#inkcapjester tutorial

[inkcapjester]

Hello! I was wondering if you would think about posting tutorials or stuff like that! I really admire your art style, and there are a lot of things that you were capable of drawing that I and many others are not.

You don't have to respond to this if you don't want to, bye honestly I just need to know how you're able to draw a kiss and make it look natural or, certain poses with characters

You're just really talented and I admire your work! I would love to learn from you if you were inclined to teach💕

i typed this almost all out once and tumblr deleted it so here we go again 🥀🥀

OFCC!! this is so sweet 😭😭 I broke my process down into steps so hopefully it’s easier to understand. This is just a general tutorial, but if you’d like a more in depth one on something specific do let me know and I can try!! I am not a professional (yet) and only a student but I hope my tips can be useful!!

Step by Step tutorial + full speed-paint of my Cassius drawing below cut 💜

Using references has been something I’ve more recently gotten into the habit of, and by god I’ve improved so much because of it. Studio classes really forced me to get used to drawing from reference, and I’m glad I got that push.

For finding references, I usually use Pinterest, or I take my own photos (like for this cover image!! i couldn’t figure out the pose LMAO) For this tutorial, I’m going to be using my recent drawing of Lord Cassius from KotLC as examples of my steps. When I’m searching for references, I like to type phrases and emotions I associate with the character and see what it gives me. For Cassius, I literally searched “Judgmental facial expression man” as my beginning search LOL.

From there, if I’m not immediately finding pictures I want to use, I try finding one that’s within the realm of what I’m looking for, and then continue deep diving under the recommended pictures below the one I clicked on. I find this is a good way to more quickly get the specifics you want, and it’s something I love about Pinterest.

You can also combine images together to create a new pose if you’re not finding exactly what you want! I love hodge-podging pictures together to create my scenes.

Along with pose references, I also like to gather emotion/body language references. Sometimes it’s just looking at different aesthetics I’m going for, and sometimes, like when I’m drawing sokeefe, it’s looking at pictures of couples. I study their facial expressions, and how their bodies interact in a space together, compared to more platonic relationships. I also just think it’s fun to study human behavior lol.

An extra thing I do when find references is also look for clothing inspiration! Especially with fantasy works like KotLC, it’s sometimes hard for me to come up with fashion for them. I often really like taking random elements from a couple different pictures, putting them together to create an outfit, and unifying them through color!

Once I have gathered a bunch of references that I like, I sift through them and pick out the ones I think will go well together, both stylistically and composition-wise. I think it’s important to note that your drawings don’t have to be a 1:1 replica of the reference!! The pictures are there to guide your drawing, but not dictate it. Some parts of the picture I will reference a lot more heavily, often things I struggle with like hands, while things I’m more comfortable with like expressions I will stray from the reference a bit and give it my own flare.

Whether your making a drawing like the ones I will show below (of the multiple smaller drawings of Cassius all laid out on one spread) or more of a scene drawing, I find using the reference photos to roughly “sketch” out how I want the composition to look to be extremely helpful. Especially with digital art, using the images as a rough guide is easy to create multiple compositions to choose from.

As you can see in this picture, I’ve cut out the backgrounds/parts of the reference photos that I don’t need, so I can better see what my composition will actually look like. I’ll have the full speed-paint of my Cassius drawing at the bottom of this post, and in that you can see briefly at the beginning me cutting apart and piecing together a bunch of images, until I landed on this layout.

When actually laying out the images, I always have in mind the viewer’s eye. I want to guide the viewer through the drawing, giving them lots of entertainment while not being an overwhelming amount of information.

When it comes to sketching, I have a lot of different approaches that I use, depending on the time I have and what I need to draw. Most of the time, I lightly trace over the reference image, blocking out any large and important shapes. This makes it a lot easier for my brain to understand and replicate. When I’m tracing, I also like to mark where certain features are, like the nose and eyes, along with the curves of the shapes. That is especially important on the face.

I like to turn the reference off, or put it in another window, bring my traced shapes to the left side, then begin my own drawing on the right. At first, I focus on making sure the proportions are correct and the shapes match. After that, I go back over and adjust the sketch to my style, and the characteristics of whoever I’m drawing. Often the reference image’s face/body will look different from the character, so it’s important to understand the fundamental shapes of the body, and how they are interacting, rather than just copying the image straight up. Here are some examples below from the speed-paint 👇

If I’m feeling stuck and like something doesn’t look right, I’ll hover my drawing over the tracing, and sometimes over the reference to see what is not lining up. Then putting it back off to the side and working on that section. I also flip the canvas a lot, to help my eyes not get too used to my drawing.

I keep repeating that process until all of my images are sketched out in my style and look like the character I want. I’ll also leave notes for myself to remember details I need to add when I’m closer to being done, and don’t want to draw LOL

Also note that some people’s sketches are incredibly neat and thought out, while others’ (like me) opt for figuring out the details in the later stages. Either way works, it’s kinda just what works for you. What sketches need to have are solid fundamentals, and if that’s looking good, then you’re set.

I looooovvveee line art /gen and i know a lot of people don’t which makes me sad 🥀

I get it, it can be tedious, but I really do enjoy bringing my drawing to life and finding all the details I want to add. I used to really struggle with my lineart feeling very stiff compared to my sketch, and it took me a long while to learn how to keep the vibe of the sketch in my final drawing. I’m not always as successful as I want to be, but that’s okay, my goal is to keep learning not to be perfect.

I’ve found that utilizing line weight helps that problem a lottt. Also just having fun with your lines, like in the sketching stage. When I was younger I remember doing line art and needing every.single.pixel to be perfect, and it really sucked all the fun out of it. There are tons of different ways to do line art, and something that helped me get out of that perfectionist mindset was just looking at artists I admired. I studied their speed-paints, what kinda of brushes they used, and how they used line in their line art.

A lot of them had more expressive strokes than I realized, often using the weight of lines to exaggerate the drawing.

The line art doesn’t need to be out-of-this-world to be good. I like using a textured brush, with lines that connect for the most part. I try to put heavier lines on places of emphasis, like the outlines, folds, points, and where lines connect. Usually, the smaller or softer the details, the lighter and thinner the lines.

It took me a long time to find a style of line art that I really enjoyed, and even now sometimes I switch between brushes. Something that art school taught was how important play is. Even just messing around with brushes helped me find how I liked to draw. All of the brushes I use I've found for completely free on Gumroad. If you're ever curious what I use I'd be happy to make a post about it!

Color!!! This is one of my favorite steps, and also the one I find most frustrating. I absolutely love color theory and tweaking colors to look completely different than reality, and it sometimes bites me in the butt lol. Recently I've gotten a lot better with base colors, and I always try to set the background to a mid-tone grey instead of blaring white. I tend to favor saturated yet darkish colors if that makes sense.

The grey background allows the colors to not have to fight so much to be seen against a white background, and also helps me keep my values in check. I'm always thinking about readability in terms of value as well as saturation when I'm coloring.

I always check my values by having a layer above all others filled with white and set to the blending mode saturation. I want the main points of the character to be distinguishable and easy to read, especially from a distance or if you squint. This is why I kinda hate drawing blond characters because it is a lot more difficult to find values of a light skin tone and light hair that are different enough without it looking insane. Some areas I succeed more in terms of "value readability" and some are weaker. Not every single color needs to have extremely different values, but the composition needs to include large areas of varying value. I also use value in my colors to frame things I want to emphasize, like Biana's face in front of her dark hair.

You can also frame pieces of a drawing with the actual colors, like in my Cassius drawing, I wanted the drawing in the foreground to stand out, so I used tints and shades of blue for the outfit behind him. Blues and yellows often go well together, and it gave me a nice opportunity to bring him even more forward.

When it comes to actually choosing colors, I like to chose a color palette for that character ahead of time. I also limit my use of different colors and tones both as a challenge and to make my pieces more cohesive. I love reusing colors, like the whites of a character's eyes being the same as their clothes.

For Cassius, I knew I wanted his palette to be primary golds, whites and blues. White can be a particularly difficult color to make, because it depends so heavily on its environment to exist. This is why I usually chose the brightest white and the skin color first. I absolutely need the white to pop and I need the skin to look alive and well, so those two colors take the highest importance for me. For each character's white, I take a look at the color palette I assigned them, and try a few different kinds of white alongside the skin tone. I try giving them cool and warm undertones that correspond with their color palettes, then chose the combinations I like the best. I always try to master a few colors together at a time. Trying to get all of the colors to work together all at once is overwhelming to me, and often leaves my drawings looking messy.

I know a lot of artists that fill the inside of their character with a base color that they want to tie all the other colors back to, and I've heard that works great too! Color is really something that you learn through play and experimentation. It took me a very long time to get a good grip on it, and even now I stumble sometimes trying to wrangle my colors. Sometimes just going back to the basic color wheel is what helps me get back on track.

The most important thing about color is just that they always exist in context. Take them out of that context, and they can look completely different, like in my example below ^.^ This is a very extreme version of what I would use for a white, but I thought it was a good way to show just how different something reads when its against a different color/value.

As for shading, I've been trying a lot of different techniques lately. I'm in-between shading styles right now, so I'm still trying to figure myself out too!! I do love using masks for shading though. I use them in my more simple/cel-shading, and for when I'm rendering.

The masks have been deleted by this point and I can't pull them from the speed paint :< but these layers I have highlighted came from the same mask. Basically, I make a clipping layer clipped onto the base colors, and fill the entire layer with whatever I want to shade with. Usually I use the layer mode multiply, and set the opacity down to whatever I want. After that, I make a mask of that clipped layer, and use the mask to carve out where I want the light. I like using masks because it lets me mess with opacity without messing with the layer's over all opacity.

After I'm satisfied with what I've carved out, I merge the mask and shading layer. Then, I select the contents of the shading layer, invert that selection, make a new layer, and fill the inverted selection with my lighting color. Then I mess around with blending modes and opacities till I get it how I want it!

If that was confusing I can always go more in-depth about it :] That and anything else that I maybe didn't explain well enough!! I love talking about this stuff and art in general (it's my major for a reason LOL) so please don't hesitate to ask!!!

Here is the Cassius speed-paint as well!!

[inkcapjester]

How did you find your artstyle and how do you consistently draw it, if I may ask?? I’m having a hard time being consistent with my artstyle 🥲

Also, I hope you don’t mind- but I’m just gonna…*noms your art* Delicious <33

To be totally honest, I'm still finding my art style!! It's not really something I've 100% decided on yet, and that's partially because I have so many! I'm gonna use my story that I've been developing for a while as an example, along with other drawings for things I've done :]

Also idk if this counts as a tutorial, but I do yap a lot about loosely put-together steps, so here we go!

I love experimenting with things like brushes, color palettes, blending modes and effects to see which things serve the purposes I most need them to. All of the brushes I currently use I found for free, mostly on Gumroad!

Experimenting would probably my first step, regardless of what I want the style to be. I usually have at least a vague idea of what kind of vibe I'm going for, but sometimes I get more inspired just from experimenting with various brushes and coloring styles.

Something ill do when trying out new brushes (usually line art brushes) is to go over the same sketch with them. This is a very old example LOL but it was when I was trying to develop a style for a comic/light novel of an extensive fantasy world I've been working on for a long time.

I labeled all the different brushes so I could easily remember which was which, and from there I ended up liking the Kumpu brush the best.

Then I made a bunch of drawings with that brush of some of the main characters, to get a feel of what I liked and what I didn't. I knew I wanted the style of this comic to feel a little bit like a pixel-art game (think undertale and stardew) but also have a clear color palette. I liked the drawing in general, but overall wasn't ecstatic with how they came out, because it wasn't as close as I wanted it to be. So, a while later, I searched the internet for more inso, and brushes.

This was feeling a lot closer to what I had envisioned in my head, but it still wasn't quite there. It wasn't until I took a creative writing class that I actually gave myself time to work on this world and style more. I ended up making these portraits to go along with my paper, and I started to really like the palette that I had coming together.

I knew I wanted this world's primary color to be purple, with the accent being mainly yellow/orange, so I made sure to keep those at least as undertones in my drawings. For example, Lenni is a grey tabby cat, so I chose a grey with a purple undertone, so that he didn't look out of place in this world that (design-wise) he clearly belongs in. I also chose to give a purple undertone to Espi's skin color, along with her brown hair. Sometimes undertones are more subtle, but from the very beginning I knew that I wanted the purple undertones in this style to be very noticeable.

That's something that I highly recommend thinking about when wanting to develop a style!! That would probably be my second step. What purpose do you want it to serve? I knew that I needed a style that was 1) simple enough for me to draw over and over 2) interesting enough to carry the story artistically like I wanted it to and 3) be visually different in an eye-catching way. My different iterations of this style I think achieved these goals in varying levels, and I tried to keep track of what things were working towards my goals, and what wasn't.

I also had to make a cover and back cover for my paper, so I used that as an opportunity to explore this style even more, with the introduction of how I wanted to use shading!

I knew I wanted the cover to have striking lighting, but I wasn't super sure how I wanted to go about it. Eventually, I kind of just tried to give up on my perfectionist mindset of "it has to look exactly how I want it to!!" and instead focus on actually drawing something. I've had to keep revisiting this world after long breaks because I was never satisfied with how my drawings were turning out, and in turn, I'd give up for a while. Which is NOT a good work flow LMAO. I do like how this cover looks as a drawing, even though it's just not QUITE what I want. But I'm trying to work on that mentality shift, and it's helped me make a lot more progress in my styles so far.

This is the mock back cover! I was much more satisfied with the shading in this one, and I felt like I was finally finding my footing with that. Now that I've become more comfortable with my line art, color, and shading for this style, I feel like I can finally start experimenting with the fun parts of the style I know I want to include, like sprinkled in pixel textures, etc. I haven't gotten to that part yet though, so we'll see how it goes!!

Besides my story-style, I would say I have two main other styles, being my "normal" style (even that could have different iterations), and my rendered style.

I'm gonna use my most recent drawing as an example for my normal style. In this style, I knew going into it that I had a vague want to explore color more, so that became the thing I decided to experiment most with.

Something I started noticing in my experiments was that I would be generally satisfied with the base colors, only to slap some shading on and not like it anymore.

When this kept happening time and time again, I decided that since I had a concrete goal of improving my colors, I would take a break from shading all together.

This is when I started taking more requests to really work on my understanding and application of color. I wanted to give myself a fun excuse to make lots of drawings of characters, and working until I was happy with how my colors looked. When I was doing this, I was referencing artists where I specifically admired their colors, and using information I gathered from my painting and color analysis classes! I love color and could yap about it for a while so lmk if you want more on my process for that.

After I felt like I had a good grasp on color, I started to tackle shading again. And....I'm still tackling it!!

I love the idea of textured shading and using masks, so I combined those two things for this piece. I think the use of masks worked well, but I'm not satisfied with the rake brush textures I used. I want them to be more noticeable and intentional, so that's the next thing I'm choosing to work on! I'm not abandoning the non-shaded style of my art, especially because I like it so much!!, but I for sure want to continue my process of experimentation and figuring out what purposes I want to achieve.

The other major style I use is my rendered style!

This style obviously is a lotttttt more time consuming, so I don't do it all the time, but it is something that I really enjoy! I use this style mainly for poster-type drawing that I want to make into prints to sell someday! This style is also en exploration of my skills and application of the things I learn in my studio classes! We do a lot of time-intensive realistically rendered drawings in my classes, and I wanted to use that knowledge that I've gained and apply it to my personal art! I can't share a lot of the work I do from class since I draw models and they're nude (they didn't consent to the internet seeing those drawing lol!!) but I can share some self portraits I did!!

These classes really honed my shading skills that I want to work on applying to my personal digital pieces, along with the hatching that I used in these graphite drawings (something that I really grew to love about them!!)

So to wrap things up, I'm still finding my style(s)!! As any good artist is. I focus on experimenting with things that intrigue and inspire me, with artists I look up to as references, and then figure out what I want the style to be and what purposes I want it to serve. I hope this was helpful!! If you have anymore questions please feel free to ask!

[inkcapjester]

hey guys i had so much fun making my drawing tutorial, so if you have any other specific art things yall want me to talk about id be happy to make more tutorials!! i love yapping about art !!!! (obviously, its my major for a reason)