How I draw stuff

This is intended to be more of a guide and a look into how I do things rather than a tutorial, but it can be used as one of those too. You don’t need to know much about Photoshop to understand this article- but you will need a fairly high amount of knowledge on it if you want to put the techniques into practise. For this painting I used Photoshop CS4 and a 4×6 Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet.

Click the ‘read more’ tag to view this tutorial.

I’ve been really art blocked so I thought the best way to force myself out of it was to draw a portrait of my character Vaughan. Portraits always help me get out of art ruts, because they’re relatively simple and there’s no need for a detailed background. I get to be lazy!

First off, I find a reference picture if I need to- in this case it was this photo.

 

1. Sketch

 

 

I scribble something that kind of resembles what I want to draw. It’s important not to be too stiff in this step,  otherwise the whole picture can come out looking forced. I don’t worry about technicalities, I can fix them later.

 

2. Refined Sketch

 

 

Now that I have an idea of what I’m going to draw, I go over the old sketch on a seperate layer, still keeping things relaxed, but adding more detail as I go.

I build the lines up by having the older sketches on a lower opacity on a different layer so I can trace over them. (Same method goes for the next step. )

 

3. Lineart

 

 

I make a new layer and refine the lines, add more details, mess around till things look alright. I draw my lines with a 1pt brush; my art is very detailed and relies on the colours to give that detail depth, so my lines need to be tiny or else it comes out looking clunky and over-crowded.

Once I’m done with the lines, I’ll duplicate the layer and flatten the two line layers together. This makes them darker and more visible, and it will save you having to kill your hands by pressing hard on the tablet pen the whole way around.

With small lines, neatness doesn’t matter so much, since the detail in my colouring will save it.

 

 

A close up so you can see the messy in all it’s glory.

 

 

Since this is a fairly simple painting, the above thick lines surrounding this character aren’t 100% necessary (or usual for me to use in this context.)

I normally use them to separate a focal point/character from the background, otherwise they get lost in the details. Here you see the thicker lines (4pt) at 100% opacity and on a new layer. I later lowered the opacity to 60% and flattened them so they weren’t so bold, otherwise they’d take too much attention away from the colours.

 

 

I changed the colour of the thicker lines to demonstrate where abouts I’ve placed them.

I usually outline the character and certain forms to separate them from one another- like here you can see his hair and face have been separated. As I mentioned above, this assists in not drowning the piece out with detail and making certain features “pop”.

 

4. Colours

 

 

I make a new background layer and fill it with a dark colour of my choice. This will be the colour of all the shadows so it’s important to choose it wisely. Something not too saturated works really well. My two favourites are the dark reddish brown colour seen above or really dark blue close to the grey spectrum.

 

 

I sort out all of the colours I’m going to use on a new layer. I’ve varied the opacity so that some of the background colour is showing through so I can blend the colours effectively.

 

 

With a soft brush and on a new layer I colour in my picture using the lowest value of each colour. I leave blank where my shadows are going to be; this step requires a bit of lighting planning since the colours are annoying to mess with/edit after this stage.

 

 

Slowly I work my way up to the lighter values of my chosen colours. I keep the shadow areas blank still and erase back into the background where necessary.

 

 

This is what I ended up with after lightening the colours and blending them.

This style of colouring requires bold highlights or else it ends up looking muddy; high contrast shading is something so many artists are afraid of. Don’t be!

 

 

At this point I add details such as the blood and shiny areas on his lips and eyes, the glow effects, and so on. I colour over my outlines with the blood since I find following lineart is too restrictive for blood effects. I use an eraser at a low opacity to erase some of the lines around the glowy areas too, so the glow is more apparent.

 

5. Editing and final touches

 

I  flatten the painting and make any edits to colour and atmosphere I need to after I’m done. I wanted something blueish to make it look like he was watching TV, and I found the colours in my original too bland to look at/not high enough in contrast. So I messed with it a bit.

 

Finished!

Details (taken at 100% zoom):

 

 

 

 

 

If you have drawn anything using this method throw me an e-mail, I would love to see it!  Thanks for reading~ I hope this was kind of helpful.