Tutorials for Figure Drawing, Shading and Coloring Digitally

March 12, 2012 1:02 PM

Looking for tutorials on drawing human figures and coloring them digitally.

I'm looking for tutorials on drawing basic human figures (clothed) in a comic-book type style, as well as coloring and shading them.

I will be having to make multiple renditions of the same set of comicbook figures in different everyday poses, so something simple would be great.

Other than practicing every day, do you have recommendations on good tutorials for figure drawing and coloring/shading? I am using GIMP, but I suppose I could easily figure out how to translate photoshop-oriented instructions.

I would love to find something like this: a link that was posted on Reddit.

FYI: I have basic drawing and photoshop/GIMP skills, enough to make decent drawings but I'm still pretty slow and the quality is a bit shaky.

Thank you!

posted by The ____ of Justice to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: Well, there's this-- a four-plus-year-old tutorial of how Jeph Jacques draws Questionable Content. He streams his nightly comic-drawing as well, but this is an explanation of the steps that is lacking from the regular streams. I could swear that he had tutorial videos posted on Ustream as well, but I can't find them.

It's not really "comic-book" style, but that Bpelt plugin is really cool. Working at mega-high resolution and scaling down produces great results as well.
posted by supercres at 1:28 PM on March 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks supercres! Thats pretty cool.

For others following his thread (there have got to be quite a few burgeoning artists on metafilter, right?), at the moment I'm going through the many tutorials posted on deviantARt. So far I find these two to be helpful for my purposes:

face tutorial

coloring a face in a minute tutorial

I am in no way affiliated with these artists...I just see there are other people favoriting this thread so I'll be putting up any other helpful links as I find them.

(Hope that's okay with the mods.)
posted by The ____ of Justice at 2:01 PM on March 12, 2012

Best answer: Found the video. It's from about two years ago. He uses a Cintiq.

Here's the rest of his channel. Not sure why I couldn't find that before. I think it's because he streams nightly on a different username now.
posted by supercres at 2:39 PM on March 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: FindChaos's Tutorial

(here's her tumblr feed)

Also look at boulet and
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:23 PM on March 13, 2012

Best answer: oops ... Brandon Graham's style(s). They use color for accent or as tone instead of carpet-bombing every part of every panel with the fill tool. That may give you more flexibility and a chance to push your draftsmanship/experimenting a bit more than cloning QC or Penny Arcade's style would.
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:33 PM on March 13, 2012