Vector Art Archive - 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 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.