Tag Archives: woman

Cafe Muse Part 2

3

Today I turned on my brain and decided to make a screen capture of what I’m doing. That way you can see the layers and whatnot that I use. For example, here I’m cleaning up my lines and making sure my artwork is consistent with the image. its not easy, but these little touches are what  help make this piece. It’s always a good idea to do cleanup.

4

Using your selection tool, highlight your canvas. Since I’m on a PC, ctrl/shift/I inverts the tool so that it selects only the artwork. Also I make sure to use my outline layer for this. Its locked so that any mistakes I make won’t affect it. (accidents do happen!)

5

Under my line layers I create another layer and label it “dark”. My selections are still up; however only the highlighted layer will receive the affect of any action I take next. I select my dark layer and, using the paintbucket tool, I add a layer of color. notice that since I put it on a layer below the line work, I can still see my art on top of the color.

6

Here it gets a little interesting. After making another layer above dark, I use the lasso tool to pick all of my midtone areas. These aren’t world class accurate, but I get them as close as possible. From here its a simple matter of filling the selections with a color chosen with the paintbrush tool. Afterward don’t forget to deselect your area by simply pressing the D key on your keyboard.

Cafe Muse, part 1

cafe1

To begin I know a lot of guys make little composite sketches and practice in different colors and things to get started. That has never worked for me. All the work I’ve done that way always feel stiff and forced. I learned to draw by myself and didn’t get much in the way in formal education in techniques. Hell, my first art paper were the backs of my homework and whatever pencil my mom bought for school. I would start a picture from the part of the person I found most interesting, in this case her hand, which seems to be cupping her breast. This is how I work when I’m using source material; when it comes to original works from my noggin, I definitely will do a rough sketch first!

Because of my haphazard way of starting my pics, I tend to use really large canvases then crop them to size. So for major shapes or general outlines, I always try to use a brush size that is at least 3 points larger than the detail brush. Also, I try to keep these disparate line types on separate layers. That way if I don’t like my fine lines or overall outline, I can change them without affecting the entire image. Don’t forget to change the name of your layers so you don’t get the two mixed up and lock anylayer and group you’re not working on. Its easier than going back in the history to fix a mistake!

Well, that’s it for now. Next up will be colors and I promise more pictures

First Winner!

20130919_114032

This will be the subject for my first Muse of the Month pic! I’ve already come up with a theme for it, so hopefully you guys will follow along.

20131106_054442

The first thing I had to do was create a layout for her image. I’ve always been partial to poster sized renderings, and since she is going to receive a digital copy of this image, i’m sure she may want to recreate it someday.

Closer

 Soon, it’ll be time for me to get busy with all the bodybuilders I’m going to be drawing. I can’t wait! In the meantime, I’ve close to finding the winner for my muse contest. In the meantime, here’s a picture I did based on a photo by a friend, Seawolf, on deviantart. Enjoy!

flow

Muse of the Month Contest!

bright-eyes_web

I STILL don’t know how I got that look with the hair, lol

Great news! I’m starting a new thing on my blog called “muse of the month”! In other words, you guys are going to make suggestions about a drawing for me to work on and I’ll show you the steps and discuss it, leading up to the finished piece! So basically it’ll be a tutorial my readers come up with! How cool is that?

With my growing workload, once a month is about as often as I can pull this off. but as you write in with your suggestions, I’ll read them and decide. Of course your name or handle will be mentioned as the spark for my art. So get into your imagination and let’s give it a whirl! Oh, one more thing; family photos, if done, will not be formal. They will be changed but familiar. So if you don’t mind seeing your mom and dad as one of the Herculoids, let’s do this!