Saturday, 7 November 2009

How To Draw A Woman Warrior

Woman warriors are certainly a good fantasy theme to draw and you can draw them quite easily with that age old saying practice makes perfect, I've been looking at fashion catalogues and other magazine pull outs to copy models poses from in my drawings and this is the best way of drawing women for anything and so using this little drawing reference you can apply it to your women warriors and the strength that women show through their dynamic poses is one inspiring aspect of amazon women warriors.

Start off by understanding how you want the figure of your woman to be arranged as you can decide what goes where and you don't have to copy your catalogue photos exactly, you just need to use them as a base for your intended drawing, my drawing in the video below was created from two separate sources and so I combined them to make the pencil drawing in that video.

Women warriors are most powerful when you show their figure form at it's best and in a dynamic pose and also a large sword always helps too.

So in the video below, I tried to draw a powerful and dynamic warrior woman who is jumping in mid air, the movement is there in the preliminary drawing I think, although what you need to factor into your fantasy women drawings is long hair and an athletic build and that's generally it, but you could try some variation and sketch out some different alternatives, before you comitt to the final piece.

Here's the video and although the high heels are a bit much, they do add that x-faxctor to the fantasy warrior woman drawing slightly, just need to ink the drawing and upload it to the computer and try some computer manipulations.



I'll add a further post at a later stage which will cover the basics of fgiure drawing your woman warrior and if you feel you are more comfortable with stick figures, then I may work this into the beginning of a blog post.

I'd like to see any warrior drawiings you can come up with!

Sunday, 25 October 2009

How To Draw A Devil

Drawing a devil is just like drawing a demon and quite easy, on my youtube channel I go through a 4 step process of drawing a devil and I do it from scratch, I've collected all four videos and published it as a hubpage so you can check it out here - Drawing A Devil

Thursday, 22 October 2009

Monster Art Design Gimp Colouring Effects

Attempting to work out the many features of Gimp with this monster art design, I drew the first drawing which was a pencil drawing that I inked the lines and then shaded the image here:-


Notice that the drawing just looks like a basic drawing that really cries out to be computer coloured and given the Gimp treatment, now what I did was to go over quite a few of them shaded pencil lines with a black paintbrush using Gimp, so that later I could blend them into grey and have the jaw line and the whole of the side of the monsters face stretch away to the right and this I did quite well, even though it took me time to zoom in and fix the smaller details that I couldn't reach at the normal viewing size.

Next I coloured the tongue with a light red using the airbrush tool and again I just went over the main black lines and some of the shading in a random way and this was smudged to blend the red further and then I added a large size airbrush of a light yellow to highlight the monsters face and a bright blue to give the eye of the monster a sense of evil power or something.


I also made the background black and blended all of the edges of the monsters head, so that it would look cool enough. Adding a light source to the front of the monster also helped the lens flare look more brighter and added a contrast to the whole monster design.

You can see a few more examples of my Gimp software adventures here - Gimp Art Design Software

Here's the finished drawing....


Wednesday, 21 October 2009

DickBlick A Superb Art Supply Specialist

For years now, I continually hear about how DickBlick is the best art supply store online and off with it's superb customer service, although they do supply internationally, it is generally the best if you live over in America to recieve the full benefits of getting the art products delivered to your door.

Find out about DickBlick and see what you could buy for your art projects as I wrote a small review about them here - Dickblick art supplies

Fantasy Blog Header Undergoing Some Computer Graphic Magic


I drew the header graphic for this blog awhile back with the intention of adding a little photoshop magic, but my computer crashed and took with it the best part of £400 worth of photoshop software installed on the computer and so I've been experimenting with Gimp the free art manipulation software quite alot lately and one of the first drawings I played around with was this blog header.

And I knew I could make it better somehow with just the blend tool and adding some deeper reds to cancel out the flet tip marks on the original art and so that's what I did, although I would like to draken the background, so that the flames illuminate the darkness and create more depth to the shadow side of the demon.

My first attempt at using the Gimp software seemed to turn out quite well I think and I will keep you updated about finishing the graphic design on this top header graphic.



Here is the working version as you can also see right at the top of the blog, but it will change in time as I want to deepen and improve the depth of the design.


2 Drawing Book Reviews

There are two art drawing books I've read recently and they have some really good information in them when you apply them to your fantasy work, the first review I did was this one Drawing Still Life By Barrington Barber and in the book he explains the best expert techniques to draw still life and how important it is for artists to observe and sketch interesting objects aswell as visually appealing subjects.

And the second book Draw Like Da Vinci is a sort of case study of the sketches and art of Leonardo Da Vinci and in this book the author Susan White attempts to guide you through the drawing processes as Da Vinci would have done and how he would have approached his compositions and drawings in a way only he could.

I hope you like the reviews of the two books, because they are two that really stuck in my mind and I have started drawing from both of them and continue to be inspired by other artists work quite frequently these days.

I will try to review more art and useful drawing books as time goes on, as it could prove quite good for any artist who needs to learn a bit more and decide what book would be great for their art to improve.