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This Saturday on Awesome Horse Studios, Aaron will do a live critique, and Cynthia will be doing a creature design from scratch with help from the viewers!

Come join in the live chat, ask questions, and paint along at 2PM EST.

View this episode live, or old episodes anytime on our website.

What happens when four illustrators share a passion for their work and sharing what they know with others? Awesome Horse Studios is Marc Scheff, Cynthia Sheppard, Noah Bradley, and Aaron Miller. They do a weekly Livestream on Saturdays at 2pm EST. Each episode consists of 1-2 critiques of art submitted from the audience, and a demonstration.

You can tune in and chat live with the four horsemen on Saturdays, or watch past episodes at: http://www.awesomehorsestudios.com/watch-now

DUNNING-KRUGERDAR: The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents:

deathbearbrown:

The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents

schweizercomics:

I do compositional lectures a lot in my classes, as well as at the occasional convention.  I’ve been asked to post them, so here’s part one: The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents!

Comic art is, as a general rule, a line-based medium.  I know, I know, there are plenty of artists whose work is painted, or who depict their subject in ink using solely light and shadow.   But these folks are unquestioningly in the minority, as the history of printing technology originally dictated the use of line to depict form in the early days of comics.  This became a stylistic expectation, and it’s an expectation that I enthusiastically embrace, as have many others.  But using line to draw the world invites chances for that cardinal sin of composition: the tangent.

A tangent is when two or more lines interact in a way that insinuates a relationship between them that the artist did not intend.

It can create confusion on the part of the audience as to what it is that they’re looking at.  It can cause the spatial depth that one attempts to cultivate through the use of planes to become flattened.  Most of all, it creates a decidedly unwelcome aesthetic response: tangents are just plain ugly.

There are a lot of different types of tangents, as least according to the way I define them.  In order to make it easier on my students when giving critiques, I’ve categorized them and named them.  This may have been done before, but I’ve not encountered it.  My hope is that, by making this “spot-the-enemy” guide, fewer artists will fall into the tangent trap by knowing what to look for.
 
1. The Long Line


The long line is when a line from one object runs directly into the line of another
This is the tangent that everybody knows.  The one that’s easiest to spot, easiest to avoid.  For a lot of folks, this is the only thing meant when one refers to a “tangent.”
 
Even in the work of the very best comic artists, a vigilant eye can find the occasional tangent.  Even when a cartoonist is constantly on the lookout, a tangent can slip through.  But, as each of strive to better ourselves and the quality of our work and our medium,


2. The Parallel


The parallel tangent is when the containing lines of two objects run alongside each other.  This causes one of two negative outcomes.  Either one object becomes “lost,” as the other overpowers it (figure 1), or one object feels strangely contained by another (figure 2).
This can be avoided by ensuring that any object that COULD run alongside another is angled at least 45 degrees from the first.
The next two are REALLY tough to spot, and most artists have fallen victim to them before.

 
3. The Corner


The corner tangent is when two lines in an object meet in a way intended by the artist, but another (accidental) line runs directly into the place where they meet.
 


4. The Bump-Up

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7. More gesture funs (Delsarte prt 2)

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By: Heather Dixon, on 9/17/2011
Blog: StoryMonster (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  tutorial, Delsarte, Add a tag

Time for round two!  You lucky kids.

So the last blog post had the body split up the Delsarte way.  Head, heart, & body  (or, as a commenter before had mentioned, mental, moral, & vital.)  Head, torso, limbs--each with three more splits of the same.  And, in those  sections, there are even more divisions!

The eyes, for example, are split: head in pupil, iris is heart, and white is body.

 (There are also divisions for the nose, mouth, around the eyes, etc...it's a crash course so we can't get in to all of that.  But you can always read the google book.)

Hands (the head part of the body section) also have three parts:  palm = body, back = heart, side = head.

 So, it makes sense why holding the back of your hand to your forehead = romantic faint (heart to head) vs. palm of hand to head (more logical--do you have a fever?)

The power & movement behind the head/heart/body divisions also had those three parts.  The more powerful and convex  is body, the least powerful, more head = concave, and the happy middle is the heart.

 Delsarte took all these movements & pieces and created exercises and gestures that symbolized the characters' emotions & desires.

Here's a (rough) Delsarte gesture lineup:
 

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Debbie Barr said, on 9/17/2011 6:26:00 PM

I took 4 semesters of American Sign Language in college, and it would be really interesting to look and see how signs correlate to this as well. Naturally not all will, but in sign language where you hold a sign on your body (like at your heart or head) changes the meaning. Cool stuff!

Caitlyn said, on 9/17/2011 8:31:00 PM

I'm learning! This is pretty cool stuff. I like your examples. But it wouldn't be complete without:

4) GOLLUM

Love your blog!

Hannah said, on 9/18/2011 3:26:00 AM

Wow Heather these are so GREAT! Thanks a million for sharing this info - as an animator this stuff is gold.

And you are so brilliantly funny to read. : ) I can't wait for the color one I am that much of a nerd!

Mary said, on 9/21/2011 7:38:00 AM

One COULD always read Delsarte's work (and i intend to someday) but in the mean time, this is wonderful! Thank you! Very precise and easy to understand- and I am learning! :)

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8. How to Draw Mr. Men & Little Miss Characters

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By: Maryann Yin, on 8/25/2011
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  Children's Books, Videos, Adam Hargreaves, Little Miss, Little Miss Naughty, Little Miss Sunshine, Mr. Bump, Mr. Funny, Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Men, Mr. Tickle, Roger Hargreaves, tutorial, Add a tag

Have you ever wanted to draw your own characters from the Mr. Men and Little Miss series?

In the video embedded above, Roger Hargreaves‘ son, Adam Hargreaves, shows you how to draw Mr. Tickle, Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Funny, Little Miss Sunshin, Mr. Bump and Little Miss Naughty.

Six-year-old Adam inspired his father to create the Mr. Men series when he asked: “What does a tickle look like?” After Roger’s passing in 1988, Adam took over and continued his father’s work. What character is your favorite?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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9. Tutorial: Basic Repeating Pattern

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By: Scott E Franson, on 7/27/2011
Blog: Scott E Franson (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  Tutorial, Add a tag

Repeating pattern from Scott Franson on Vimeo.

This Tutorial shows how to create a basic repeating pattern.

1. Choose a pattern size and create a new document. (The resolution matters. My default is 3x3 inches at 300 pixels per inch)
2. Draw in the center of the defined area. It is important to avoid the edges.
3. Filter > Other > Offset, check Wrap Around.
4. Draw
5. Offset [command F will redo the last filter]
6. Edit > Define Pattern
7. Name the pattern

Now you have a repeating pattern that can be used in many different ways.

• Apply pattern to a brush [tutorial coming soon]
• Fill with pattern [tutorial coming soon]
• Paint with pattern [tutorial coming soon]

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10. Tutorial | Basic Color Harmony

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By: Scott E Franson, on 7/22/2011
Blog: Scott E Franson (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Harmony in a Color Pallet from Scott Franson on Vimeo.

This Tutorial shows one way to use Adobe Photoshop to create color harmony.

(A pressure sensitive tablet required)

Mixing a bit of one color into the other colors in your pallet will give the colors a family resemblance.

1. Change the background color swatch to the color you want in common
2. Select the brush tool.
3. Open the Brush window.
4. Select Color Dynamics > Foreground/Background jitter > Pen Pressure (this setting requires a pressure sensitive tablet. I use Wacom tablets.)
5. Choose a color and begin to paint varying the pressure.
6. Choose a new color and repeat as desired.

The result is a series of colors that are harmonized with the addition of a common color to achieve a family resemblance.

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11. Photoshop - Using Photos to Create Texture Brushes

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By: Jennifer E. Morris, on 5/4/2011
Blog: Jennifer E. Morris (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  Tutorial, Adobe Photoshop, Add a tag

I like creating my own texture brushes from all sorts of things. This tutorial will show you how to create texture brushes from your own photos.

Texture hunting makes for a fun afternoon. If you have little kids, it can be a fun family project. With digital camera in hand, and start looking for interesting patterns and textures. Rocks, trees, carpets, clouds are just a few things that can make neat texture brushes.

Once you have a some photos,upload them and open in Photoshop. This is a photo I took on vacation of a rock outcropping in Central Park...



This photo was already fairly monochromatic but that's not always the case, so the first thing I like to do is desaturate the image (Images->Adjustments->Desaturate). Then I create a levels adjustment layer. I want to boost the contrast in my image to make the texture more noticeable in the final brush.

Altering the levels isn't mandatory, you can leave more gray tones in your image, it will just mean that the textures will be more subtle. Experiment and see what works for you.

Next I use the round marquee tool to select a circle out of the middle of my photo. I then click Select->Modify->Feather and feather the edges of my selection about 10 or 15 pixels.

I then copy and paste my selection to a new file. So I have something like this...



Now I can create a new brush by clicking Edit->Define Brush Preset. This is what it looks like when I try and paint with it.


It's okay but I think modifying the brushes characteristics will make it a lot better. So I open the Brushes Palette and make a few modifications. First I increase the spacing. Right now some of the texture is getting lost in the overlay of the individual brush strokes. By increasing the spacing a little the texture will show through better.
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12. diModule | Adding texture to a brush

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By: Scott E Franson, on 4/23/2011
Blog: Scott E Franson (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Adding texture to a brush | This process simulates how a textures surface such as canvas or gesso influence the texture.

diModule Contents page

Applying a texture to the brush

1. add a texture [diModule | Creating texture]
2. open the brushes pallett  | Menu Bar > Window > Brushes
3. select texture options | Brushes Pallett > Textures
4. choose a texture | Brushes Pallett
5. select a mode | Brushes pallett > Multiply
6. paint

Experiment with the brush mode

 

diModule Contents page

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13. Photoshop Brushes - Flow Vs Opacity

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By: Jennifer E. Morris, on 4/8/2011
Blog: Jennifer E. Morris (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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I'm giving a presentation next month with my friend Carlyn Beccia at the New England SCBWI conference. I get to speak about Photoshop painting techniques. And I thought this would be a perfect time for me to really look at some of the features of the Photoshop brush tool.

When you click on the brush tool you have an option to set the flow and opacity of your brush. This is one of those things that I found very confusing in Photoshop. What the heck is the difference between Flow and Opacity? They both have to do with the transparency of the brush strokes, but depending on the brush you are using they can seem to do pretty much the same thing. But there are some difference between the two.

According to the Photoshop help file, flow sets the rate at which color is applied as you move the pointer over an area, where as opacity sets the transparency of color you apply. Umm, I don't know about you, but that really didn't help me a whole lot.

So let's take a closer look at each options. Let's select the hard round default brush. If we draw with this brush it looks like a think solid line but when we open the brush palette and increase the spacing we notice that this brush is lots of circles being laid down really close to one another, if you lay them down close enough together they look like one continuous line.



So for now let's leave the spacing kind of wide so the individual circles are touching slightly, somewhere around 70%. Now if I set the opacity to 100% and the flow to 100% and draw a line with this brush I get a sort of rippled solid blue line. No surprise there. If I leave the flow at 100% but reduce the opacity to 50%, I get the exact same ripply line only 50% lighter. But if I reverse it and leave the opacity at 100% and reduce the flow to 50% I get something a little different. Now, each little dab of the brush is reduced to 50% but where those little dabs overlap the paint coverage is actually darker than 50%.



Okay so that's not too confusing. Now what happens if I start reducing both the opacity AND the flow? This is where is can start hurting your head.

I like to think of opacity as being the main transparency governor. If I set the opacity to 75% then no part of my stroke will ever be stronger than 75% transparency. Within that 75% range I can decide how transparent each dab of the brush will be from 1 to 100%. So let's say my opacity is set at 75%, even if I set my flow to 100% my stroke will still only be 75% of the original color.

Right now you might be saying, well, that's great, but how is that going to help me with my painting? Look at these four samples. In each one, I scribbled around and around in circle until I could go no darker. As you can see the center of each dot is the same color (75% opacity) but you can see when I used a lower flow rate, I needed more little dabs of paint to get to that color. At 5% flow I was scribbling quite a lot longer than I was at 100% flow. So flow gives you a way to gradu

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14. Photoshop Tutorial - Watercolors (sort of)

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By: Jennifer E. Morris, on 4/6/2011
Blog: Jennifer E. Morris (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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When it comes to digital art, there is a school of thought that feels that the more digital artwork mimics traditional mediums the better. Unfortunately, anyone who has tried to replicate watercolors knows that a computer tends to fall short when it comes to copying those "happy accidents" that are inherent in watercolor painting. So I say, why try? Instead of slavishly trying to replicate watercolors, this technique takes inspiration from a loose airy style of watercolor painting and incorporates it into something new and a little different.



This illustration started off by scanning in a finished pencil drawing. I sometimes do my final line work in Photoshop using various grainy brushes, but sometimes it just feels good to pick up a pencil and paper.

After I scanned in the drawing, I selected Image/Adjustments/Desaturate to convert the image to black and white. The paper I was using had a slight yellow cast to it and I didn't want that showing up in the final art. Next, I selected Image/Adjustments/Levels. I clicked on the white eyedropper and then clicked on the white of the paper to make paper really white. Next I selected the middle slider under the Input Levels graph and slid it slightly to the right to darken the pencil lines just a bit.

Once the pencil drawing was adjusted and looking right, I moved it to a layer above the background layer. The way I do that is to open the Layers windows and click and drag the background layer down to the "new layer" icon at the bottom of the layer window, it's the icon next to the trash can. This creates a duplicate of the background. Name this new layer, "outlines." Set the blend mode of this new "outlines" Layer to "Multiply" Next I select the background layer and click Select/All and fill the whole background with white. So now my image looks like this...



And my Layers window looks something like this...



Next I create a new layer between the background layer and the outlines layer and name this new layer "colors".

On the new "colors" layer I select the paintbrush tool and using a hard round brush and 100% opacity I start coloring in the picture. I purposely leave gaps here and there to leave bits of white showing between the colors just as if I was painting wet watercolors next to each other. If you aren't seeing the colors, make sure you have the outlines layer blend mode set to "multiply."

So now the image looks like this...

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15. The Making of a Picture Book 5

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By: admin, on 2/21/2011
Blog: KatGirl Studio » Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  picture book, sketch, tutorial, Add a tag

Art Eating Bindings

Don’t forget you illustration’s end result will be a bound book and thus some of the image in the center of the spread where the binding is is going to get lost. If an item goes into the binding it should also come out the other side. It’s more than a little unnerving to readers when the page seems to swallow things. So it’s a good idea not place anything important (ie. characters, text or objects important to the story) in the center inches of the spread. This makes for better compositions and makes sure your reader doesn’t miss anything important.

If the pages for the book are going to be full bleedFull bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming. The bleed is the part of your illustration that extends out from the image cut line and allows the printer that small amount of space to move around paper so no white appears by accident. adding 1/2 an inch bleed all the way around image is a good idea. Don’t put anything important there since it’s going to be cut off but also don’t leave it highly unfinished or blank either.

Breaking Perspective

Sometimes you have to break the rules to show all that’s needed in a scene. Like this dual two-point panoramic shot

or this dramatic warped perspective shot.

When making a story with true to life environments its a good idea to stick to the rules of linear perspective and only break them when it will further the story in some way. Good examples for breaking the rules of perspective are:

• To express heightened emotions like fear, anxiety or wonderment.
• To show multiple locations or angles not normally scene in true linear perspective.
• To add interest to an otherwise uninteresting scene or location.

Painter Tool Tip

Under Edit > Preferences > Brush Tracking is a handy little customization tool. Each time you turn on Painter you should open up this tool and drag your style across your tablet. The Brush Tracking will record the way you in particular use a stylus and adjust your brushes accordingly. When I switch from pencil, to ink, to paint I redo my tracking. It only takes a second and can make a world of different in your artwork.

This concludes the fourth segment of The Making of a Picture Book. Thank you for joining me on this journey and I hope you will join me again for further installments.

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I thought it was time for another Photoshop tutorial. This tutorial will show how to color a drawing to give it an Arthur Rackham type feel. Now, before you say it, I know, I'm no Arthur Rackham. I just want to show how to give a drawing that aged sepia tone sort of look that he was known for.

The technique I'm going to use is very similar to the one I showed a while ago with Coloring Line Drawings in Photoshop, but with a few extra steps. So you might want to go back and take at look at that tutorial first if you are a Photoshop newbie.

This image started out as as a pencil drawing that I scanned into Photoshop. You could also start with a pen and ink drawing, charcoal, whatever you want. Below is exactly how it was scanned in, and I don't know if you can see it, but the whole image has a pinkish cast and lots of pencils smudges.



The smudges I'm going to leave, I think they will add to the feeling that I'm going for. But I want to get rid of that pinkish tint to the paper. So I click Image->Adjustments->Desaturate (or SHIFT-CTRL-U) That converts the image to greyscale.



For this technique you need to have the line drawing on a layer above the background layer. The way I do that is to create a copy of the background layer. You can either right click on the background layer and select "duplicate layer..." or you can drag the layer down to the little "new layer" icon right next to the trash bin. Rename this new layer, "Line Drawing". Now, go back to the Background level and select all (CTRL-A) and fill with a solid tan color. Your image won't look any different yet, but your layers window will look like this...



Click again on the "Line Drawing" layer and create a new adjustment layer (the little icon at the bottom of the layer window that looks like a black and white cookie.) We're going to create a "gradient map." Experiment a little with the gradients, you'll find that you can tinker with it in all sorts of ways to get lots of neat effects. You can see that I chose a gradient that goes from dark brown to

Ever wish your life was more like a comic book? With Photoshop, you can turn your photo album into a graphic novel.

Using the YouTube tutorial embedded above, you can use Photoshop to turn your digital photos into black and white images that look like comic book sketches.

What type of stories would you tell with your graphic novel?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Don’t Forget the Text

Though I can’t show you the text I can show you were it is going to go. One of the tricks in illustrating a picture book is the leave space for the text without leaving a gaping whole in your illustration.

When I plan out an story illustration I always have a layer with the text on it in the size the publisher has said it will be. This way I don’t have to guess and hope it will fit in the end. This also goes for book covers. Where the text is going to appear you also want the colors to be low contrastThis means that the value of the colors in a particular area are relatively the same value so either dark with light text or vice versa.

Zooming in for Effect

When illustrating a picture book you don’t always have to have crazy angles for every shot. Take a queue from the film industry and go in for some close ups. If your working on a computer you don’t even have to re-sketch your scene just use a free-transform tool to expand your image. I wouldn’t advise doing this with a painted image in most cases because of pixelationPixelation is when you blow up or expand an image and the pixels, the bits of color information that make up your image, become jagged and much more visible..

This concludes the fourth segment of The Making of a Picture Book. Thank you for joining me on this journey and I hope you will join me again for further installments.

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