Beginner 39;s Guide To Sketching Pdf

[Semarias Alfna]

Thecharacteristics of the cast shadow are dependent on the intensity of the light source. A hard light will produce a cast shadow with a sharp edge, a soft light will produce a cast shadow with a more blurry edge.

The longer the cast shadow is from the object, the softer the edge of the shadow becomes. Notice how the cast shadow is darkest right underneath the sphere and then it gets lighter and lighter as it goes out further away from the light source.

Also a cast shadow behaves predictability when on a flat surface, but when there are other levels or surfaces in the shadows path, the shape can be altered depending on the surface over which it falls.

Once you understand the basics of how light behaves, it is quite encouraging to think that a small amount of information can give you the knowledge needed to convincingly portray the illusion of form with any subject.

Hi Sue, great have you onboard. So pleased you found the article easy to follow. Lighting can get a bit technical at times but can be so helpful to you painting success. Really hope this lesson can help you to achieve a painting you can be proud of!

Hello Wiil,

Your sphere has a very immediate weight and presence, which I am enjoying looking at. It is so good!! I shall give it a try as well. Appreciate your explanation of the light. Thank you!

Lynne

So please you found the article to be timely for you, the added complication of textures can appear to take away from the smooth sides of an object, but as long as you think about the underlying form of the subject you will be able to add texture, and more mark-making into your drawings yet still create a compelling realistic effect.

I have just taken some of my work to a gallery for constructive criticism and was told to work on my lighting. Your lesson comes at a most opportune time for me. Thanks so much. Looking forward to the next lesson.

Thank you for this great lesson about understanding light. this is just what I need. I am hoping to order the portrait lessons soon. Will you be giving a lesson on how, what angles to put light on a live model to start portrait practise

Hi Debbie, lovely to hear from you, and thanks for your kind words on the writing, I would say grammatically correct might be stretching it for me though! Really pleased found the article logical and easy to understand.

Cheers,

Will

Hello Will, good to hear from you with another great piece of advice. You are keeping me on my toes with such informative lessons. I really must get the pencils and sketch pad out to brush up on my sketching and shading. All the best with your portraits.

Shirley

Hello Will,

What a great lesson. I did not know about those subdivisions of shadows. And also how easily you explained the tricky parts! Everyone will agree that you are a great teacher besides being a great artist. You explained it simply. You have a nice penmanship too. As a reader it never seemed too informative or boring.

Hi Will,

This is very good explanations regarding light sources, shadow and reflection. Your explanation is superb, so simple and so clear. I really enjoy a lot and am looking forward to the second and the third parts. I appreciate very much your generosity, it helps me a lot to understand and looking forward to applying it in my painting. Nualnapa

I have used the periscope app one time in my life. There was a person drawing and we the observers were as present as if we had been in the room. I mention this because should you ever decide to hold a class where you taught about light and shadow I would like to be in attendance. Just a thought.

Hi Will,

Thank you so much for creating these wonderful tutorials. Your explanations are clear and easy to understand. And as a new painter it is wonderful to be able to learn online from a talented artist like yourself. I wish you great success and thank you sincerely for sharing your knowledge.

Cheers

Jane in Ottawa, Canada

I think I may be a bit late on this whole comment thing, but thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with those who need it! I really appreciate these guides, they help me on my journey through art. My teacher is sending my class to your guides for isolation homeschooling, and I find that it really helps me understand the wonderful world of realism artmaking. Thank you!

This article will introduce you to basic art concepts to give you a head start in making your own 2D game art. This is not a Tutorial! This article is for those with some vague familiarity with 2D art for games, primarily people who are programming games but would like to create quality assets, or those just getting started with creating art for games. By 2D assets, I'm referring to 2-dimensional images used for games - anything from character sprites to large backdrops. This article focuses on giving a brief introduction to good old-fashioned art skills and the ways they can make your game better. It's meant to give you a brief introduction to some principles and ideas so you don't have to waste your time discovering them the hard way or develop any bad habits you will then have to break.

Okay, that's actually what my programmer friend made and my, uh vast improvement, but I think it's a pretty good example of what happens when you apply a little artistic know-how to a design. We're all used to looking at 2D images in everyday life, but knowing what things look good isn't the same as understanding exactly why they they look good. Any 2D image can be broken down into basic elements, and you can think about creating 2D art as combining those elements in a way that 1) Looks like what you meant it to be, and 2) Is not super ugly. For example, we all know what a square and a sphere look like, but how do they fit into the process of making an identifiable character? To answer that, we're going to start with our first section:

Knowing that shapes matter, you can apply them to make environments seem more or less friendly, or match (or intentionally mismatch) characters and objects to those environments. Start designs with only very basic shapes- I'm talking about circles, squares, and rectangles. Try a character made of squares, or one made out of just triangles, and then see who looks more like the hero and who looks more like the villian. Keeping your initial design thoughts to shapes only also lets you generate a lot of ideas without getting carried away trying to figure out the detail right away (more on that later with the "Practice Makes Perfect" section). Generally, sharp edges imply artificiality or evil while curves and roundness imply organic and good. Traditionally it's though of as a spectrum, with roundness on one end with jaggedness on the other, with squares somewhere in the middle. For a great example, think about the landscape of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings films, versus the rolling hills of the Shire. A round, friendly looking character wandering through an angular environment seems more unsettling than the same character in a predominantly round environment. In the same vein, you can easily make stylistic choices to influence how a player thinks of an area. Let's take a look at another particularly good example... Let's break down two characters that have a lot, but also pretty much nothing in common: Godzilla and Barney the Dinosaur. What kinds of shapes make one look like a fearless killing machine and the other look like a friendly hugging, uh... machine?

Think about it, both characters are T-rex-like monsters designed around the fact that a guy had to fit inside... but they're on the opposite sides of the appeal spectrum. Why? It has a lot to do with one having smooth curves while the other is more angular with parts that are downright sharp (there are other reasons, which we'll get into later). At a fundamental level, this has to do with our general comfortableness with round organic shapes versus our discomfort with sharp angularity. It's no coincidence that "bad guys" tend to have spikes coming out of every concievable surface (Bowser in Super Mario Bros being the archetype), while "good guys" like Mario himself, tend to be, well, soft around the edges. When Sonic the Hedgehog was concieved as a cooler, more mature version of Mario, it's no coincidence he designed to be signicantly sleeker and spikier than Mario. Let's take a look at Barney and Gozilla again, this time in silhouette:

Silhouettes are very closely tied to the shape of an object, and are a great way to break down the shape of a character. Apart from any any connotations of the shapes used, if a character does not have a distinct silhouette compared to other characters, it's not a very good design. Some artists even go so far as to start with the silhouette and move inward to flesh out their subject. Reducing an object to just the silhoutte can also be a great double check after it's already started to make sure it's looking right. In summary, when thinking up designs for your games, make sure you account for shape and form and connotations those shapes often have to get a design that conveys what you want it to. Also keep in mind that things are largely recognized by shape, so objects in your game should have distinct shapes in order for the player to identify them easily. Spikey the Sea Urchin as a protagonist, outside ironic appreciation, probably wouldn't have a lot of appeal among facebook gamers. TL;DR: Everything is made of shapes and forms, and different kinds have different subconcious connotations.

Figure drawing is often considered to be the most difficult field of drawing, since people are structurally complicated masses of interconnected cartilage, muscles, bone, and skin. I'm not going to go into super detail since I don't personally have a ton of experience, but there are hundreds of books and websites dedicated to figure drawing. The essential idea is that there are certain rules and relationships in terms of length, size, and position of anatomical features, which is important because anatomical errors stick out. The more stylized a figure, like Mickey Mouse, the less important strict adherence to anatomy becomes, but it's a good idea to study realistic figures since by knowing the rules, you'll be able to bend them better. You can think of human proportions as essentially shortcuts to get close to ideal anatomy by comparing the size of different parts of the body to each other. There are specific proportions to measure pretty much every part of the human figure, but the usual starting point is the head. Humans in real-life are around 7.5 heads tall, though often this is rounded to 8 to make a slightly more idealized figure:

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