Intro

Hello! This is Nevermore and in this series, I'll be showing you my process for my art, starting from the idea and rough drafts and working my way toward the finishing touches that make the artwork pop. I'm still decently new to digital art, so I'm no where near professional, but I hope this is helpful for beginners, as well as more experienced artists. This guide in particular goes in depth into a few topics, so as much as I would recommend you read it, feel free to skip over it if it bores you too much. Please let me know if you have any critique, questions, or requests for possible future tips. Now, without further ado, let's get started:

Getting the Idea

If you’re like me, you’re probably incredibly picky about what you want to draw and struggle with finding inspiration. If this is the case, my advice to you is to just be patient. Look around at your surroundings, ask family and/or friends for ideas, look online for inspiration; I promise you, ideas will come if you just be patient.

 

Another scenario could be that you may come up with a bunch of ideas at once, but forget about them when you need them most. If this ever happens, try writing your ideas down in a list. That way, if you ever find yourself in an artists block, you can look to your list for inspiration. I find this helps me a lot.

 

Another thing you can try when you have artists block is find something that stimulates your creativity. What will usually help with this varies from person to person. It may be listening to music, looking at nature, taking a walk; anything that helps to clear your head. Trying to come up with something while you’re stressed is very hard, especially when you aren’t the type of person to work well under pressure. That being said, do an activity that helps you think straight, and then try to generate ideas for whatever you want to do.

 

Ideas are incredibly important and are the anchor point for anything in art, so it's important to do whatever is possible to get through blocks, especially if you plan on making art a career.

Getting the Idea (summary)

Sorry, that was kinda long. Just in case you completely skipped over it (don’t worry I understand), the key point is that the secret to getting over artists block is:

*Clear your mind

*Draw inspiration from your environment

*Have patience

 

The artwork I am using as an example in this series is one I did a few weeks ago. It’s loosely based off of my avatar in a videogame I play. Now that I have an idea of what I am going to draw, I move on to the next step:

 

 

(Note: the avatar in the game is completely customizable and the aspects that are portrayed in the image are not claimed by any company or group, therefore this artwork features an original character created by me and I don’t believe it infringes upon any copyright laws. If it does, please let me know.)

References

Once you have your idea, you need some reference images. Many people falsely beleive that good art can only ever be drawn from the memory of your own head. This can be true, but only to a certain extent.

 

References are used to improve artwork, and by using references, you can actually learn a lot and improve your visual library. However, references can only take you a part of the way. It’s your mind that needs to put all these different ideas or aspects together to create something that stands out. Use too few references, especially mental references, and its just another clone. Use too many, and you may make the mistake of your art being too busy, so you need to be careful with how many aspects you want to add in to your art.

 

 

The more experienced you get, the fewer tangible references you’ll need. If you are just starting out, you may need a lot of images to help you, but if you are an experienced artist you’ll rely more on mental images than digital or physical ones. This is because over time you will build up your visual library by using references to the point where you’re visual library is all you need.

For my reference images, I first took a picture of the videogame avatar this piece is based on. I can’t show you it, for copyright reasons, but I used it as a baseline for the drafts. Since this character is human, I used one of Clip Studios 3D models and posed it to my liking. The signature things this character wears is a cow skull and a leather mask, so I found reference images for those too.

If you don’t know how to import reference images, please check out my guide explaining two ways you can do so!

Drafts

Now that we have all that stuff out of the way, we can start on our rough drafts. What I like to do is start with a light blue color using the colored pencil tool that comes with the software and start doing a rough sketch of what I want my piece to look like, and then on a new layer go over it using a red color and refine it a bit so it is easier to do the line art. To get the anatomy at least semi-correct I drew the drafts over the 3D model I brought in earlier and also incorporated some of the references I used. This is what my draft looks like:

 

(Side note: I deleted the layer with the blue rough lines so sadly I don't have an image of that.)

As you can see, this draft is very rough and messy and looks pretty unappealing, but that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be! I used to feel bad when I saw other (professional) artists sketches, since they always looked so good and would me feel like my sketches weren’t good enough. Don’t let yourself make this mistake! All that matters about a rough sketch is that:

➢ You understand it

➣ It helps you make the final product the best it can be

 

And don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this to the end! In the next part of this series, I’ll be showing you how I do my line art. I hope this guide and this series helps you, and please let me know if you have any questions, feedback, and all that other good stuff in the comments.

 

Have a wonderful day everyone, and remember to keep smiling! ☺︎