Art Techniques - Tumblr Posts

All right, because @babsvibes asked me how I picked colors for my latest Thanksgiving art piece yesterday, I’ve decided to make an official walkthrough of how I do coloring/shading and lighting for my pieces!! This isn’t technically a tutorial, but maybe you can count it as one?? Take everything I say with a grain of salt, though, as I’m just a self-taught artist who still has a lot to learn!!

Usually, the way I start coloring is by taking a screenshot from the show and take the colors directly from there. Having a screenshot is also handy so I can use it as a reference! Is it cheating to take colors directly from the show?? Maybe, but I like doing it so so know the colors are exactly correct.

Using my latest piece of Bob and Gene eating Thanksgiving dinner together, I used this screenshot as both a reference and to take the colors:

Then, to do my shading, I take a shading brush in Procreate and paint in everywhere where there would be a shadow. I’ve trained my eye to look for places where I know light wouldn’t really touch, such as below an arm or neck or directly under a character’s hairline. Then, when I’m done, I just lower the opacity and pick a layer setting that looks the nicest to me. This is what my latest piece’s shadow layer ended up looking like (with the opacity turned up a bit):

Then, once I’m done with shading, I go on to lighting. I use a new technique now where I just paint in everywhere else (AKA everywhere I didn’t put in a shadow). I used to not even do lighting, because I found it complicated, but I feel it adds a nice touch to my pieces now. The way I do it is kind of tedious, but it’s what I’ve found I can help me understand lighting the easiest. Sometimes I also duplicate my lighting layer, use a Gaussian Blur, then turn the layer to “Add” to create a glowy effect. This glowy effect is usually reserved more for things like torches and flashlights, but I feel as if it gives my lighting an extra “oomph”. Here’s what my lighting layers looked like:

And to make my colors pop even more, I use my phone’s edit feature to go through the process of putting on a nice-looking filter and going insane with all of the features! I’ve found it has a really nice effect.

If I want to go even crazier (yes, I actually do this), I might go into this photo editing app I have on my computer and do even more messing around with filters and colors and the like.

It’s called Polarr Pro Photo Editor for anyone who’s curious!! I also put on my signature in here if I forgot to do it in Procreate.

But that is how I do my coloring and shading/lighting!! I’m still learning and I’m sure I’ll continue to improve. I definitely still have a lot to learn when it comes to shading and lighting!! There are honestly so many ways you can tackle this, so my method absolutely isn’t the end all be all!!

I even have a different technique for when I’m doing a simpler piece or just want some shading that has a lot more texture. I duplicate my color layer, lower the saturation, make a mask, and “paint in” the light really quickly with a super textured brush.

Here’s what it looks like before:

And here’s what it looks like after!

I actually find this technique a bit difficult because my brain works in shadows and finding where shadows would hit, so painting in the light is a challenge. But it can be fun too!!

If anyone has any techniques of their own, feel free to share them!!

i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors

Worst art advice I ever recieved was that I should never use green in anything. (this was not in reaction to anything I showed them btw, just unprompted)

The reasoning was that since the human eye had more color receptiors for green than any other color I could never possibly get the shade and hue right as an amateur and therefore should never try.

I'm still pretty new to drawing techniques, but the one where you repeat the name of a body part in increasingly distressed and confused tones I have got DOWN.

Here's some notes on some of the upper body muscles so you, artist, don't need to look them up

They are not medically accurate, just enough for artists to know the necessary muscles and how they work together

I 100% recommend doing the last exercise I did to be able to actually place the muscles

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

More art tutorials by Disney artists Griz and Norm Lemay

i know we joke about cis artists having the weirdest sense of anatomy, but also even when the anatomy is fine, no one seems to want to draw women doing normal things