How to draw Blood Splatters

How to Draw Blood

Original Tutorial: http://www.dragoart.com/tuts/1789/1/1/how-to-draw-blood.htm 

 

 

Step 1.

This is a very simple first step. All you have to do is draw four different shaped circles. The one in the left corner resembles a sun. The shape to the right of it looks like an oval with three lines in a vertical angle. Next draw out the last two which is an odd shape and a circle shape.

 

Step 2.

In this step you will start drawing the blood shapes. Start with the biggest. All you have to do is draw different shapes and sizes of the blood drips. Finish the tear shape in the middle and then add splatter lines on the top of the right blood stain along with drip lines. Next draw a few pointed shapes for the pool of blood and then the razor lines and shapes for the blood splatter.

 

Step 3.

Color in all your blood designs leaving hints of white in select locations as shown to you here. This will add the wet look to the finished colored blood spots while also adding depth and texture.

 

Step 4.

For your last step you are going to draw out and color in the remaining bits of drips and splatter lines as you see here. I would tell you to erase guidelines, but as you can see there is none because they are colored in.

 

Step 5.

Once you are done your work should come out looking like the marks you see here. All you have to do now is incorporate the newly drawn designs with some of your favorite drawing. I hope you liked learning how to draw blood step by step.

 

 

Happy Halloween everyone!

Drawing Hands with KakeranoTsuki

Many people have mentioned how the hands I draw look good, and by good, meaning no anatomy mistakes, since those mistakes are so common when drawing any hands that are not in 'the default pose'. So, beginning with anatomy, this is the basic bone structure of the hand is represented by sticks and circles are joints. Notice there are *three* joints in each finger, not two.

Step 2

Now to flesh out the hand. Some people tend to make the hands out of straight lines, which makes hands look slightly fake. The fingers bulge out very slightly at the joints (you can even feel your own fingers for the bulges!)

Step 3

On to finger types and nails. Fingers on top, nails on the bottom. People say you can tell a lot about someone from their hands, such as their profession and gender. Long, slender fingers and short stubby ones give very different impressions about their owner. To emphasize the gender, use tapering fingers for females and square-ish fingers for males. As for nails, remember that the nail is made of three parts. The cuticle, the nail itself, and the slightly lighter part that's sticking out (if any) also remember that the nail is not flat. *very important* if the nail is drawn flat, it will seem like the finger is flat too. Generally, you can get away with no cuticle, though xD

 

Step 4

Moving on. The dreaded foreshortening. For those that don't know the term, it's just when an object is angled towards the viewer. In other words, it's pointing towards you. Example of foreshortening: [ LINK ]
A lot of people have trouble with this, myself included, but think about a cylinder viwed from different angles. It's not very hard to visualise that, is it? Think of that as fingers, and then fordhortening with hands doesn't seem so hard anymore!

 

Step 5

Furthermore, a useful tip is to remember the three areas of flesh on your palm. Areas one and three should definately be drawn in, since area two isn't very obvious when the hand is in this position. If you scrunch up your hand, these three areas will become visible. The two red stars indicate other areas you should be aware of. The joint in your wrist makes a little bump, and the big wrist vein should be indicated with little lines. An optional addition would be the wrinkles dividing the palm and the wrist, but that's not overly important.

 

Step 6

The most important thing with drawing hands? It is without a doubt, observation. You have references right in front of you! You've had them since you were born and you'll (probably) have them until you die. If you encounter a hard angle and these tips don't help, use that reference attached to your arm. If you think you have ugly hands, then use these tips to beautify them. It really isn't hard to draw hands, as long as you put in some effort.

Original Tutorial Here: http://www.ratemydrawings.com/tutorials/drawing/138-Tips_for_drawing_hands.html

Inner Space Comic Layout Tutorial

Original Tutorial Here: http://innerspace.notonigon.com/?p=8

Disclaimer: I hesitate to call this a tutorial - it’s really more like ‘observations I made when making my comic and looking at other comics’. I’m not an expert so what’s written below should be taken with a grain of salt! Hopefully you’ll be able to glean some interesting tidbits out of it despite that.
Laying out panels – it seems like a really simple task, but I’ve discovered it’s a little more complicated than that in my own comic. I guess I’ll start this tutorial at the beginning – thumbnails! Making a thumbnail sketch of the comic page is important. It’s much easier to fix a five minute scribble than a page that took 5 hours. So let’s start with a sketch of the page:

Okay… well, that’s a little boring. You can do full pages every once in a while, but not with every page! Let’s just divide that up into panels already:

That’s about as boring as you can get with a panel layout. It’s good to remember that a comic page is just like any other art piece. You want to lead the viewer around the page in a pleasing way, get them to feel involved. The above layout is just too boring to do any of that.

This is a little more exciting – you got a couple of different sizes that you can do different things with. You also have some different shapes that you can use to lead the viewer’s eye around.

Try not to get carried away though. When you start adding too many boxes, the comic can feel overcrowded, with everything far too squished. It can also get confusing for the viewer to figure out the order in which the panels are supposed to be read. If you have a lot of plot, try spreading it between 2 or even 3 pages instead.

Margins

Let’s go back to that first try at panels again:

There’s actually another problem with it. There aren’t any margins in the page. One of the things margins do is create a buffer between panels – take that away and you have a confused and crowded page.

vs.

Also, the viewer can misinterpret such close panels in weird ways.

That said, you CAN have some panels with no margins (this is isn’t something I do though.) This helps emphasize connecting actions, closely interacting scenes, etc. Just make sure the viewer can differentiate the panels in some way.

Thoughts on Panel Sizes

So, we have a page with margins, with different sized panels arranged in an interesting way. But what are the best things to put in each of these different sized panels? Larger panels command more attention, so these would be the best places to put establishment scenes – the scenes that show where the characters are going to be speaking or doing something.

Borderless panels can also be used well when they are the large panels. The lack of borders puts no limits on where the viewer can look - so they actually end up looking at more of the panel. You can also skirt around the margin problem using borderless panels as long as you’re careful. Just make sure you don’t have borderless panels spilling over on each other, because that can be really confusing and odd-looking.Aside from using the large panels as establishment scenes, pretty much everything else goes in all the other panels – dialogue, action, facial expressions, etc. Generally speaking, put the larger actions in the larger panels and the smaller actions in the smaller panels. If you want to emphasize on action over another, put it in the larger panel. You can also put a bunch of similarly sized panels in a row to emphasize a repetitive action – it creates a nice rhythm.

Flow

There’s one more thing to address aside from margins and panel content and size. That would be the compositional flow – the way the viewer’s eye is drawn through the comic. There are a lot of the same principles in use here that you use in traditional art as well (http://picturingbooks.imaginarylands.org/palette/design/principles.html), so keep those in mind. Also keep in mind that most English speaking audiences read from top left to bottom right, so it’s great if you can get your comic to naturally flow that way.
Take a look at this comic:

You can see how, even without the dialogue, the eyes are (hopefully) drawn in the correct way through the comic. If you flip the comic horizontally, it loses some of its readability due to the flow being off.

Since the viewer is reading a comic and expects to be going from top left to bottom right, it’s not absolutely vital to artfully construct a proper flow, but it always helps. And remember, never make your viewer have to visually fight to get through a comic page!

Dialogue

I don’t do as much with dialogue as I could, but there are a few things I’ve picked up. You want to make sure the dialogue follows the composition flow – if you can put the thought and speech bubbles right on that line, that’s the best.

At least make sure your bubbles don’t confuse the viewer – you want them to read everything in the correct order. My main audience likes to read top left to bottom right (as I stated a few thousand times) so if I put a speech bubble on the bottom LEFT and top RIGHT of the panel, that may confuse people. If you’re not sure about the readability of your page, it always helps to get an outside opinion.
Also make sure you’ve saved enough room for all the dialogue on the page. You don’t want to accidentally cover a characters head!

And too much dialogue can get wearisome to read and not be quite as entertaining to look at.

You can also break up the dialogue to force pauses. For instance, compare how these two panels read:

vs.

The second panel forces the viewer to not only slow down, but explore more of the art in the panel while they read the rest of the dialogue.
Yet another thing to keep in mind are the sound effects bubbles. Obviously, these bubbles visually illustrate sound effects that you would hear if the comic were, say, a movie. You can also use these bubbles to separate two action panels – this creates a nice quick rhythm.

If I haven’t confused the heck out of you (and convinced you I’m a raving lunatic) this should help you make a decent looking comic page.And that’s it. At least, all I can think of. For now.

Manga style Lineart with Photoshop

Original Tutorial Link: http://grabtutorial.com/2010/02/19/creating-anime-manga-lineart-at-adobe-photoshop-tutorial/

Some people feel lazy if inking manually with pen or drawing pen. I prefer inking with Manga Studio. But if you don’t have it. you can use this simple way to ink with Photoshop.

1. Prepare your art. This is my friends art. We join at one team Saturday Syndrome for publish comic at Elex Media Komputindo. Her name Afatarra and this is Hee chul fanart From Super Junior.

2. Create new layer

3. Use pen tool, create path at the place that you want to ink. Make sure the option is for path tool

4. Set the brushes (B). I usually use solid brush 4-5 px (Depend on your art size)


5. Back to Pen tool (P). Right Click on the path and choose Stroke Path

6. Choose ‘Brush” And check “Simulated pressure”

7. DONE

8. TIPS : After U set it, what do you need to do are :
a. Press P
b. Creating Path
c. Press B
d. Enter
e. Back Space
f. DONE
Hope it help. ^^
This is my art that 100% inked and toning at PC (I just testing the tone. This is not my mange sample. I’m following some manga). Sketch done by hand.
Our Manga that will published at Elex Next Year (if we fast enough)

'Painting hair in Photoshop'

by Natascha Roeoesli

Some basic facts about painting hair which I have been gathering from my own observations or from studying theory:

Hair comes in layers:

This means you have tons of single hair and strands laying on top of each other and like any other element like normal fabric for example, it casts shadows and interacts with and on itself. As a matter of fact I think clothing is in it's nature pretty close to how hair reacts - you can look at it as just some special kind of fabric some how..

Hair comes in Strands:

Something very important to remember is that even though you might have single hair visible - they always clump together and cling onto each other..

Hair is messy:

Even if you try to comb your hair fully straight - you will always have some single strands or hair which go the total opposite direction. Use this knowledge and be brave if you paint hair..

Hair has a depth of field like everything else:

If you look at a photograph you'll notice that hair get's more blurry the further away from the focus it lies. That's actually general DoF theory but a lot of people keep forgetting to apply this to hair as well..

Hair colors are different then they seem (how to pick colors):

· Black hair has most of the time blueish/purplish/lilaish highlights or at least they appear like that. · Red hair has extreme orange tints as highlights · Never use pure yellow or gold for blonde hair. Use greyish yellows and cold brown tones instead - even greens or reds work. · Hair is effected by your ambient color like everything else In general it is hard to explain how you should go about picking colors for hair but there are some tricks I use: · Always start with the darkest color (shadow) and go from there · Use a brush and set it to low flow for starters. That will make the background color shine through slightly. Later on you can go and color pick from that color to establish more depth. · Mix some of the skin color and background color into your hair (yet again low flow for the brush - so it mixes with the tones you already have set down if you don't want to pick the actual color) · Brushwise - start BIG and end small.

Ok, now for an example. Explanation first, then you'll see the image which will hopefully help to make my muttering a bit more understandable. Assuming you have a sketch or at least a general idea to work from, start to block in the main form of the hair with a dark color. Even blonde or bright brown hair as very dark shadows. If you use a darker and more saturated shade of the actual base color you should be off to a good start. Don't worry too much about single strands or hair at this point but make sure to leave it pretty rough. Have some basic flow and directions in there, however. I was working very big for this image which means I used a brush at low flow and 80 px tip (flow and size set to pen pressure). Like I said, if you work with low flow the background color will shine through a bit and leave you with some nice color values to work from. I added some shape while switching between a lighter shade of the background color, some color I wanted to use for the skin later and a highlight color - but very roughly and lightly. The base color for this is a bit of an exception because that overall setting is very dark (night). Normally you would go and pick the shadow color of the main haircolor you want, to start with, like mentioned above

It is very important to go from darker to lighter colors as you work on the hair. At this point I color picked a midtone from the color chaos I had from the first step and used it to slowly start defining the hair. I went in and started to detail the hair over her forehead a bit more with a smaller brush tip. I also went back in and used the background color on low flow to give her head including the hair a more roundish 3D feel. Now you probably already noticed that naturally you got darker and lighter parts and hairstrands automatically start to come forth or fall back (even if you didn't plan on them). While color picking from the colors (dark and lighter part alike) you can go about to work this "accidents" out more to emphasize strands that lay on top of others.

At this point I started to pick the brightest color I had so far and started to paint in single strands (eventually you might want to adjust the color slightly after colorpicking.

Making it more or less saturated). This means I go about painting stroke by stroke until I have a strand of hair established (which basically takes a lot of patience). Don't forget to totally change direction for some single hairs and don't go all over your hair but leave some parts darker or don't add a brighter color to certain areas at all (keep the lightsource in mind). Depending where your light comes from and depending on the volume of the hair, this is basically some knowledge you need to have (or rely on a picture if you have to). Also make sure to vary the pressure you apply to your brush which is an easy way to work out hair volume. Start lightly and apply more pressure where the highest lit-by-light part would be and take back pressure as you go down or unto the shadow of a strand. Once I have some basic hair/strands laid down I use the smudge tool and a special brush (see image) to smudge all over it again make sure you follow the hair flow while smudging though) which basically leaves me with a nice starting layer to work from. You will also notice that the brightest color will get toned down again while smudging - which is what we wanted to happen. Now for the real fun! Our smudge layer works as a nice base for more detail work. Make a new layer on top of our first one. With the settings you see in the image I go about repainting strands. Once more, tons of strokes to work out those strands and hairs. You can actually reuse the color you used for the last step before the smudging or you can go and use a slightly brighter version of the previous one. The strands you paint now will automatically appear to be on top of the base we made earlier due to the fact that they are sharper then the smudged layer beneath it, for now. What we are doing here is creating some depth of field which is probably good to see at the closeup in the image and the ends of her hair close to her chin. Normally you would smoothen those endings out to not make them look as harsh and stubbly but I wanted to go for a roughly cut look, so I left it quite harsh. There are several ways of going about to render the tips of hairstrands or free flowing endings. You can either smudge them out carefully, use the airbrush tool or use a little trick that works for me for hair which is further back on the head: Simply colorpick the background color and use a huge brushtip with very low flow. Then go about painting very carefully and slightly over the parts you want to tone down a bit. That also works for most elements that lay further back in your painting. It's however a very rough and messy way of creating some depths. Now what? Well, we are in the rinse and repeat stage :D Flatten the hair layer and smudge it out again (bored yet?). From here it's basically the same again: Create a new layer, pick a brighter color, work out more strands (strokes, strokes and more strokes) and lay them on top of each other. Color pick from the whole range of values you have in your hair now. If you have to, even go and deepen the shadow parts with several single strokes but be careful with that. You'll notice, that by now you should have a quite huge range of different color values (this is probably a strange example since she doesn't really have what I would call "normal" colored hair.) Depending on how much patience you have, you can go on as long as you like. The more you do the more realistic it will look. Before the final step of this painting I picked another highlight color (in this case ALMOST white - it's not a pure white though but a shade of the main lightsource color) and put focus on some special strands. Don’t forget to vary both your brush tip and the flow and pressure you use while painting A LOT. It helps creating some dynamic in your hair. This rule, by the way, applies to painting in general. To finish up – carefully smudge out endings and parts that lay further back and go over parts that are in focus with a sharp edged brush one last time. asdf Voilà, after some more time and a bit too much oversharpening (I would actually go back and change quite a few things on this but it works for now ;))

Basic Perspective

Basic Principles Of Perspective Drawing For The Technical Illustrator

By Kevin Hulsey

Perspective Basics

A thorough understanding of the principles of 1-Point and 2-Point Perspective is essential to creating an accurate, and visually appealing piece of art. A lay-person with no technical understanding of the principles of perspective drawing will nonetheless have an intuitive negative reaction to a piece of art in which something is amiss. Using the perspective techniques shown in the preceding tutorials, the mental impression they will make on a viewer will be so strong that once mastered, the illusion of 3-dimensional depth will remain, even when the visual trickery involved in the process has been revealed.
Any good technical illustration starts with well executed line art. If you are working from any type of reference other than a CAD output in the desired angle, you will need to have a strong fundamental understanding of the principles of perspective drawing. This page will cover the various types of perspective angles you will encounter. In the tutorial lessons that follow this page, you will be given the tools needed to map out a perspective grid for any s-dimensional situation. From this grid, you will be able to create realistic three dimensional drawings from flat or "Off Angle" reference.


The three photos below demonstrate the difference between 1-Point and 2-Point Perspective, as well as 3-Point Perspective. The first photograph (Fig. 1) is an example of one-point perspective. All of the major Vanishing Points for the buildings in the foreground of Fig. 1 converge at one central location on the horizon line. The angle of view or Point Of View (POV) in Fig. 1 is referred to as Normal View perspective. In Fig. 2 the vanishing points for the two opposing faces of the center foreground building project towards two different vanishing points on the horizon line. In Fig. 3 we see that the horizontal building elements project to the left and right horizon and the vertical building elements project to a central vanishing point in the sky. This upper vanishing point is called the Zenith. If one were looking down on the object from a Bird's Eye perspective, the vanishing point below the horizon and would be called the Nadir.

Deconstructing "Perspective" from Photography

In the next three diagrams, you will see the same three photographs with Vanishing Point trajectory lines (magenta) and Horizon Lines (blue) traced over the subject matter. Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 are both examples of Normal View perspective. A Normal View angle places the Horizon Line at a natural height as if the viewer was looking straight forward without tilting the head/camera up or down. In these two examples, you will notice that all of the vertical features of the buildings are straight up and down.

Fig. 6 is an example of a Worm's Eye perspective. In Fig. 6 the head/camera is tilted upward placing the Horizon below the picture. The perspective when the view is tilted in an upward direction, creates a third vanishing point at the Zenith. All of the vertical building features will converge at this upper vanishing point. If we were looking down on a subject, the viewing angle would be a Bird's Eye View and the vertical details would converge at the Nadir.
This technique of tracing parallel lines to their convergence point would be used to construct a Perspective Grid from exiting photographic material. Each convergence point will represent the exact location of the Horizon, Zenith, or Nadir in that photograph.

The Illusion of Depth

In the preceding photographic examples you will notice that as an object recedes towards a Vanishing Point (infinity) it appears to get smaller. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the "viewer" is at a steeper angle of view when looking an object that is in close proximity as opposed to an object of the same size that is farther away and therefor, viewed at a shallower angle. This phenomenon was first observed during the 16th century, when a German painter and printmaker named Albrecht DŸrer began drawing observed objects onto a sheet of glass (below, left), later known as the 'picture plane.' Prior to the discovery of the picture-plane, artists used their best guess to determine perspective (below, right).


Albrecht DŸrer drawing on glass 'picture plane' c. 1520 (left), Cappella Tornabuoni fresco in Florence c. 1490 (right)



The picture-plane shown in the diagram below represents the point where the observer perceives perspective. In the physical world, the "picture plane" (as shown below) represents the point at which the observer perceives perspective as interpreted by the lens of the eye. In the world of illustration, the "picture plane" is actually the flat surface of the paper or computer screen, and the perception of 3 dimensional depth or perspective is an artificial illusion.

Drawing in Perspective

The following diagram Fig. 7 is a sample of the typical reference material you might expect to receive on a technical illustration project. All of the major plan and elevation views are represented here as well as an Isometric view. From this reference, we will construct a variety of perspective views in the tutorials that follow this page.

In the following six examples, you will see a perspective grid and our subject in various aspects discussed in the previous paragraph. Fig. 8 is a Normal View 1 Point Perspective drawing. Fig. 9 is a Worm's Eye View 1 Point Perspective drawing. Fig. 10 is a Bird's Eye 1 Point Perspective drawing. Fig. 11 is a Bird's Eye or High 3/4 View 2 Point Perspective drawing. Fig. 12 is a Bird's Eye 3 Point Perspective drawing. If you were to extend the vertical vanishing point lines downward, they would converge at the Nadir Station point.

2 Point vs 3 Point Perspective

Perspective vs Isometric Drawing

By now you may have noticed that perspective drawing techniques differ from other types of commonly seen technical imagry. In Fig. 13 you have three examples of 3/4 view illustrations that are not in perspective view. They are classified as Isometric, Dimetric, and Trimetric drawings. In these types of illustrations all parallel lines remain parallel and therefor, never converge at a single point. Although they can be very useful for conveying technical information, they lack the quality of realism when compared to the perspective view drawing example in Fig. 14.