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I always use a hard circular brush - the Penbrush tool, to be exact.

Power is pressure-based, Size is constant. That's all there is to it!

So no paper structure? I thought I saw paperstructure on the youtube-film but it was pixelstructure I guess.

PICKING COLOURS How to understand and analyze colours that you see in a photograph, as well as how to effectively make use of a Hue/Saturation/Value colour picker.

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IMPORTANT COLOURS Okay, once you know how to pick colours - which colours need to be picked for painting? How should they be applied? What about ARARRRARRGHHH!!!! WATCH YOUTUBE TUTORIAL AND STOP ASKING.

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Thank you for your time

http://tenminutedrawing.blogspot.com/20 ... g-bar.html

Learn to "add" something to a photograph without breaking it.

End result:

Nice tutorials, thank you.
Would anyone recommend using the silhouette technique for defining keyposes for animation characters?

Boomslang wrote:Nice tutorials, thank you.
Would anyone recommend using the silhouette technique for defining keyposes for animation characters?

YES.

Boomslang wrote:Nice tutorials, thank you.
Would anyone recommend using the silhouette technique for defining keyposes for animation characters?

Absolutely. The first step to designing a character is to start with a good silhouette.

None of this makes any sense to me. How is drawing a silhouette such a hard thing to do when it leaves out all the intricacies that makes a drawing come to life. By God people; wake up and just draw what you feel and what you see and stop this endless quest for the golden rule, the magic formula, the guru on the mountain. If you can't feel the drawing inside of yourselves then you simply don't have it -- it's not there.

My suggestion is to read some good books about the human spirit and get inspired by the wonders of the world and become awe inspired by nature. Study natural sciences and leave the science fiction books in the trash bin and if they aren't there yet, put them there. By dwelling on the mechanics of life your soul becomes atrophied and is in hibernation.

Don't copy anything. Copying is like a contagious disease; once you start you need intervention to get yourself out of its spell. Draw a simple line across the screen and look into yourself. Does it make you feel something? Does drawing a different kind of line make your feelings about what you are doing change? Work on these lines gently and relax.

Putting a silhouette down is like laying a turd on the sidewalk. You can stare at a turd and think you see a little fat man in it but you are just guessing, you feel nothing except the relief from passing a bowl movement.

idragosani wrote:

Boomslang wrote:Nice tutorials, thank you.
Would anyone recommend using the silhouette technique for defining keyposes for animation characters?

Absolutely. The first step to designing a character is to start with a good silhouette.

But, In D.T. Nethery's attachment I see that the silhouette has been added AFTER the linedrawing, to test its read-ability.
By making the silhouette first, and then the linedrawing over it, isn't there a big chance you start "filling" things in instead of structuring a character?
In other words, is it best to start with the linedrawing, or to start with the silhouette?

As I said, I don't get it. A silhouette has its purpose in telling a story but I see no purpose for it as a design construction. It sounds like voodoo art to me; draw a character with lines, fill it with black, step back and say: I still see my character in it! I am getting somewhere! This is marvelous! O.K. so are shadows. Now what?

I agree somewhat there Paul, I think its good to use silhouettes to test the readability of a pose, but when it comes to structuring a character it gets a little clumsy.

Either you know how to draw or you don't. If you don't, there is no trick with the pencil or any materials that will show you how to draw because it's in the soul; it is not part of the material world. To learn to draw, to become better at drawing, or to absolutely master drawing, you need to cultivate your mind.

Of course you can't sharpen your pencil with your mind to make a thinner line but that is about mastering your tools once you have mastered the mindset to draw.

There is no shortcut to help you eliminate the need to practice, practice, practice. If you can't put yourself to drawing all day long, if you dabble with music a little here, cooking a little there, watching TV a lot over there, tinkering with your bike three times a day, you had a nice day but as a drawing person you got nowhere.

Boomslang wrote:But, In D.T. Nethery's attachment I see that the silhouette has been added AFTER the linedrawing, to test its read-ability.
By making the silhouette first, and then the linedrawing over it, isn't there a big chance you start "filling" things in instead of structuring a character?
In other words, is it best to start with the linedrawing, or to start with the silhouette?

No, what I mean is that if you start off with a design that is constructed well, it will lend itself easier to to having strong silhouettes when animating. For blocking out a basic structure from shapes, being aware of the character's silhouette is good to keep mind, but I didn't mean you draw a contour of the character's outline and then fill it in.

Paul Fierlinger wrote: if you dabble with music a little here, cooking a little there, watching TV a lot over there, tinkering with your bike three times a day, you had a nice day but as a drawing person you got nowhere.

I would like to add '' and if you hang out on internetforums too much ".

It all depends on the sort of artist you want to be. Violinplayers for instance may all want to be the greatest solo violinplayer in history, but most of them end on the second row of a provincial orchestra. And on that row you can forget everything you ever learned about expressing yourself, because it's really a robotic sort of performance. All noses have to point in the same direction, as is the case with large animationproductions. So all these rules serve a purpose.
We can't all be succesful 'free' artists.

But I agree that it's an absolut neccesity to draw for thousands and thousands of hours. But to be an artist one also has to live, because where-else can the inspiration come from.
Drawing from life, learning something about anatomy, about color, perspective, paintingtechniques, and 'the animation survival kit' also fits in there.
It's all just knowledge and if you grow old or drunk enough you can forget most of it again.