nathanaardvark

Let's Start Again!

Hello! It's been a while, hasn't it?

Yes. I'm so excited to be getting back into Patreon. Why I stopped for so long, who knows? Maybe the burnout I experienced scarred me!

What have I been doing?

Over the past 6-7 years I've evolved my style, focussed mostly on traditional figurative art, had som...

Art in Action: Drawing a Portrait

Thought I'd share the occasional action shot with you guys. This is a commission I worked on a few years back for an awesome Patron. 

Clearly, you don't need a full studio or an easel or even the right lighting, clearly! ;) 

I think I just taped the paper to a piece of MDF and went ahead with a piece of charcoal, a cloth for ...

Tutorial 166 - Squash and Stretch

"Squash and stretch" is the first of twelve basic principles of animation developed by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. The principles can be used to achieve a greater sense of realism in realistic animation and convey a more exaggerated feeling for drawn cartoons. 

Understanding these principles can benef...

Tutorial 165 - Shadows in Perspective

This tutorial illustrates the few steps we can take to work out shadows in perspective. This will help us to create more convincing images in terms of creating the illusion of depth.

1) Starting with an object we want to plot the shadow of, first we locate the light source. 

2) Draw a vertical line from the light source to ...

Tutorial 164 - Umbra and Penumbra

Here's a visual explanation of how varying sizes of light will produce different shadows. Up to three shadow regions can be distinguished.

A point light is a single point in space. Light coming from a point light creates an umbra shadow region only.

A non-point light which has a measurable size will always create at least two region...

Tutorial 163 - Light and Shadow

Here's a demonstration of a typical lighting setup, a single light source and ball resting on a surface. 

The elements of light:

Center light 

The center light, also know as direct light, is the plane (or planes) of the form facing directly towards the light source.

Highlight 

Tutorial 162 - Light Sources and Shadows

This tutorial explores the types of light sources and shadows that we need to concern ourselves with as artists. 

Most light sources can be considered one of the following:

Directional light

A directional light source emits parallel light beams, and doesn't fade over distance, unlike other types o...

Tutorial 161 - Experiment with Light

Light is key to making an image convincing and one of the most powerful ways to evoke mood. 

Exploring a variety of lighting arrangements is a simple practice to adopt in your working process, with great benefit. 

Working traditionally, the options are limited but here is an opportunity to use photoshop as it was intended, as...

Tutorial 160 - Photoshop's Mixer Brush - Mix Ratios

This tutorial focuses on the Mix slider and how these values effect the paint strokes applied to our canvas. 

The Mix slider changes the ratio of Wet (the canvas paint) to Load (the reservoir paint). To find out more about Wet and Load read through this tutorial: 2016-06-23 17:35:57 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 159 - Photoshop's Mixer Brush - Reservoir and Pickup

This tutorial explains photoshop's concepts of the reservoir and the pickup well. We only need to keep these concepts in mind when using the mixer brush.

The reservoir 

The reservoir is simply the idea of a container holding the color that has been selected to paint with. When using the normal brush, our active color...

Tutorial 158 - Photoshop’s Mixer Brush - Load and Clean

Here are four visual descriptions of photoshop's "load" and "clean" functions when used with the Wet combination preset. 

The effect is similar to traditional blending on a wet canvas.

In this example, the mixer brush is set to Wet, which means Wet, Load, and Mix are set to 50% and Flow is set to 100%. 

We are using ...

Tutorial 157 - Mixer Brush: Introduction

This tutorial introduces Photoshop's mixer brush. 

To fully understand this tool we should know a little bit about traditional media. 

If you've played with paint as a child then that's enough to start, but we'll see in upcoming tutorials how this tool can simulate many types of traditional media, wet and dry. 
2016-06-13 08:48:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 156 - The Appendicular Skeleton.

The appendicular skeleton are the bones that are appended to the axial portion of the skeleton. 

The pelvis, skapula, clavicle, the bone of the limbs, feet and hands are all parts of the appendicular skeleton.

Learning the names and location of these bones will help us when constructing the human form from imagination. Use this image a...

Tutorial 155 - The Axial Skeleton

The skeleton is divided into two parts. The axial skeleton and the appendicular skeleton. 

The axial skeleton is the core group of bones forming the central axis of the whole body. The axial skeleton includes the skull, vertebral column (all vertebrae, sacrum and coccyx), and the rib cage.

We should try to learn...

Tutorial 154 - The Apollo's Belt

The Apollo's Belt (or iliac furrow) is a colloquial term describing the groove that sits between the thigh and the abdomen. 

In the illustration, note the pink dashed line indicates the location of the grooves. The grooves emerge from the hipbone, just above the iliac crest, indicated in green. The green dashed line indicates the inguina...

Tutorial 153 - Gender Comparisons of the Pelvis

The most notable difference between the male and female pelvis is the height and width. The female pelvis is wider and shorter (by an inch or so) than the male.

The pelvic inlet 

The pelvic inlet (and outlet) is the gap in the middle of the pelvis. In females, it is larger and rounder to allow for child...

Tutorial 152 - A Stack of Blocks

Unlike muscle groups and bones, these simple boxes and their placements can be easily memorised. Doing so will provide you with a good starting point to begin your figure drawing and will also make it easier to learn more complex anatomical forms. 

Remember to start simple.  

Tutorial 151 - Pelvis-Torso Relationship

Here's a simple visual showing a few basic relationships between the simplified masses of the pelvis and torso. 

From profile, we can see that if simplified into cuboids, the pelvis tilts forwards and the torso tilts backwards. These angles vary from person to person, sometimes drastically. 

From the front, star...

Tutorial 150 - The Pelvis Simplified

The pelvis is a very complex shape to conceive of but we need to get to know it at a basic level if we want to understand the human form. 

We will break it down into a simple shape to make it easier for us to visualize. 

From the front, the silhouette might resemble a butterfly.

From profile, the silhouette is a li...

Tutorial 149 - The Rib Cage

These illustrations show how a simplified 3D shape represents the complexity of the rib cage fairly accurately. 

When conceiving of the rib cage as a basic shape, we should focus on the size and placement in the torso, and where the plane changes occur. This will help greatly when constructing a drawing of the torso. 

...

Tutorial 148 - The Rib Cage Simplified

Here's a rough representation of the rib cage as a solid shape with visible plane changes. It's worth memorizing this fairly complex form by drawing it from as many angles as you can. 

Start by drawing an egg shape, broad at the base, narrow at the top. For the top, we remove a chunk, at a 45 degree angle, sloping forwards. This is roug...

Tutorial 147 - Bony Landmarks of the Torso

Here's a simple visual on the bony landmarks of the torso. We can observe these areas on most model sizes and they will provide us with good anchor points to construct our drawing. 

We'll discuss what's going on under the surface in an upcoming tutorial but for now, try to observe these landmarks on the life model. If drawing from imagin...

Tutorial 146 - Basic Structures of the Female Torso

Here's a fairly basic diagram of the areas to consider when drawing the female torso, showing where these areas are placed in relation to each other. 

Generally, when drawing both from life and from imagination we might want to begin with a basic gesture line, moving to the oval forms of the rib cage and pelvis areas. Then on to suggest ...

Tutorial 145 - The Envelope

This technique of measured drawing is closely linked with another tutorial on angles found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/144-drawing-with-5553528

The envelope method gives us another way of creating a framework for our contour sketch by f...

144 - Drawing the Figure with Angles

This is a very analytical approach to drawing the figure and is more suitable for longer poses, usually starting from 90 minutes. 

We can get as analytical as we like, using just a pencil or a ruler to measure our subject, though some artists like to use a plumb-line. A plumb-line is simply a piece of thin string with a weight attached to th...

Tutorial 143 - Female Torso: Process

Here's a simple approach to the female torso beginning with gesture and simple masses, leading us to a finished study. 

The first steps are sketching the gesture and oval masses. These elements are to be considered very flexible, and not at all fixed. They are a simple base to apply the framework of the simplified landmarks. 

Land...

Tutorial 142 - Head in Profile: Male Variations

This is a follow up to Head in Profile: Female Variations found here: 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-139-in-5521117

In both these tutorials we're simply exploring some of the slight variations that will occur from p...

Tutorial 141 - Checking Figure Perspective

Drawing the figure in perspective can be challenging, especially when starting out, an drawing from imagination. 

It is difficult to know how much larger or smaller to make areas of the body that are in perspective.

A fairly simple way to check your drawing is to use perspective lines to make estimations.

Tutorial 140 - The Figure in Perspective

This is a basic method of creating a guide to represent the figure in perspective. Though it looks like there are a fair amount of complex lines don't be dissuaded.  Understanding a few simple steps will help:

• Start by sketching the full figure very lightly. In the following steps we'll construct a basic box in perspective to check ...
  2016-05-25 04:55:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 139 - Head in Profile: Female Variations

The proportions, angles and contours of the head and face vary so much, it's fascinating to observe from an artistic perspective. 

It would be almost trivial for us to talk about the differences in race, age and sex as there really is no standard. In general, older people have longer ears and noses, thinner lips, etc, but not always.&nbs...