drawing hands

Hands. We use them everyday to touch and express ourselves, hold things, feel, and many other things. But when it comes to drawing them, they are pretty tricky for most people. I know that I have always stuggled with their shape, compostition, and for some reason, I always draw them weird... So I'm making this post today to give all the people out there some things that I have felt were helpful to me when attempting to draw these tricky appendages.


Tips for drawing hands:

-Fingers do NOT all end in a straight line across, the middle finger is usually the longest followed by the ring then first then pinky and finally, the thumb.

-When drawing a palm, you must remember that it isn't flat, there are creases and bumps. Take for instance the bump on the palm made by the thumb, that is the main one.

-Wrists are not just staight, they have an area that comes in slightly from the palm of the hand that extends into the arm.

-Fingers have different sections and aren't just lines, they have bends, and not only two, but three!

-The length of the palm is actually the same as the length of the fingers.

My main suggestion though, is to look at your hand (like STUDY it) and just draw what you see from different positions. It is probably one of the best ways to learn.

Drawing Lips

As you way know, we talk so much in our lives, at an average of 16,000 words per day! So in art, mouths should be important too right? In anime, mouths are usually drawn at just lines with almost no lip, but sometimes a small line under the mouth to signify the end of the lower lip. Today I am mostly going to talk about realistic lips.

Tips for drawing lips:

-First decide what kind of lips you want. There are the overbloated lips like Rosie Huntington-Whitley who appeared in the Transformers 3 movie

Or small thin lips, or a more normal sized medium

-Then when drawing these, remember the indent of the lip caused by the philtrum. Many peopl tend to forget this, but it is alos a huge part that makes the shape of the lip.

-When adding color, the original color of the lip is going to be a lot closer to the person's skin tone than you think (unless they are wearing lipstick or gloss).

-Near the edges of the mouth, it is still a dark area because of the overlap of you upper and lower lips, so remember to make that little end dark too!

Here is a video to show you how you can digitally make lips too!

Drawing Hair

So hair is an interesting part of drawing and art because it can be done in so many different styles. The style I usually draw in is manga, and that has a distinctive way to draw hair depending on what look you are going for. For realistic hair (which I am not as skilled at) the way you draw and the way it looks is quite different. For manga hair can be done in blocks, or sections, as I like to think of them. They usually utilize triangles and set shapes to give it more of the cartoon-y manga effect. When drawing realisticly, you have to be more aware of the shape of the hairs, their direction and also about how much hair you are giving the person.

So, some manga tips (they can also be applied to realistic drawing):

-When drawing hair you have to remember the hightlights on the hair. Also you can use highlight placing strategically to give your hair more volume and/or depth.

-Strait hair is not always strait unless it was straitened and then there is no outside force acting upon it, so use wind when you draw or at least the bumps from where the hair hits the shoulders.

-Curly hair has many different types of curles. There can be large loose curles like what is done with a curling iron, small compact curles from naturally curly hair, Shirley Temple curls, and others too. Now each of these look different be it small or large but also the way the light and wind interact with these different types of curls. With large curls it may blow in small strands while small curls will blow the entire curl. So keep that in mind.

-With wavy hair there can be so many ways to play around with this so if you just use light wind and different types of hair types, you can get very interesting/unique looking hair.

So here is a video by a very good american manga artist who shows how to draw a few types of hair styles

Another can be found here

For realistic hair (by the same person as last week's videos)

Drawing Eyes

Most artists understand that the features of the face are a very important part of art. A face can show emotions, it can talk, hear, smell, listen and feel and this means that it is a very important part of art. My favorite part of the face is the eyes. They draw you in and entrap you in their gaze. They convey feelings and communicate words to us. They come in so many colors that some people even change! So because of all these things and more, eyes are a very important part of a picture (they are worth a thousand words).

I know that there are so many places where you can look for great eye drawing tutorials, but most of them use the same techniques. So here are some pointers for drawing an eye.

-Eyes must have a light source. These make shadows, reflections and highlights on the orb of the eye.

-Eyeballs are circular and it is just the eyelid that sits on top that gives the eye its shape, so it usually helps if you draw that circle first.

-Eyelashes are only plentiful if you are drawing someone with mascara. To make a normal eye, the lashes don’t curve as much and there are less than you think.

-Eyebrows are just lots of little hairs so you might want to draw them as such if you are trying to draw realistically. Also they come in many shapes and sizes so don’t fret if yours don’t look like the single stereotypical model type.

I am also including a video that I find particularly helpful (and well done) to help a little more with your drawings.

This is the video in color.

This is another by the same author but in black and white. (Aren't they amazing!) :)

Fairies

I am tinkering with the idea of writing a short story or manga about fairies, and so because of this, I decided to do some research to make my representation a little more accurate according to other history or texts.

It turns out that there are so many different tales of fairies and of their different sizes, shapes, magics, and all sorts of interesting things! The basic fairy that most people think of today is a small winged person (usually a female, though sometimes they are male). They are also associated with having insect or butterfly wings to let them fly and sometimes magical powers, but are definitely associated with the supernatural or magical. In old texts and in oral tradition and history there are other versions of this though. In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s dream” the fey (another name for fairies) were depicted as human sized. Also at the time of when Shakespeare was alive they church highly disapproved of these magical beings. Sometimes they were thought of as demons and so that would be one reason why the church would so highly disapprove of them. This was also when they first deemed that goblins (particularly hobgoblins) were evil. Although they were “evil” texts depicted them as personifications of nature at that time. I don’t particularly understand how that would be bad or evil, but that is what they said. Also when it comes to the fairy’s size, texts would differ. Some folklore said that they were about the height of a small child, while others said they were human sized, and some, like our culture, said that they were small.

Celtic tradition and folklore calls the fey the “hidden people” as a reference as to how they hid from humans. That is how they came up with the fairy hills where they would say that they fey went to hide from humans. Also folklore says that they fey cannot lie but they do trick people with their words, so basically they are very deceptive. Folklore also says that they are devious and sometimes bite people. That is where we can connect to changelings. Fairies were said to steal children from their homes and replace them with changelings which were either fairy offspring or enchanted wood or stones that looked like they baby and seemed to grow sick and die. This is why when children died of diseases at young ages parents would say that that child was a changeling and that is why it died.

The history of fairies becomes a little unclear when you talk of how they came to be. In Peter Pan they said that a fairy is born when a baby laughs for the first time. Some people believe that they come from nature and that they are “born” in a sense from the element they are.

So that is most of what I found on my search about fairies, I advise you to take some peaks around google if you thought that this was interesting too. Also I am going to post pic of my drawing of a fairy. (It was supposed to be a vid but my computer won't play or post the file :( ) I hope you enjoy it! :)

Some extra links so you can find out more on Fairies:

http://www.fairies-tales-art.com/Fairies-History.html

http://urban-fairies.com/background.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy

Painter 4 in a nutshell

This week is focused on Corel Painter 4 which the version of painter that comes with the Wacom Bamboo Pen. This is one of the older versions of Corel, but since it is the one that I have used for a while, it is the one I decided to show for a small overview. I also got Corel Painter 12 recently and have been trying to learn that one. It has a lot of features and so once I get pretty good with that one I'll make another video inolving it. For more information on Corel and its products, visit the Corel Painter Site.

Digital Drawing -- the Basics

So last time we talked about manga, and this time we will talk about using tablets to draw images on your computer. I was going to use the Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet to demonstrate, but I was having a little trouble on the audio for the video I was trying to make, so we will have to make do with the written version. Basically a tablet is like a plug in that hooks up to the USB port on your computer and it is a little screen and a pen in which you draw on and what you draw appears on the screen, and when I mean draw, I mean it moves your mouse because it only will draw if you are in word, power point, or a drawing program. Now I use Corel Painter Essentials 4 (which came with my tablet) for all of my drawings. There are also other programs like this one, for example; Adobe Photoshop, Sketch Pad, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Post Workshop, or Art Rage Deluxe. There are many others, but these are just the few ones. Utilizing these programs and your tablet you can create so many different types of artwork from cartooning to manga to realistic sketches. With the different types of tablets you get you get many different features mine is only a pen version with right and left click but there are some like the Bamboo Fun that have a touch screen and pen. There are also ones like the Intuos 4 line by Wacom that are a professional level of tablet designs giving you easy access to quick and wonderful drawing features that can only come from drawing digitally. Then there are the types of tablets like the Cintiq line from Wacom. These are actually like a computer monitor that you draw strait on. This utilizes the hand eye coordination that some people seem to enjoy better than the traditional tablet version. Although, the only downside to the Cintiq is that the cheapest one is $999.  When you can combine these tablets together with great programing, even amateurs can create awesome art. Next time I will get the audio working and post a video detailing how you can draw using your tablet or even with your mouse if you want to try it!

--Jessica--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP8am8U9N5A&feature=player_detailpage

This is the Cintiq 21 UX trailer which will basically tell you a little bit more about the high end pricey version of tablets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IsEXtmqO1k&feature=player_detailpage

This is the Intuos 4 trailer which is the moderately priced tablet aimed towards aspiring artists and professionals who don't own a Cintiq.

Manga-explained

Manga can literally be translated from Japanese to mean “whimsical drawings”. This is the Japanese form of cartoons. The industry of Manga was definitely popular in the U.S., even if not supported by everyone, there are many groups and communities of people who enjoy reading, writing and just expressing themselves through this interactive series of storytelling.

Nowadays there are so many different genres of Mangas. For instance there are, shoujo, yaoi, yuri, smut, horror, ecchi, sci-fi, fantasy, drama, action, seinen, and many others. Mostly the ones that are serialized tend to be long adventure stories that have an easily extendable plot, the second to the top being very interesting romance novels, but at some point those usually end (and noticeably faster than adventure Mangas). The most popular of these now would have to be; Naruto, a story about a young ninja; Beelzebub, about a demon baby and a delinquent “father”; Fairy Tail, a guild of wizards with amazing adventures; Bleach, a man and the power to see and destroy evil spirits; One Piece, a young pirate who goes on a quest for the ultimate treasure. These are just some of the highly rated serialized Mangas, but there are many more!

Most Mangas are just like novels, they have a plot with twists and main characters with feelings, just like any other novel. Mangas are just another innovatively creative way to tell a story. I personally enjoy them because I feel that they bring another aspect of reality into a story. By being able to literally see the characters emotion through the image, it gives us, as a reader, a deeper connection with the character, just like with another person. When you see someone it is easier to tell what and how they feel rather than just a description with words. I feel that Mangas is just another way to add to our culmination of ways to express a story.

Sailor Moon, a popular animated series.

From Grand Fantasia, an online Anime based video game.

A drawing that I have done.

Husky from +Anima, a cute Manga.

Test Post

Testing, testing, 1,2,3... testing, testing, 1,2,3