#I like drawing cartoony muscles

[moaccyrk]

Here in Brazil, on top of being Halloween, october 31 is also know as "dia do saci", a Saci being a very famous folk character in my country.

In this piece, I drew a witch and a saci stablishing a friendship based on being spooky, magical and super fucking jacked.

[wispscribbles]

I want to say your style is soft and whimsical? If that's the word. Its a nice variation to a lot of the others I've seen. Sorry if my words are not wording. I love your style is just so fluffy and sweet between Ghost and Soap.

daww thank you! That's so sweet!! Drawing big buff military men has been a challenge for me, it's very different from my usual stuff - but it's fun to love a piece of media so much that it forces you to leave your creative comfort zone. I used to only draw animals when I started out, so that's definitely shaped my style into what it is. But Ghost and Soap deserve a little softness, as a treat, so it’s ok that my style is sorta mismatched with the source material

[ittybittybumblebee]

Ive decided trying to draw foreshortening in realism is hell actually

[hotpotatopotat]

What or who inspires your art style?

Uhm honestly, I don't know totally! I know there are answers like Skippy and Corndog, Hori ofc, a few others for sure. But mostly my artstyle was developed as a way for combat my joint pain. My style for example used to be something more like this, but it was just too painful to continue to output this level of art (2021)

So I started drawing more cartoony and simple things, that at first I couldn't even color. I really needed to develop my muscle and draw fast because drawing a couple hours at a time was all I could manage.

Over time I guess I just got...better? And was able to mesh a more realistic style in with my cartoons, color, shade, and make comics all within my time frame. I feel like I'm slowly making my way back up?

Thanks for asking!

[dragengyrr]

"Lose the jacket"…

More Alastor in dress from this post because I am completely normal about it (I’m not).

@prince-liest : answering previous asks, let’s establish now that if I mention you directly in my posts, you are free to link the art to your fics without asking (after all, it wouldn’t have existed without them). I’m pretty sure I’m not done with them. Cheers <3

Artist’s little side note (because I feel like rambling again): so Hazbin gave me two life improvements (well, three, if you add the music) - one was stepping foot into the unknown aroace territory and being hit on the head with realisation that it was my home all along, making my questionable behaviours and reactions in the past a whole lot less… weird. At least for me, the allos probably still thought I was weird af, but that’s their problem now.

Second improvement was discovering a cartoony style that just sits right with my hand. I’ve always loved cartoons, had a little nostalgic era at the end of high school where I went back to the stuff I’d watched as a kid (Jake Long, Ben 10, Kid vs Kat, Samurai Jack), then I was discovering shows that were made quite recently already as an adult (Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, The Owl House), I loved them for various reasons… but every time I tried to play with their style, I couldn’t get past a few drawings.

I also never truly worked out my own cartoony style, so I thought I’d be stuck with realism for all eternity - which is not bad by any means, it’s just that added pressure of your own artistic ego whispering into your ear that if you misplace one tendon or muscle, or get the proportions wrong, you’ll likely burn down in some special part of hell, specifically for artists that are too lazy to check their anatomy atlas for every single drawing they make. Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is – I don’t remember the last time I produced so many drawings in such a short time, and it’s a blast. And I can focus on posing and emotions more than anything, thus learning new tricks, and it might improve my realistic art as well, right now limited by my fear of it somehow looking incorrect (because that would surely mean the end of the world).

-End of ramble-

[runningwithscizzorz]

HOW DO YOU DRAW FACES??!?! seriously, everything about your art is pure eyecandy, I love it SO MUCH, but faces. YOUR FACES. the faces are perfect. they capture every detail. they feel so human. so expressive. i would love to know how you draw/structure your faces because it's the biggest thing i'd like to improve on with my art!

Art is a translation of how you perceive the world. Art is both extremely watered down and painfully vulnerable with emotions. The artist translates the world, and people translate the art. Lots of art gets lost in translation. My goal is to make people read my art regardless of my language. I want my art to speak louder than my simple cluttered words could.

How can you read a face with no words? You have to find your own way to do that, but here’s a very rough way of how I read people and attempt to translate their world into mine.

One practice is drawing straight from a reference. I've been watching TLOU, which has some of the best acting ever and is perfect for screenshotting specific moments to recreate. Pulling scenes from episode five, I stretch and amplify the facial features to properly read their emotions in my style, ex, making Ellie and Sam's eyes bigger to amplify their youth, smoothing out facial wrinkles for simplicity, and (my favorite) exaggerating the mouths so they emote louder.

Second method is feeling how your face moves. Ethan Becker on YouTube explains it better (go watch all his videos) of how to feel and observe how your face compresses and works with different features to properly express emotions. Using your own face as a stencil to understand how your muscle and jaw work is both simple, and always accessible for artist reference.

An example of how I break down bits of a chapter into chunks for each panel while still attempting for it to run smoothly like the writing. Honestly, a lot of this part rides on wanting to do the author justice for their fabulous work. You want to show them how much their work affected you and why it’s totally worth it to draw their stories.

Some examples of scenes from media (that almost made me cry) and how I translate and manipulate it into my style. This is why I redraw scenes from movies so often, not only is it fun and easy, but it’s a great way of studying the masters

But, to actually answer your question, I think the reason my drawings are so expressive to you is because I still follow somewhat typical human anatomy while still being cartoony enough to break the uncanny valley and create an aesthetically pleasing style. I’m still practicing and studying everyday to get better. You must work as much as possible to attempt to properly translate the world.

[glitterclan]

Question!!! How do you do your anatomy/sketches? Your style is so good and a perfect blend of cartoony and realistic and I need to absorb it like a sponge

Also!!!! How do you do the poses? I always have to find specific references

what you see in glitterclan posts ARE my sketches! they are very quick and unpolished drawings done without references. i've been drawing cats for so long that everything is sort of muscle memory at this point

[finchwingart]

OMG I'M YOUR FAN

I really wanted to know, do you draw humans too? Or just animals? Your style is very realistic, did you initially imagine having a style like that?

I draw humans very rarely, I'm just so unconfident with them n don't enjoy drawing them so much ToT In my gravity falls phase tho I drew SO MANY I was actually improving for once, but then I stopped lmao. Oops

Here's the One (1) 'human' character I have

about having a realistic style, it has it's ebbs and flows I guess? I love going really cartoony but drifted a little bit away from that during uni cause I was embarassed of it, which I'm really mad at myself at. I think I was worried people would look down on me for drawing lotsa cartoony animals but I was dumb. I do enjoy drawing more realistically though as it's very comfortable, drawing from reference is nice n simple, but I really need to stretch my muscles and try more cartoons n characters again bc stylisation is the hard bit tbh.

I do stuff like this sometimes!

[t0mashek]

Mini character guide for my fellow McSpirk fanartists!

I feel like I finally have a satisfying level of muscle memory down for how I draw each of our guys in a recognizable way! My portrayals of Kirk, Spock and Bones aren't usually drawn with a reference, and they definitely don't look all that realistic, but I figure at least one of you out there might like to have a peak into what I do to try and make them recognizable!

Before I show the specific lines I always like to use, I would like to shoutout all the artists out there with same face syndrome. I had very bad same face syndrome before I started drawing Star Trek fanart, the variety of characters in Star Trek REALLY helped me draw better characterizations of people! BUT, if same face syndrome is something you currently struggle with do NOT let it deter you from posting your beautiful art!

Even when drawn with the same basic face structure like I did here, it's still very easy to tell who's who, just with the use of colors, hairstyles and facial lines!

Now, for anyone who is wanting to pinpoint what I try to keep consistent in my drawings of the boys, I highlighted the lines I find most important in my drawings of each of them. I try to keep my style slightly cartoony, so I like to exaggerate!

The roundness of Jim's face is what I always try to make the most pronounced in all of my art of him. The contrast to the harsher angles of the faces of Spock and McCoy is one of my favorite things to include in my art. He has a button nose in combination with those apple cheeks, they're my favorite thing about Jim to overexaggerate!

McCoy on the other hand? Give him his TRIANGLES. I try to go for a much more square face when drawing Bones, but for the lines and features within his face we love our good old friend the triangle. That man's eyebrows are pointy, and I love to give him his mouth lines. I like to balance out the sharper lines I draw on his face with the round lines of his hair.

Spock has the bangs, ears and eyebrows that play a great advantage to us, no other bro serves like Spock. While I love the pointy sideburns on all of the boys, Spocks sideburns help me play into the length of his face. He's got a straighter face and straighter nose compared to his human boyfriends. And while he and Bones both have those handsome mouth lines, you can differentiate the shape of the crease to fit their faces! When I'm drawing McCoy's mouth lines, there's more of an angle, I draw Spock's lines straighter, similar to his face and nose.

I hope this might help some of my fanartist brethren out there! Or at the very least give you a little peak into my art process! If anyone finds this helpful and uses it to draw some art, I'd love to see it! The variety of styles and character potrayals I see in all of the Star Trek fanart I browse on here never fails to warm my heart. These goofy little guys never fail to stand out from one another, no matter how they're drawn, and that is just so special to me.

Live long and draw fanart, little gay people in my computer!!! 💛🩵💙🖖

[soft5ku11]

Hey so I'm also an artist and a gainer and I was wandering do u have any tips on drawing fat men

Well, it's all about shapes - at least to me. Keep the shapes connected in the right way, with the right volume, and heaviness. That's what I try to focus on. Fat goes over the top of regular anatomy, so learning how that works first can really help.

What I did was just draw whatever and I learned as I drew more of it. It's all about trial and error, learning and evolving and recognising what you want to improve, rather than being discouraged by "this looks bad". Don't compare yourself to others, only yourself.

But, as with anything to do with art, collect inspiration, collect a huge amount of references. Print out your favourite artworks from other artists, smack 'em through a holepunch and keep em together with a treasury tag. Never be afraid to use yourself for a reference picture either. If you cant find something, just save the time instead of mindlessly scrolling image results on your search engine of choice. Especially since you're a gainer, you can use your own body to study how any niche angle or pose might look with your body type.

To add onto this, of course it'll vary from style to style but exaggerate your shapes, (coming back to the shapes thing) for example, I'll use this artwork of my DND guy that I recently did:

See how the shapes of certain parts aren't necessarily more muscled or fatter? The feet and hands for instance, they look better and read clearer if you exaggerate them a bit, and I already set the hands and feet on the 3D reference model I used to almost maximum. You can do this with heads to an extent as well, but it could make the character's proportions feel off. That part is a balancing act and you can find basic proportion guides for the body online to help with that. But - the thickness of the arms and legs and even the neck pulls the figure further from realistic proportions and more into a cartoony illustrative look. I could go on for ages about this but that's the basic gist of it.

One thing I think is exceptionally under-represented in art advice that I've seen in my time is DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF HAVING ARTIST FRIENDS! Learn from each other, talk about stuff, gather and share resources amongst yourselves, etc etc. You learn more when in groups, that's why school isn't one-on-one.

These are just some tips off the top of my head, there's always more out there and I'm sure one of these things won't work for you and others will, but make the leap like you've done here and ask other artists too. Lots of people would be willing to give some advice to help you get going, and you asking will also benefit others who might be too shy to ask so even if you don't take my advice, you can be happy that you've pulled it out of me for others to see at least XD

[mushroominaforest]

Can I get some Human anatomy tips ? I'd Google it but I like hearing from fellow cartoony artists. If you have no tips or anything u can just ignore me :)

All you gotta do to achieve good humans with accurate anatomy in your art is to only draw Canadians in the winter

Jokes aside, honestly just practice. There’s no quick and easy trick to do good anatomy, you have to put in the time. Study references, do billions of figure drawings, look at skeletons, bone structures, muscle and fat formations etc.

Dont just practice drawing people standing in the pick your character/sims stance. Draw ‘em walking, playing an instrument, playing a sport, (yoga is a good one for more complex pose practice).

Bear in mind this is coming from an art major, so I probably have snobbish opinions about the « right » way to draw lmao.

And if all else fails, just draw Canadians in winter.

[baraturts]

Hi, everything’s been good. Out of curiosity how did you learn to draw the turtles, especially when it comes to their facial expressions and bodies ? Do u have any tips or references that could be helpful ?

Hi, things are going relatively good. Hmm, I'm probably not the best person to ask this, heh. My drawing progression and process has been (and is) a bit all over the place.

For anatomy, I'd recommend searching for terms like "comic book anatomy" and "simplified male anatomy for artists". Some pretty good free resources out there, especially on YouTube. Then you look at those recourses and simplify even more! I don't draw a lot of muscle detail, just focus on making the main muscle groups visible and ignore the rest. As long as that's in place and you have alright proportions (another thing to study, hooray), things tend to look passable.

I also have a little folder of screencaps from the movies (mostly OOTS), always handy! Some taken my self, some "stolen" from here on Tumblr. I've never really used refs for expressions, but I also don't draw a lot of very exaggerated/cartoony expressions. I keep it subtle and often find my self subconsciously making the faces I'm trying to draw, heh. And I guess that's my final tip: Draw! One can't JUST look at YouTube videos and tutorials, you gotta draw a lot too. But never be afraid to use references, that's how you learn and drawing is how you hammer that knowledge in to your hand!

Don't be afraid to ask if there's something more specific you're wondering about or if you want me to red-line something. I find that easier to be helpful with. I'm not a very good teacher on broader subjects, my answers to those tends to boil down to: JuSt GoOgLe It, sorry, haha.

[cherriow]

Is rodger a twink

I guess he fits some of the descriptions but id like to say no? He isn't like short and he DOES have body hair (but he's blonde so its not as visible as it would be with someone who has a darker hair color) also he's not a sub

i guess the slim and the gay part does fit him? (hes pan) but hes not like the weak type of slim, he has a bit of muscle but its more like.. not poking out much? like compacted a bit. obviously my style doesn't really do him much justice HAHA its very cartoony anyways heres a rare image of Rodger without clothes.. originally added the ant underwear as a joke but i actually kind of like it so its canon now. him also having stupid bug related t-shirts is also canon also i drew the scar wrong in the last drawing oops.. this is the correct way it looks

[chocodile]

2023 was certainly the year of the rabbit. I felt like I didn't do as many ambitious pieces this year as I would have liked.... lots of sketches... lots of sketchy comics, which certainly count as ambitious, but don't really flex the art muscles the way full rendering does. I also spent a lot of time working on offline stuff and crafts which often required weeks of work to complete.

In the end, there were more big pieces than I remembered. Even January/February/March, which were pretty crummy months for me, still got some cool art made during that time. (Ironically, the "Sleep with One Eye Open" piece shown for March was both "vent art" expressing the massive amount of stress I was under during those three months and my most numerically successful piece on Tumblr this year.)

But I'd still like to do more experimental stuff in 2024. I miss working with the zany colors and the more abstract psychedelic cartoony style that I feel defines me as an artist... you can see it here and there this year, but much of my output was more directly representational.

Overall, 2023 was a year that challenged where my life priorities were (in a mostly positive way) and did bite into the amount of time I could spend drawing, but I'm still happy with what I made this year and happy with where I'm going creatively. I enjoy that I'm doing more story/character-driven stuff again and feel way more engaged with my own work than when I was doing more one-off pieces, even if those one-off pieces were "better".

Here's to a good 2024!

[nukacourier]

deets on James pretty please, i know very little and yet i already like them

Okey doke! I'm gonna list off his basic info

He's 5'10" or roughly 178 cm, and he has dark brown eyes and dark brown hair. Generally his hair is around 3C-4A curl type I think. His body type is usually mostly muscular but with fat so he doesn't have tons of defined muscle

He's also a trans man who has had top surgery so he has scarring under his pecs

He has freckles mainly on his cheeks and nose, with a few on his chin, shoulders, and his arms and hands. He also has a beauty mark below his left eye that sort of blends in with his freckles

He has scars but the only ones I tend to draw are two on the left side of his face (one small one on his upper lip, and another small one through his eyebrow near the end). He also has a bullet hole scar on his forehead, a deep surgery scar on the side of his head, and a thin scar circling his entire head. None are visible unless you get rid of his hair though

I got some images of him for reference in skin tone and his features :]

The one on the right is more cartoony but I figured it'd do well for any color reference you might need since it's not shaded beyond simple flat shading. He's around 23 in both (I call it his New Vegas design)

Sorry for leaving a wall of text in response!! I'll try to make reference sheets after this now at some point to make it easier lol

[fraternum-momentum]

I really really really love your art. Like a lot.

And mind if I ask, how did you learn how to draw expression so good???? I want to draw like one day.

WAA Thank you !! Well the answer to that is studies, studies, and lotsa studies. Rn I'm studying Ami Thompson's work in atsv:

god it's so fucking cool i fucking love how they draw the charas. like it's the right amount of cartoony but it still has realistic proportions aiubhjghj so fucking good. (also Hobie, Miguel, Pavitr my beloveds 🥺🥺)

You can get a lot of great references in animation actually ! Expression sheets help a lot in making sure the charas stay in model when emoting, i think?? I'm not sure, but they're cool and helpful !

Sidenote:

i tried looking up expression tutorials on pinterest and there isn't a lot of it??? i found this one by Kayla Marquez, which basically boils down to 'exaggerate the expressions more', but it doesn't really tell how..? i guess by applying squash and stretch (you can actually see that in Ami's work, esp in Hobie's and Pavitr's sheets) but they do sm more than that.

I can try to explain what i personally do when drawing expressions, it's pretty lengthy so it would be under the cut:

One thing that helps me a lot when drawing expressions is I try to do it on my face. While it's best to do it looking in front of the mirror. I unfortunately have personal issues when it comes to doing that, so what I do is I try to feel what muscles my face is using. Are my lips pouting? Are my eyebrows scrunched up? Are my eyes squinting? Small details like that matter a lot when it comes to expressions. Take this as an example:

This is kinda basically that thing where you go to thesaurus.com to find that specific word in mind but for drawing LMAO. Like what kind of sad do you want to express?

When it comes to emotions the biggest changes you notice in the face are in the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth.

look at how much an expression changes by swapping one of these things:

BUT! While exaggerating may be the main focus here, you don't have to exaggerate every expression. Subtlety can also be good. It really depends oh what you're going for.

Another rule i have is that not only the face emotes but the whole body as well. Shoulders, hands, even knees and arms help accentuate the emotion you're trying to convey !

I think that's pretty much it without going too much into detail. Also a reminder that everything i wrote here isn't a set in stole rule ! it's just how i personally do things. Have a good day :DD