials online are useless to me as the lowest number I've found is PS 6, so they all talk about using tools and settings that I just don't have.

I'm also using a mouse to color, and I can't afford a tablet. So what I have is what I'm stuck with. I also have issues of shading, but I'm pretty sure once I get the hang of coloring, shading isn't much different.

So, all that taken into account, any advice...aside from practicing?


--Erin M.

[Fusion Fox]

I hope nobody minds me jumping on this bandwagon while it's available, I guess it can't hurt _{And you can always ignore me} Don't mean to steal the thread creators thunder...

Not so much fanart as drawing in general _{true, this is a fanart section but where else can I talk to so many great and friendly artists at once?!} I've always been impressed by and jealous of the things artistically talented people can do, so I've been practising drawing whenever I can. Recently I think I'm starting to get close to something close to resembling something good ;D (seriously, I'm proud and suprised of what I can do

So here's probably the best I can do right now



Any tips for improvement?

[Slyrr]

Well, you don't need a tablet tool for shading. A technique I picked up was this:
1) Do all the line drawing in one layer. Once the black and white with empty spaces inside is done, duplicatate that layer, name it 'color' and place it beneath the B/W layer.

2) Go to the color layer. Use the MAGIC WAND tool to select the areas inside the drawing that you want to 'fill' with color. I usually have my initial drawings at high resolution, so the next steps can be crucial.

3) EXPAND the selection to be filled with color by 1 pixel in the selection/expand portion of the photoshop drop-down menus. This will allow you fill and not have any unsightly pixellated sections at the edge that were missed and have no color in them.

4) Fill with color. You can, even with version 5.5 I think, 'record' this sequence as an ACTION and assign it to a hotkey. I did this to save time since the process must be repeated a lot and different sections must be filled with different colors. I have my "F2" key set to automatically expand a selection and fill with color.

5) Repeat. Not EVERY portion of the drawing will be filled flawlessly. It helps to have another layer beneath these for a background color that clashes with the others so you can pick out spots that were missed and fill them manually.

Don't rely on using the paint bucket tool to do the filling, the 'tolerance' settings are just too finicky and the results don't look as good. Do the coloring in a seperate layer, that way the black and white lines on top in the layer 'above' will mask any flaws that the filling process leaves in the colored layer.

At need, you can also have a layer on top to make shading and shadows, a technique I use quite a bit to give depth to my drawings...

[shallow15]

Now THAT'S helpful!

Thanks, Slyrr!


Oh, I just noticed the note about not using the paintbucket to fill. What do you use then, just the paintbrush?

--Erin M.

[Nulla]

there are also kp character sets on wallacb's site

might help if i link you too

www.kpfanworld.com/modelsheets.php

[Malory Evolent]

Yeah if the bandwagon's not full I'd like to jump in here. While fan art is great, you cannot forget to make a place for yourself in the art world. My KP style isn't exactly close to cannon, but it's my style and it makes me, well me! Personally, it's best to develop your own style, because it makes you more recognizable. If you went around drawing and copying different styles, people would just think of you as a copycat. It's great to be able to copy and mimic other styles but as an artist individuality is the key. Nobody else painted like Picasso, you can spot a Van Gogh from a mile away and well there's the "big eyes small mouth" of the anime world, but we won't get into that.
As I said, my style isn't KP cannon but it's a kind of mixture of KP and my own personal style. I think that's why it's easy for me to come up with OC's so easily because I can interpret things from my own perspective. And you may have to start out trying to get an exact pose or facial expression and that's fine. I started drawing when I was 10 and after almost 15 years I learn something new everyday. It wasn't until middle school that I developed my own style and I'm still tweaking it more and more. Just some friendly advice from one amateur artist to another. Be yourself and forge your own path. At the risk of sounding like an after school special. I hope that helps ya! Good luck! ;D

[Nutzkie]

littlemissruthie said:

Anyone here have any adivce that chould help me out?

Don't eat the crayons. ;D

[DarkFairyYume]

nutzkie said:

littlemissruthie said:

Anyone here have any adivce that chould help me out?

Don't eat the crayons. ;D

LOL.

I have a tutorial I could show you, on drawing female anatomy, if you would like me to PM it to you. It's done in my style, so it's kinda weird.
Helping with something like this depends on what aspects of drawing help you need. Is it anatomy/proportion? Coloring? Inking?

[angelicbunny]

I've been drawing since I was a baby (my mum used to give me felt tips and paper ;D) and as I got older and older, I used to draw people alot, and eventually I would trace from my sisters Disney princess mermaid magazine, until I didn't need to trace anymore (I was pretty young... 11ish maybe? wasn't perfect but it was pretty good...) and I got into manga, and read LOADS of tutorials on the anatomy, colouring, shading and lineart - for PC and by hand. I kept experimenting with different styles - even my ow, until I started with KP, and I really liked it. I know it's not really 'individual', but that's not what drawing is for me, I like the way it flows and that's the way I feel most comfortable drawing, and if I changed it in anyway, it would just look odd.

Don't draw in a particular style because it looks good, draw what's easiest and comfiest for you
And as for drawing better, well there is practice - which also takes ALOT of observation, and guidelines really help with the facial features (there's a good turorial on how to draw KP's head sometwhere) and remembering certain 'rules' like the size of Kim.

With the colouring, I sometimes use the eyedropper tool on a screenshot from youtube, and maybe change the colour a tweak, or try and mimic the shade, but in a different colour. Once you get used to that, it should be easy to choose the colours yourself.

Try and look at the colours in the cartoon, how dark/light they are, how saturated/desaturated, etc, and the lineart - what colours do they use there?

Hope I helped... I've been really tired lately, so I wouldn't be surprised if this makes no sense

_{off to bed now anyway ;D}

[Firelady Nemo]

keep practicing! im not that good...

[chocoholic1]

littlemissruthie said:

I've practicing how to draw fan art for a while, anyone here have any adivce that chould help me out? Please and thank you!

All I can say is most people will only look twice, if at all, at drawings that are digitally colored. I know.