Illustration Archive - Nadine de Macedo

Inktober – 31 illustrations on 31 days

Nadine — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:43:16 +0000

First time I heard about Inktober has been 2 years ago. It’s an online event where illustrators draw 31 pictures to 31 prompts. It’s open for everyone, and if you tag your pictures properly, you can get in touch with other artists on social media. I wanted to participate last year, but my head has been so deep into music, that I barely had the patience to draw any trace on a sheet of paper. This year the timing has been excellent as I just released my album and needed a musical break. It’s been the first time participating on Inktober. Roughly 3 weeks before the festival, you can read all prompts on the website. I must admit, that I have been overwhelmed and puzzled by most words, but 10 illustrations popped into my mind quite quickly. Soon I realised that I cannot force myself to draw everyday or draw every prompt, but I did my best. Originally, Inktober wants you to draw with ink, but it’s not my favourite way to paint. Instead, I decided to draw only the prompts that spoke to me and dust off my watercolours that I haven’t touched for 20 years. It took me a while to remember how to use them, but I had a lot of fun. I loved scrolling through the hashtags and see how different people interpretated the promopts. All in all, Inktober has been a nice experiment, though I didn’t paint 31 pictures. I found some new strengths and weaknesses. For example, drawing animals and colour gradients were super tough, while I discovered my love for drawing food. I may participate in figure, but only under the condition of (a) picking a medium of choice and (b) don’t draw all 31 pictures. For now, you can see my illustrations only on Instagram. Maybe I find the time to scan the best of them and upload onto my website. Did you participate?

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Why a 6B pencil rocks

Nadine — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 14:44:00 +0000

Every illustrator has his or her favourite tools. Mine is a 6B pencil, for sure. Read in this blogpost what is so special about a 6B pencil and why you have to understand the hardness scales to optimize your results. You may know an HB pencil from school. They are good for writing. I’ve drawn about 200 pages of comics with a common pencil until I bought a mechanical pencil. Still, I worked with HD mines for years. I loved the sharp lines and I had more control in comparison to a common pencil. I learned the downside while colouring. Whenever I worked with a mechanical pencil, one could clearly see the pressure I worked with. I read some articles on pencil hardness scales and tried different kinds of tools. After some years, I came to the result, that mechanical pencils are only good for small and detailed drawings. Here you can see a sketch on my DARK portrait of Jonas and Martha. The whole sketch is on A4 paper, so the details are quite small. I could not draw this with a common pencil – but I don’t enjoy drawing with mechanical pencils. The pencil hardness scale Reading a lot about art and sketching, I tried lots of techniques e.g. charcoal or cross-hatching. I figured out that one cannot do cross-hatching or shading with all kinds of hardness. The pencil hardness scale goes from 8H (hard) to 8B (soft / black). If you want to draw with a H mine, you have to press quite hard onto the paper. B mines are way software and darker, but they can easily be smudged. I still don’t own the whole pencil hardness scale, since I was not able to spot the difference of 7B to 8B or HB to F. I figured out that I was not able to work with harder pencils than 3H. The lines just disappeared. All in all, I own four different pencils: HB, 3B, 6B and 8B. You can see those in my photograph above. Which hardness is made for what purpose? As said before, F, HB and B are good for writing. But since I don’t like to write with pencils at all, I barely use them. Therefore, 3B became a sort of all-rounder. I really like this hardness for rather small, postcard-scales drawings. I figured out that my pictures become larger the softer and broader my pencils are. 6B is perfect for me. The lines are about 2-3 mm thick which leads to portraits about the size of a hand. I need only a couple of traces to portray somebody. With a 6B pencil I have full control about darkness and pressure. I only use 8B if I plan illustrations that will be printed bigger than A4. Some artists told me, that they also like H pencils, because they have thin and precise lines. They use them for details. But I don’t use any hard pencils at all. I guess they are best for technical drawings. Why you should try out a 6B pencil The thing I like the most about that 6B pencil is its versatility. I can draw bold and thin lines and I can use it for cross-hatching or shading. In comparison to other degrees of hardness I feel like I have the best control with it. I don’t have to think too much about smudging the lines, which is one of the biggest downsides of the 8B pencil. You can still use a common rubber, though I prefer foam rubbers or art erasers. If you’re quite new to drawing, you should try different degrees of hardness. You don’t need all 18 of them, but maybe a few B and a few H just to have an impression. I guess you only need the full set as a professional landscape and portrait painter. I only need three or four different degrees of pencil hardness, but I use them wisely. What is your favourite pencil?

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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?

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Jaime Lannister on the Iron Throne

Nadine — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 18:15:00 +0000

[Advertising] Who has watched Game of Thrones? Have you already seen my speedpainting fan art of Jaime Lannister sitting on the Iron Throne? Well, the original video was 8 hours long, but after editing it sized down to 6 minutes. This short amount of time is not sufficient for explaining how this drawing was created. So let me discuss it here. Finding appropriate references Jaime Lannister is a proud swordsman of the royal guard, but he is also called the kingslayer. It was quite obvious, that I had to draw him sitting on the Iron Throne, after a good friend of mine requested a poster of him. My illustration shows the version of the TV series, where Jaime Lannister is portrayed by the Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. My references were the first season as DVD and lots of pictures of the actor. Inking the pencil sketch digitally It’s a pity, that I lost my pencil sketch of my fan art of Jaime Lannister. I hope that my digitally inked version is good enough to get an impression of the composition and outlines. The lines were digitally inked with a Japanese graphics software called Paint Tool SAI. I found out, that this software is able to rotate the canvas. This is a very nice feature, if you want to avoid drawing all the swords, which were melted into the Iron Throne. Speaking of these, I did not draw them exactly as on the template. For recognizing the Iron Throne it is essential to catch the composition and the shades. I ensured, that the raven is sitting on the right place and that different types of swords were drawn. The thing, I like the most in this graphics software is the very sharp and precise inking pen. The picture likes look like they were drawn with real ink. After preparing the background, I made a sketch of Jaime Lannister. I didn’t care much about his facial expression, because I will redraw it anyway. Painting the background I switched to another software. The outline is imported as the topmost layer. I set the layer mode to multiply. The background was filled in several shades of grey and bright light scales of yellow. With this, I create the impression of a sunlit cellar. Besides, I have added colourful random noise and distortion. The background looks a bit rougher now. Drawing the Iron Throne If you came from traditional art, you may know, that it best practise to paint the background first. After drawing the backmost layer, you work your way to the front. My second layer contains the Iron Throne. Of course, I did not have the patience to draw all these swords. I just filled in some shades of grey corresponding the DVD cover image. Here and then, some lighter or darker shades were thrown in. Nevertheless, it took some time to finish the iron throne. Fan Art of Jaime Lannister Jaime Lannister is drawn on another layer of my fan art. I started with his face and worked my way down. I did not go much into detail, because it is better to catch the whole impression. You can do this by analysing the colour hues and shapes. How to draw realistic portraits? Thick black lines make portraits look like comics. Therefore, after each step or layer of colour, I increase the transparency of my outlines. My aim is to recreate the image without using the outlines. It is very important, that you avoid using black, because it looks unrealistic. Try other colours, which give you the same feel, and do not think too much about finding the perfect hue. While mixing colours, I always pick some tones of my surroundings. Jaime’s blonde hair is shaded with the same shade of olive which I used for his armour. I highlight with yellowish tones, because they look more sunlit. How to draw antique gold How do you make the colour gold? Well, gold is not a colour, it is an illusion. My experience has shown, that gold cannot be drawn with yellow. For the antique gold colour of the armour, I took olive. It looks like brass or gold, if its reflection looks metallic. You can achieve this by using hard contrasts and saturated colours. The more colours are mirrored, the shinier it looks. How to draw a sword realistically? During the years, I developed a technique for drawing swords and knives. The blade looks sharper, when you use the selection tool and draw inside your selection with very broad and diffuse brushes. The main colour of the blade is grey, but I work a lot with surrounding colours. This creates a mirror effect. Drawing the ornaments on the armour I do not like drawing ornaments, but it is important for showing the wealth of a Lannister. The ornaments were drawn on another layer. I do not care much about the details, I just figure out the shape and patterns. As the armour consists of metal, I use hard contrasts. The box beneath the throne If I didn’t have owned the DVD, I would have never noticed that the box beneath the throne is made of wood. At least, the texture and the planks looks like it were so. I did not use any textures, since the planks have a very distinct form. Drawing the cape In my fan art the cape layer is located in between the Iron Throne and Jaime. It is made of soft textile, therefore I use unsaturated colours and less contrast. The textile does not mirror the surroundings. Using light effects The painting could have been finished by now, but to give it something extraordinary, I decided to apply light effects. Two additional layers were created. One in the addition or negative multiply mode, the other one in expose mode. Understanding these layer modes is not that simple, but they show the best effect, when used with broad soft brushes and light saturated colours. I also use blur these layers heavily. How to draw reflections I love digital art for working out new tricks and hints. For the mirror effect on the ground, I just made a screenshot, flipped and deformed it. You can play around with effects to make it even more realistic. This saves a lot of time! Realistic portraits take a lot of time and effort If you want to take a closer look into the process, visit my YouTube account or click onto this picture: Drawing realistic portraits is more about light, reflection and texture then about exactness. I haven’t used any texture for this fan art of Jaime Lannister. I hope that you have learned some tricks of digital art. You can also visit my digital art gallery for similar artworks. P.S. I do not make money by naming series, products or labels. This post contains my personal opinion and experience.

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Dark Fan Art – From Comic to Realism

Nadine — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 10:04:00 +0000

[Advertisement] Have you ever failed drawing a realistic digital portrait? I bet you did. Drawing realism is hard. But here is something, that may embolden you: It is more about observing nature and light than matching the exact shapes and details. In this post I will turn a comic-like illustration of Dark characters Jonas and Martha to a realistic portrait. In my previous post, you gained some insight in my ideas and concepts of my fan art of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen from the Netflix series Dark. This follow-up will give you hints on realistic digital portraits based on a comic-like or vector illustration. How to draw light, shades and reflexions realistically Here is the point of this digital portrait painting tutorial:What makes a digital portrait realistic?Is it about the details? The textures? I think both, but in my honest opinion catching light is the essential thing to go for, if you’re talking of naturalism and realism. Colours are not absolute. There is no blue, black or red without the impact of light. Try to imagine colours as a blend of basic colours, shade, reflexions and light. Do not try to match the exact colour – catch the impression. Form and texture will follow automatically. After some years of observation, I finally found a scheme that worked. I do not know if this is correct, but it’s the way I work today. direct lightAreas, on which the light shines directly, are shaded in light unsaturated colours. The brighter the light, the more saturated the area. You can observe this on the jacket and the thumb. direct reflexionI use bright saturated colours on areas with direct reflexion. You can see this on the tip of the nose or the highlights in the eyes. These look so bright, because they are surrounded by less saturated colours. indirect reflexion of a gleaming sourceWhile shading these areas, I mix a highly saturated colour of the indirect light source. The apricot tone of the cheek is a good example here. You can also see this effect on the bottom of the hand, which is illuminated by the yellow jacket. shade and indirect lightYou can paint a scene in indirect light with unsaturated colours. Shades will be in greyish or taupe undertones. In this picture, the light simulation is quite complicated and intense. Therefore, I tend using complimentary colours for shading. Just watch the neck which is shaded in violet. At first sight this sounds complicated and poetic. Just give it a try! Take a photo, analyse the light sources and spot them. After some time you may see light blue spots on faces and olive tones in shades. If not, you may visit an exhibition of impressionistic art. Impressionists work a lot with the impression of light and overemphasize them. Turning an outline into a comic artwork One of the first steps in drawing illustrations or comics is drawing a neat outline. You may be tempted to fill in your colours here, but wait. It took me some years to understand, that this is actually a bad idea, if you want your artwork to look realistic. A coloured version of an outlined sketch always looks like a comic or vector illustration. In most cases your neat outline is not good enough for a realistic digital portrait. Proportions are perceived differently when coloured. It would be a waste of time to correct the outlines and the colours. Therefore, I prefer finishing the comic sketch first, before putting any effort to make it as realistic as possible. This is how the artwork looks like after colouring it in a simple way. Taking the right pencils for a vector like illustration In comic-like or vector-like illustrations, one uses other pens and brushes then in realistic or naturalistic drawings. I paint outlines with a hard brush that scales with pressure. Please do not link the pressure sensor to the opacity. While colouring in, I use nearly the same brush! I achieve the comic-like or vector-like style by using only two to three shades of each colour. I do not mix colours, I pick them from the colour wheel. Lighter shades are taken by shifting the colour to the top and to the left – For darker shades, I shift my base colour to the bottom and to the right. In this way, I gently play around with saturation. I do not change the hue! You can follow all steps in my YouTube tutorial on digital art or in my last blogpost. Honestly, my way of colouring is a bit unconventional. Professional illustrators tend to shade a picture in greyscales first before fitting in colours. I do not care how you draw and colour your images. It’s the result that counts. Let us conclude, why this way of drawing reminds us of comics: The picture has black inked outlines We use only a few colours The colours do not reflect the surroundings The shades are either high saturated or greyish How to turn a comic drawing into a realistic digital portrait It took some years to understand, that drawing realism has nothing to do with details. As I said before, one should focus on the use of light, shade and reflexion. Did you know, that you only need some strokes to make an object look wooden? Neither you don’t have to draw every single hair to catch the impression of hair! How do you digitally paint a portrait? First, we need to inverse the steps I mentioned above: Remove the black inked outlines Use more colours Mirror the surroundings depending on the texture Use shades and textures wisely Step 1: Soft shades I start with my comic version of Jonas Kahnwald. By applying a large soft brush with 50% opacity, you can smudge out the edges and create softer shades. I usually mix colours of adjacent areas. Just look onto the cheeks, that is the effect I want to achieve. Step 2: Remove inked outlines We move to the hardest part of the digital portrait: Removing the harsh outlines. First, I reduce the opacity of my ink layer to something like 20%. Then, I redraw the layers behind the digital ink. I recreate these outlines without using black or any other harsh colour. Use brown, taupe or greyish shades instead. Afterwards I reduce the opacity and recreate the outlines once again. Repeat until the outlines disappear. The best way to achieve realistic edges is to draw the base a soft brush. Then, I take a darker or lighter colour and sharpen the brush by changing its diameter. The smaller the brush and the higher the contrast, the sharper the edges. You need sharp edges when drawing eyes and ears. It takes some time, until you find the relation that works best for you. It has a lot to do with the age of the people you are portraying. The younger, the softer brushes are used. While working on a realistic portrait NEVER use black and white. Experiment with colours, blend in soft browns, greys or taupes. Work with different hues and saturation. There are plenty of colours which can look black or white without being exact black or white. Step 3: Edges, edges, edges… In my honest opinion, realistic portraying is all about defining edges and light. In this step I have focussed on the eyes. Try to get these edges properly! The eyebrows were drawn with a small sharp pen. When drawing hair is important to follow the natural direction of growth. Step 4: How to draw hair digitally Before drawing hair, I create a new layer. I draw plenty of dabs in different colours. Gaussian Blur is perfect for blending colours. You can already see the effect on the picture before. Here comes my new trick on drawing hair digitally: I use the smudge finger tool. Wait, what?! You can overlay the smudge finger tool with a hair brush. This is a special brush tip that consists of points with different opacity and diameter. I smudge my blurred area in the growth direction of the hair – et voilá This works fairly well with straight, soft and wavy hair – As long as do not cross paths. It’s a very simple technique! Step 5: Adding plenty of light effects Maybe the result of step 4 looks realistic enough to you. Since Jonas is holding a light emitting metal sphere in his hand (and he’s also wearing a yellow rain coat!), we have to add lots of reflexions. I use a brush with low opacity and high saturation. I share everything yellow and orange, which is close to the light source. Now, the digital portrait of Jonas Kahnwald looks like this. You don’t have to see the rest of the picture to understand that there might be an intense source of light in the bottom. Step 6: Once again soft shades It is time to redraw the digital portrait of Martha Nielsen. Drawing her was really tough, because of her hairdo. We repeat all steps we did on Jonas’ digital portrait starting with adding soft shades. After quite a while my picture of Martha looks like this: Step 7: Try once again! The second step of my drawing tutorial, is to turn the outlines into realistic edges. After two hours of work, this looks quite okay, but this isn’t Martha. Sometimes it is better to open up a new layer and to redraw everything after some days. If you watched the video, you may have noticed, that I mirrored the image quite a few times. It really helps to spot the mistakes. Another hint: Finish the skin before drawing hair. Draw hair on another layer. Otherwise, it will be difficult to correct the hairdo. You will not draw these eyes once again, right? Step 8: Drawing plenty of hair Some days after, my second try of the digital portrait of Martha Nielsen looked way better. I focussed on her nose and the chin. Drawing her hair was really tough. Though using the smudge finger technique of the previous step, it took me hours. Her bangs were hard to draw, but I figured out that the selection tool can be used like a pair of scissors. Step 9: Softening the textures The result of step 8 does fairly well, but I do not like these hard strokes in her face. Therefore, I use a soft large brush with low opacity to even out the skin texture. My digital portrait of Martha Nielsen is done. Have you noticed something? I haven’t used any textures. You don’t have to use textures, when light and shades are well one. Textile can be easily drawn by studying folds. Drawing hair is mainly about catching reflections. The only “texture” I used is a hair brush. I would have been able to draw this picture without it, but it would take twice the time. Besides, the hair brush is a nice tool to draw jeans. Here is the finished fan art of Dark In total, drawing this fan art of Martha Nielsen and Jonas Kahnwald took about 15 hours. Do you like the digital portrait? Bonus: How to make draw a glowing antique metal sphere Speaking of tutorials, I found a nice way to draw an antique metal sphere with less effort. Photoshop has an oval selection tool. By pressing CTRL it can be used as a round selection tool. Just fill the selection with plenty of colours in between yellow, olive and brown. The more greyish and olive hues you use, the more antique it looks. I also added the yellow tone of the jacket to it. Gaussian Blur will do the rest for you, if you don’t leave the selection! How do I make it glow? Well, I just made a new layer with a layer style. In Photoshop there is an option called outer glow. Pick an orangey colour and set the width. Now you draw white lines into the layer –...

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