Digital Art Archive - Nadine de Macedo

Put the “Pedal To Metal” and rock!

Nadine — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

“Pedal To Metal” is a good example of lyrics and genres I would have never tried without having some random weird ideas and the right people. Ready for some vintage fun? Here’s your new favourite rock’n’roll song. The idea for “Pedal To Metal” came on a sunny afternoon in 2022 while practising guitar. I slightly modified a standard blues progression and had the strong urge to try rock’n’roll. No idea what made me write lyrics about drinking and driving, but it ended up in some dark humour blues. And I love it. Turning the draft into a full band production took many months. It’s been not easy to find a guitarist who is into rock’n’roll and rockabilly. I am very lucky to have stumbled across Joe Liberty on SoundCloud, who recorded his own ideas on Dragondreams‘ rolling bassline. In comparison to the original write, the song has been speed up and pitched down to match DJ’s sweet spot for the vocals. After recording all the stems, we still missing something. That’s where Mark (that you may recognize from “High Noon”) joined us with a harmonica improvisation. Everybody added their own flavours to the song, so it diverged a bit from the original. But that’s alright, I really love how it turned out. Some happy careless rock’n’roll fun! As usual, you can listen to the song on YouTube and SoundCloud. Lacking of photos and illustrations for cover artwork, I drew my own. Luckily I recorded the process video. It took me 7,5 hours to draw a youngster in the style of a vintage 1950s commercial. The speedpainting is also available on YouTube. Big thanks to the band. I couldn’t have finished this song without you, and you turned my draft into a very cool rock’n’roll song. I’m happy to take a ride with you!

This post Put the “Pedal To Metal” and rock! was published at Nadine de Macedo.

Inventing the Disco Blues

Nadine — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

We accidentally invented a new genre, and it’s hot. Let me tell you about the background story of the “Disco Blues”, which is both a song and a genre. Combining disco music with blues Late January 2022. Everything started with a simple guitar lick and a mail to my Canadian collaboration partner, Garrett Kirby. He convinced me to try some blues, so implemented a common blues progression. Working in a ping pong music collaboration, we exchanged stems and ideas resulting in a song, where both composed and improvised their instruments. In one of these stages, Garry sent me some funky rhythm guitars, that reminded me of the 70s. I had the urge to try a 4-to-the-floor beat. Using an acoustic drum set, it still sounded disco. Garry sent me a groovy bassline, I played the organ and improvised a piano and acoustic guitar solo. The disco blues was born, a combination of blues rock with disco beat and funky basslines, but none of us thought that this combination sounds so rad. What are the distinguishing features of disco blues? What exactly makes a song sound bluesy? Is it the improvisation? The use of 7th chords? A certain progression? There may be plenty of answers, but in this case, I’d say that the blues is hidden in the guitar parts. The disco is in the 4-to-the-floor drumming and the smoothness of the sounds. This genre takes you back to the 70s while sounding the same blues as disco. Being old school is hot right now – Just look at Elton John, who released a top 10 hit with Dua Lipa that brings back the good old 70s. There may be more prominent examples of old school sounding modern. How does it sound like? Right after the composition, we decided to add vocals and asked Michael Karns, who comes from jazz piano music and worked with us on “Going My Way” last year. He tells a story of an interesting encounter in a bar that works well with our 70s feeling. Later, Valerie Cox joined us for background vocals, giving that special blues feeling. Today we released our song on SoundCloud and YouTube. Check it here: It’s cool to invent a new music genre, but it also has to be represented in terms of artwork. We wanted to have a 70s looking cover that reminds both of disco and blues. I dusted off my graphics tablet and drew whatever came into my mind. If you want to take a look into the drawing process, check this speedpainting YouTube video on my channel.

This post Inventing the Disco Blues was published at Nadine de Macedo.

How I found my own drawing style (part 2)

Nadine — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:50:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered, how you find your personal drawing style? In search of my own style, I tried out a lot in between manga and realism; I even tried water colours and digital drawing. Over 20 years after my first attempts on comic illustration, I found my sweet spot in realism, portrait drawing and digital art. Here is how I found my own drawing style. My previous post was dedicated to my dream of becoming a professional mangaka. As stated in the very last sentence, I had to jump two steps back, because I did not get along well with the proportions of manga. My next phase was simplifying the style I had before by leaving out facial expressions. I focussed on outfits, hairdos and the way people act and talk. It helped me a lot to draw faster. Realism meets a fantasy narrative Inspired by high fantasy literature, I created a story questioning today’s society. In 2004, the idea was based on a high fantasy universe and narrative with elves, dragons, knights and magic. With every stroke, I figured out that fantasy was not my thing. I have no idea how mystical creatures move or how to draw magic. Instead, I focused on my main characters and the fantasy story turned into fantastic realism. In contrast to Satoshi, the panels were in western reading direction. Looking back, I’ve drawn too many panels on one site. Squared A4 paper was not the best idea to start a comic. I used watercolour pencils, but they did not paint over the squares. Therefore, scanning this comic has been a mess. I gave up this comic after 3 volumes with 20 pages each. The story has been too long for a comic or graphic novel anyway. I could have filled 50 volumes, so turning it into a novel was better. Today, this novel is about 1200 pages long and still in progress. I don’t tell the title here, because you’ll hear from it as soon as the book takes shape. Be Yourself: Colour pencils on blank paper Learning from the past, my next comic Be Yourself has been drawn on blank paper. It pays, cause this graphic novel has been exhibited and printed in the year 2005. Be Yourself consists of 150 DIN A4 pages and is drawn in the same style as the predecessor. My own style is a kind of simple semi-realism with less contrast. But when we gave it to print, we had real issues with the colour pencils. Be Yourself tells the story of a young, talented musician, who changed his image to become famous. It’s a story about the rise and fall of a fictive gothic rock band. Switching to digital drawing I was really disappointed after seeing the results of my printing, so I searched for a better way to illustrate and make it printer friendly. Somebody on Deviant art told me, that digital drawing is the way to go. This is my first drawing I did with a mouse. The print has been awesome, so I invested in a graphics tablet. If you’re used to drawing with pencil, pen and paper, digital drawing is a bit difficult in the beginning. Your hands are completely disconnected to the picture, since it is displayed on your monitor. It took me years until my digital artwork was on the same level as my drawing. Indiepedent: Youth novels and sub cultures In 2008, I drew another comic called Indiependent. It’s a successor of Be Yourself dealing with music business, sub cultures and youth. In contrast to Be Yourself, which I’d rather call a drama, Indiependent is a comedy. Thus, the narrator of the story is not Matt, but his best friend Alex, who is still a teenager. I’ve translated these two pages for you, to have an idea about the humour. Translation left page: Alex: "Hi." (super annoyed) Jessy: "Alex, can you please bring me to school? I've come all the way here…" Alex: "(Take the keys) drive for yourself!" Keys of the car drop into the drain. Translation right page: Dom: "Hey, do you like my new outfit?" Rob: "Super cool. You may need some sharp items, strikes, khol kajal pencils, piercings, tattoos and an onion." Dom: "I can do that, but… why onions?!" Gary: "Bingo, Emos cry without onions as well!" Dom: "Nobody loves me!" (crying) Gary: "It's said and done, haha!" Damien: "Thanks mates. This daft bawheid gets boring. Btw, where's my dout?!" Comment: Part of this scene is in English because there are British exchange students who barely speak German. This time, I drew my comic with a HB, 3B and 6B pencil. I figured out, that drawing large size portraits is easier if you use a soft pencil. If you’re interested in this topic, I forward you to this blogpost, where I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these tools. My own style of drawing adapted once again. With bigger images, I was able to draw facial expressions more easily. Colouring 4 pages took so much time, that I didn’t finish. My style of drawing is too complex to finish my comic during my lifespan. I still love to see my comic finished in full colour, but I can’t. Who would love to read a comic about subcultures who do not exist any more? I’d continue on that project, if I knew how. Saving time with illustrations instead of comics During my studies, I did not have enough time to draw comics. So I started writing novels instead. I missed drawing so much, that I illustrated nearly all important scenes and characters. In 2012 my quality of digital drawing was good enough to present my first artworks. I did not find my own drawing style in digital illustration yet. Vector art – Abstract ways of realism The deeper I got into digital art and illustration, the more I got to know the huge toolbox. Just imagine all that possibilities with brushed looking like textures! Still lacking of time and patience, I came across vector art. Fewer colours, fewer lines, should be easier, I thought. But it ain’t, because you really have to find the right lines to portray a character. My first real vector art has been in 2008, where I participated in a T-Shirt design contest for the Australian electro pop band Cut Copy. From the technical point of view, vector art and pixel art are completely different approaches. Pixel art consists saves colour information and each pixel, whereas vectors consist of lines and dots with relative coordinates. Vectors scale up with large image sizes, which is not possible with pixel art. The drawing technique is completely different too, because you have to work with Bézier curves and avoid intersections. Getting this right was too much effort, so that I moved back to raster art, but kept the artistic look. It is a tough job to draw a character with a handful of lines and shades, but I really love this rather minimalistic and still realistic style. Here you can see the same person drawn in a more realistic way. This image took me 20 hours, whereas the vector like illustration was done in 1.5 hours. I have to think a lot about the most relevant traits. Stunning, how my art developed in over 20 years! If you compare the results with my ideas around 2001, you can still see some traits there. I like realism, but it takes too much time. Basically, all I longed for is an easier and faster way to draw people but preserving realistic features. Tomorrow: Concept art? If I had all the time in the world, I’d deep dive into concept art and matte painting. I am a big fan of realistic drawings of nature and characters. They are quite sketch like but super realistic, because they are not so precise in detail, but in light and shade. It’s a long way to get there, and I am not good at drawing architecture and nature. Concept art is a lot about perception and not about detail. It’s quite the opposite of the art I’m doing right now, though some of my paintings are related to concept art. When I started drawing, I did not think about using a computer and, yes, even liking it more than canvas and paper. Hopefully, this post keeps you motivated to try new things, jump out of your comfort things, explore new realms and get inspired. Do not insist on finding your own style, something that develops after years. Do what is comfy for you, what feels right, and it appears out of a sudden. I do not know if my future art will still be related to realism and vector art like it’s now. Who knows what I’d like to do next? Which kind of art did you try? How would you describe your style?

This post How I found my own drawing style (part 2) was published at Nadine de Macedo.

How I found my own drawing style (part 1)

Nadine — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 11:03:00 +0000

Most artists and illustrators find their personal drawing style after a long time. I’ve tried manga, naturalism, still lives, portraits, and it took me more than 20 years to realize which kind of art, style and tools work best for me. Finding your own drawing style is an ongoing process you can only establish the more you try. In this and the next blog post, I will guide you through my milestones and stylistic changes. Let’s take a look in my very beginnings. Drawing instead of kneading Looking back, it’s important to try as many techniques and styles of art as possible. Don’t give up, if you don’t like to draw, because art has so many approaches and one of them may work for you. Drawing and sketching needs spatial imagination, whereas sculpturing needs haptic and perception. I am happy that I have been able to try lots of different things in my school classes. I worked with papier mâché, charcoal, pastel chalk, clay, acrylic paint and textiles. After some years, I figured out, that I loved drawing and sketching whereas everything connected with kneading, tailoring and crafting was not my thing. My first comic has been a manga Inspired by anime and manga, I drew a manga at the age of 10. It’s a fan fiction comic consisting of 18 volumes à 30 DIN A4 pages. Stylistically I’d call it a shōnen manga, because it is for a rather male and young audience with strong heroes and lots of action. The plot was very unstructured, and the drawings were not my best, but my classmates enjoyed it very much. Drawing comics, I learned a lot about drawing the same characters in different positions. Representative for all my whole comic, I show an illustration of Mei-Ling Li, a character from Cardcaptor Sakura (link goes to Wikipedia). As this comic has been a crossover, her outfit is inspired by Dragon Ball Z. Developing an own style from fan fiction manga 2001 I drew another comic called Satoshi. It’s been 9 volumes with 30 DIN A4 pages. The protagonist Satoshi is a hen-pecked young man who gets to know real heroes. It is a multi universe fan fiction with lots of characters from other series. Copying them was really hard, because they were so many styles of drawing like shoujo manga, Marvel, DC Comics and even some European approaches. I figured out that I was not able to draw all of these, but I did not think about establishing a new style. The more I drew, the less Satoshi played a role in this comic. My side characters were more interesting, and I invented new ones. Mixing manga-like soft shading but keeping realistic proportions, I found my own drawing style. You can still find these in today’s work. I’d really love to show you this comic, but I am not able to scan these because the volumes are tied together. I found an illustration from the year 2002, where I drew Jack and Aqua, two original main characters, who were responsible for the mixing of the universes. Satoshi has been a milestone, because it is my first comic with a plot, and it opened my gate to find my own drawing style. Why I never became a mangaka In the early 2000s, everybody read or drew manga. Germany had a quite big community of mangaka (manga drawers), so I thought a lot about joining them and become an illustrator. In 2003, I started my own manga with own characters and plot. To increase my chances, I started this project in Japanese reading direction (right to left, top to bottom) and Japanese comic format. I bought some special drawing pens, good pencils, an art rubber and even screentones. The main challenge has been setting up the panels in a reading direction I was not used to. Right after, I had troubles sticking to manga proportions, especially facial expressions. Even after two weeks of practise, I was not able to draw my main character by heart. I underestimated inking with real ink. The thinner the pen, the less control you have about the stroke. I loved harder pens, but they destroyed the paper. Too bad, I did not know about pigment ink, I may have tried it for a longer time. After drawing, inking and screen toning four pages and two full coloured illustrations, I gave up my dream of becoming a mangaka. I did not go along well with this style and narration, so I jumped back. Finding your own drawing style can be a tough nut to crack. In my next post, I will show you my milestones and ideas after 2004. Let read, how I came to digital drawing and why my drawing style does not have a name. Did you expect that I came originally from manga? How did you start, and where are you now?

This post How I found my own drawing style (part 1) was published at Nadine de Macedo.

How to draw a check shirt

Nadine — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 17:43:00 +0000

Right after posting the cover of The Verge single “Back In Town” somebody asked me on Instagram, how to draw a check shirt. Since it will take a while until my speed painting is ready, I’d like to sketch how to draw plaids, tartan and stuff. While reading this post, you may also learn, why check shirts are so important in rock music and why these patterns are quite hard to draw. Why do so many rock stars wear check shirts? First, you may notice that there are plenty of patterns which are spread all over the music scene. While analysing the type of check shirts, you can find out which music is performed by these bands. Tartan is widely spread in the British punk rock scene, whereas American and Canadian emo core and metal core bands wear black-white or black-red plaids. You can also see black-white plaids in the ska punk scene, especially in combination with vivid colours like green or yellow. Lumberjack shirts were typically worn in the 90s grunge scene, but there are plenty of post grunge bands, who seem to like them too. The internet band The Verge titles herself as an alternative rock band. We have a diversified musical background, but you can hear the influences of grunge and punk in our music. Therefore, the young man on the cover of our current single “Back In Town” had to wear a check shirt. Though “Back In Town” is a skate punk song, I have decided to draw him in a grunge outfit. The reason for this was the colour of our logo. The muted greenish olive colour is made for plaids. As some of you may already have noticed, the cover illustrations of The Verge singles are deeply connected to the lyrics. I have made a video of the process on YouTube, where you can see how I draw the check shirts. Analysing lumberjack plaids How to draw a typical lumberjack plaid or check shirt? Many attempts have been made to understand the typical pattern of a flannel check shirt. Having a closer look into this pattern, you may notice, that it consists of two patterns. There are coarse plaids and finer plaids inside them. You need different colours, different line thicknesses and lots of layers to draw plaids. It is best to give each line and colour a new layer. To draw a check shirt, I had a closer look onto my own flannel check shirt and analyse the plaids. The thickest line is not a thick thread, but a special hatching. You can construct it by using several tilted parallel lines either in black or grey. I used a digital brush for sketching and hatching, modified it a bit and draw the main lines. The best way to achieve a 3D effect is to visualize the body as mesh. Now the drawing looks like this: Two kinds of plaids In the second step, we can subdivide the checks into segments of four. The lumberjack check shirts look way more appealing, if you draw two different colours for either vertical and horizontal lines. In my honest opinion, the best choices for line colours are black, grey, dark blue, dark green, dark red and brown. As I decided this plaid to be olive, one of the lines is dark grey and the other dark blue. We have finished drawing all lines. The best trick to set these, is to switch the layer mode to multiply and pushing all the line layers to the top. You can play around with the opacity. Please note, that any colouring layer will be under all these multiply line layers. Use multiply layer effect for a realistic looking plaid pattern Drawing and colouring all these checks can be quite confusing. Don’t think too much about checks, try to see stripes instead. First, I colour the horizontal stripes. One row olive, the other in a muted beige. You can use the colour you like as long as it is mildly unsaturated and not too dark. The colours you choose should work well together, because they build the fundament of the check shirt. It is very important to follow the lines and to think about details when drawing a check shirt. How many stripes are missed, if the sleeves are rolled up? Is the shirt neatly buttoned? Depending on the scene, it can also happen, that you see parts of the backside. The pattern has to be consistent. I also use this step to fill in some shading. Now, I hide the horizontal stripes to concentrate on the vertical stripes. I add a new multiplication layer on top of the horizontal stripes and fill in a new colour. This one should be mildly saturated and not too dark. Choose a colour which has a slightly different hue and it not completely complementary. I’ve chosen the greyish green tone of our logo. Magic happens, if you set the transparency to something in between 30% and 70%. Make the horizontal stripes visible again. Due to the multiplication effect, the colours on the vertical layer will be added on top of the other colours. This trick does not work, if you’ve chosen a very light and very saturated colour, since white is neutral to multiplication. Now it’s time to play around with opacity until the check shirt looks nice to you. That’s what the illustration looks like after finishing the plaids. I hope that you got some idea, how to draw check shirts and plaids. You can save a lot of time, if you see a plaid as a layered combination of different stripes. This is only one kind of plaids. The subdivision of the lines may vary. If you want to draw classic tartan, you may subdivide one check into three lines, these three line once again while leaving some of them untouched. It’s best to download pictures of clothing and analyse the divisions and colours. The idea of separating lines and colour layers stays the same. Why screen tones are not the best way to draw checks and plaids If you came from Manga or Graphic Novels, you may be used to screen tones. These are transparent self-glueing foils with printed patterns. Many mangaka and illustrators use them to save time. This is a nice technique, if you glue these foils onto flat backgrounds and rigid objects. Using screen tones on clothing and curved objects may end crucial, since screen tones do not follow the curvature of the object. So don’t try to use these foils on living and complex objects, or use irregular and abstract patterns instead. How do you draw plaids?

This post How to draw a check shirt was published at Nadine de Macedo.