A Good Few People Asked Me How I Do My Shading So I Whipped This Up :]

A good few people asked me how I do my shading so I whipped this up :]

Feel free to experiment with things of course, but this is just to show how I've been doing things! <3

More art tutorials by Disney artists Griz and Norm Lemay

A little shading tutorial I made to help a friend.

Horns and Antlers

took a while, but i'm mostly back on my feet and have energy again.

I received an ask a while ago about how to add horns and antlers onto a humanoid, so here are my thoughts on that:

(image description: a stock image of the human skull from four angles, front, back, side, and three quarters. Next to it, the same image faded and traced over in blue, with red circles all around the top front portion of the skull. A note on the image says, "there are lots of places you can anchor horns or antlers". end description.)

Here I have marked out some common placements for horns/antlers, and I will show them each in more detail below. The four main areas are: the brow, the center forehead, the top, and the sides of the skull.

As a general rule, horns and antler anchor directly to the skull, but they do not emerge from the skin as solid bone. There is typically a covering layer of some sort, like a keratin sheath, that starts where the horn or antler emerges from the skin. This makes horns and antlers look a bit funny when you remove the skin, because the actual bone base is thinner than the covering layer.

(Image description: same as before, with the four angles of the human skull next to traced versions of it. This time, each of the four images shows the skull with simple horns added and the skull altered to accommodate them in the four basic horn positions. Brow, sides, top, and center forehead. end description.)

Depending on the size of the horns or antlers, you may want to add more bone to the skull, or even thicken the neck bones. Bigger neck and shoulder muscles will also be important to keep the head upright with the additional weight. For horns at the brow and forehead, I've made the brow bone bigger, and for horns at the top and sides, I've made the skull a bit wider and thicker in those areas. It isn't a huge difference, and may not even be very visible on a skin layer, but it's important to be aware of.

And now I also have four sketches of how each horn/antler location would look on a person with the skin and hair in place.

(image description: four simple sketches of people from the shoulders up, in basic shaded colors. From the top left, clockwise:

A man with a mohawk and short beard, frowning. He has curved horns over his brow. A woman with long braided hair and a neutral expression. She has a single horn in the center of her forehead. A man with a beard and long unkempt hair, looking tired but happy. He has moose-like antlers on the sides of his head. An androgynous person with short hair, smiling. They have pronghorn antlers at the top of their head. end description.)

It's very easy on the sides and top of the head to cover the base of the horns/antlers by layering the hair around them. But any horns on the forehead area will be harder to cover this way. I've put thicker skin where the horns and antlers emerge, which has made the brow very heavy on the first two sketches. To balance that out, I also made their nose bridges a bit bigger and more connected to the forehead.

So I hope that helps! Horns and antlers are very fun, and they come in so many shapes.

tbh ive drawn buff women for long enough to stop being surprised when people throw nonsense at me like. im not out here claiming i know how to draw the most anatomically accurate buff woman or what certain muscles do when this or that and whatnot. im just tryna draw cool characters man

A quick tutorial on how I do braids! Perhaps it can help some of you out there. ✨