Painting 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?

This post Inktober – 31 illustrations on 31 days 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.

Dark Fan Art Jonas and Martha

Nadine — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 14:14:00 +0000

[Advertising] After watching the third season of Dark on Netflix, I had to draw a fan art of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen. In this post, I will present my artwork and tell, why Dark is a science fiction series I will never forget. Good reasons why you should watch the science fiction series Dark If you haven’t heard about this realistic science fiction series Dark, it is time to catch up. Dark is one of the best series I ever watched, because it works without spaceships, aliens and supernatural powers. While watching the first episodes, one might think that this story is going to be a mystery thriller or crime. But this is definitely not the case. Dark is about the mysterious disappearance of children in a German small town called Winden. Episode after episode, the circumstances become weirder. It seems like everyone in Winden is hiding secrets. The story is complex, because it takes place in several epochs with dozens of protagonists. Dark is the kind of story, I was missing on TV for a long time. This is the reason, why I had to show my appreciation by drawing a fan art. Symmetry as a leifmotif in Dark Some people might have noticed, that Dark works a lot with visual effects. If you haven’t noticed it yet, think about the kaleidoscope effect in the trailer. Symmetry is a main motive in this series. I picked up that theme by arranging the protagonists symmetrically. Even the pockets and the seams of the yellow rain coat are in perfect symmetry. Martha and Jonas stand divide the circle into a golden section. In my coloured version, you can see that the dark sky is drawn in the complimentary colour of the iconic yellow raincoat building the perfect contrast to the foreground. You can enlarge or scroll through the drawings by clicking them. Reference pictures of Matha and Jonas Before drawing this fan art of Jonas and Martha, I had to collect plenty of reference pictures of the series Dark. I used a lot of photos of the main actors Louis Hofmann and Lisa Vicari. Another source was the Internet Movie Database for screenshots and trailers of the series. I also searched for reviews and insights. Though drawing a comic sketch, it was very important to me, to match the expressions, hairdos and traits of each character. My main source for drawing Jonas’ iconic yellow jacket were online shops with similar pieces of clothing. On my YouTube channel you can watch me draw the outlines. Just click on the picture below. Digital Vector Art Before drawing this fan art of Dark, I did not decide whether it should be a realistic or comic like portrait of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen. Therefore I drew both. Recently, I had a lot of fun with drawing vector-like illustrations. I think it’s because they don’t take so much time. Only by drawing a few strikes, you can characterize the person sufficiently. For each basic colour you choose only two to three shades lighter or darker. I call this style pseudo vector art. Technically these aren’t vector images, but rasterized images. Due to the reduced colour depth, they look like vector images. How to generate a background After a couple of years of photo manipulation, my hard work paid off. I was able to generate this background in less than thirty minutes. Instead of drawing the nightly sky, I just used a colour gradient tool. Either, I did not draw the sphere in the background. It’s just the result of the elliptical selection tool, a large blurred out pen and some wave filters. Adding the transparency to that sphere was not the biggest deal. You can use an alpha channel mask and modify it via grey tones. The spruces in the background are made with a special brush or stamp, which I collected some years ago at Deviant Art. These are commonly used for photo manipulation. How to draw digital light effects digitally There are at least two ways to implement a glow effect into the sphere in the background. You can clone that sphere layer, fill it with white colour and use the Gaussian Blur. Another way is to select the area outside the sphere layer. By choosing a soft wide brush, you can draw the glow manually. Let Gaussian Blur do the rest for you. The sparkles above the metallic spheres were drawn with a haystack brush. If you don’t have one, you can quickly improvise by drawing a pin and setting the scatter parameter to the max. The dodge and burn tools are designed for making things glow, but they only work if used on slightly desaturated colours. You can intensify the light effects by showing the impact of light as a reflexion on skin, hair and clothing. I increase the saturation of all surfaces that point to the source of light. Gently tilted surfaces are mixed with an apricot colour. The yellow reflexions of the rain coat hit hair and skin. Since the colour of the jacket is quite intense, you can exaggerate the yellowish undertone on the skin. From October 9th on, you can watch the second part of the tutorial on my YouTube channel. 2,5 hours would be way too long for a YouTube video. Therefore, my coloured version of this fan art will be presented at ten times the speed. I hope you learned something on digital art while reading this post. Have you enjoyed my Dark fan art on Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen? Have you already seen Dark? Do you have recommendations for realistic science fiction novels or series? Please comment, if you know some novels or series like Dark. I am searching for realistic science fiction stories some month, but I did not find any. Our libraries are filled with space operas, military science fiction and young adult dystopias. Sometimes I like reading those too, but I miss the science inside science fiction and a bit of day to day conversation. Today’s novels are more about thrill, sense of wonder and exaggeration. Since I’m finished with my science fiction classics of the 30s and 60s I need some interesting books or series. I also like to find some stories which are related to my realistic soft science fiction writings. I read stories in German and English both. Thank you in advance! P.S. This article had to be tagged as advertising, because it’s about a Netflix series. I do not make money or gain any reward by naming the series, the characters or online offers. This post is about my personal experience with this series combining it with my artwork.

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