endling:

 One thing you’ve probably heard before is how important a characters’ silhouette is. Ideally, when creating a cast of characters, each of them has a shape that is distinct from one another. I suppose this may hold true more so in animation than in the creation of characters intended for comics, but I think there’s a lot of merit to it either way. A distinct character is a memorable character.

  I’ve seen artists begin work with silhouettes. Putting down blots of black in Photoshop, then alternating between cutting away and adding shapes, lines and scribbles until the result is an appealing shape. I don’t work directly into Photoshop myself, but I do use roughly the same process on paper. When I’m trying to get a feel for a new design, I tend to doodle tons of forms like the ones above, in the second picture. Eventually you’ll start running into shapes that stand out to you, and you can experiment with piecing them together into a single design. And then those shapes can become bits and bobs of clothing, accessories and other features. (It helps of course to have a rough idea of the kind of character you’re looking to create.)

  Granted, what you see above are all supposed to be humanoid female designs, so the shapes aren’t nearly as varied up as they’d be if I showing the difference between like.. hulking super muscle characters, spindly aliens and/or squat koala people. But it’s important to be able to differentiate characters with similar features as well. You won’t always have a cast of such varied, intergalactically inclined individuals.

  Try breaking some of your existing characters down into shapes. Incorporate their outfit and features into the shapes themselves, rather than just sticking to their basic anatomy. (Though anatomy is crazy important! Do NOT neglect the basics, or all of this stuff becomes a heckuva lot harder!) Think about how they would look if they were in motion, even if they’re standing still. It’s important, considering you’re going to be drawing them a lot, and in many more positions than just this one!

   This is an excellent way of warming up before doing full illustrations, I find. Draw an entire page full of figures. They don’t have to be established characters of yours, either. Half the time it’s better if you warm up with shapes you AREN’T familiar with, as it starts your creative gears a-turning. Don’t get too caught up detailing either, it’s about loosening up with body shapes. They don’t always have to be doing extravagant backflips or Figure Anatomy model poses either. There are many different ways of doing what are normally ‘static’ looking poses, if you find a way of varying up the shapes and curves involved. 

  More on character design later. It’s a big question I’ve been posed a few times, about designing characters, and truth be told it’s waaay too much to cover in one or even ten posts like this, haha. So I will chip away at the subject bit by bit! Hope anyone out there finds this useful!

elliotoille:

felt like doing a tutorial thingy (what should I call these??) again! I think I’ll make a tag for these in case I do more. This time I’m gonna talk a little about how angles affect how clothing falls aaaand stuff. here we go…

Given: The first drawing of these three is how the clothing naturally wants to fall, how it is made to be shaped. Or, whichever pose you could take that will give the garment the least amount of creases.

• I’ll actually talk about the green first; this is a representation of the hip box, which itself is a representation/simplification of your whole pelvis area. You see how your legs and hip box oppose angles here. in almost all poses except standing straight, your hip box and legs will create a bent angle, which affects how clothes fall.
• The red/blue is the skirt (obvs), the red specifically is the ellipses of the top and bottom openings of the skirt. This skirt is very stiff material for the sake of this example, so notice how the two ellipses always match eachother. the top ellipse is where the skirt is actually attached to the body, so it’s the boss; the bottom ellipse will more or less do exactly what the top one does.
• here’s where the fact that the legs and hip box are at different angles becomes important. The top of the skirt is attached to the hip box, but the bottom ellipse is in the realm of the legs. The orange lampshade shape diagram there is a simplification of this. It is very much like if you were to tilt a lampshade. The side you are bending towards will hug the body and create creases. The side you are bending away from will fall off the body in a straight line.

It even works with pants, though as the bottom ellipse(s) gets farther away from the top there’s more room for the garment to get distorted by gravity, perspective, and bent knees and such. But with this last example you can really see how the side touching the legs really hugs the body underneath, whereas the other side hangs off of it in a straighter, crease-less line.

Dresses are a little different because their top ellipse is attached to your torso/ribcage mass rather than the hip box.

Much of the time you get the same result as with a skirt. However if the hip box and ribcage mass are opposed sideways rather than forward or backward, it becomes a little tougher:

You can see in the third drawing how a shirt and a skirt together would fall in opposite ways if your body is bent sideways. If the shirt is long, just like I mentioned above about the long pants, there is more distortion of this effect.

I’ll take what I said above, “The side you are bending away from will fall off the body in a straight line”, and add a bit to the end: “… until it hits something.” In the fourth drawing above, the garment is falling off the body in a straight line on the right side. If you lengthen the garment:

The straight side continues down as normal until it hits the leg and becomes the body-hugging side. in response to that, the body-hugging side from farther up becomes the straight side when it falls off the hip.

Aaand with that I think I’ll stop lol. I hope that wasn’t hard to understand. It’s easy to do yourself, just wear a skirt or some loose pajama pants and take hula poses in the mirror lol.

not sure if i reblogged this before but.

wannabeanimator:

Requested by chenipan - Movement & Dynamics

It’s all about that line of action! Dynamics Tutorial Gesture Drawing Lesson

i-i need this„,

notzilon:

One limiting thing about SAI is the number of brushes, as well as the difficulty in making them. Well, screw that! I was doing some digging, and I found some cool resources that everyone who uses this great program might be interested in. There’s others out there, but these are my favorites that I’ve found that I’m currently playing around with.

SAI Tutorial by algenpfleger : Basic run-down of SAI, but this explains the process of creating textures/brushes to add to SAI. It’s more complicated than, say, Photoshop, but is still pretty simple if you take them one step at a time.

9 Paint Tool SAI Brushes : Exactly what it sounds like. Very attractive brushes, along with an installation how-to. Includes chalk, soft, thick, and flat brushes.

Easy Paint Tool SAI Brushes : A few brushes and a large collection of textures! Textures include shell, stucco, rust, watercolor, and a lot of grungy/concrete/etc-type textures. Page includes installation notes.

Paint Tool SAI Pencil Brushes : Includes settings so you can re-create the effects shown, emulates graphite pencil. These are really, REALLY beautiful and accurate, I think!

yes omg these brushes are fantastiq.