I got a question about drawing injuries, and I typed up a pretty lengthy response so I wanted to share it here as well.
I get asked a lot about hand strains and injuries, and it is something most artists have to face one time or another just because we work so hard for our dreams. I personally don’t get strains or injuries, both for art and for piano playing when I still majored in it, two main creative paths where hand/arm injuries are common. My hands rarely feel tired
and when they do, I stop drawing. So when I get asked, I usually can only offer the fact that you can find a lot of carpal tunnel exercises on google and there’s nothing else I know about relief exercises, other than I find that flinging my
hands also help loosen them up a bit.
The most important thing
about this issue is actually prevention rather than relief. I would like to believe this approach is what prevented me from getting injured–I’ve never really been a push through the pain type person, and glorifying suffering and pain as a sign of hard work is definitely unhealthy, as those are huge signals from your body telling you to stop. There are many
things that I know for sure strains your hands much more than anything else that I will list below, and I believe that, if it is possible for you, the most efficient way to deal with injury is to find out which of
these things is the cause and working around it.
The first big cause is posture; if your
arms have no support points (ie you have to hold your elbow up with your
muscles or tense your wrist to maintain stability) you will strain much
easier, just like how you get tired easier standing at an uncomfortable pose vs a well grounded one. So be sure to seat yourself so that you have somewhere to rest
your arm while drawing, while your body is at a relaxed angle with full support. For a normal tablet, rest your arm and wrist somewhere on the table or the tablet. For a Cintiq or tablet monitor, try having it upright so that your elbow can rest on your desk, and your wrist can rest on the cintiq screen, and you only need to use your fingers to control the pen.
The second cause is your grip on the
pen. This can be caused by your need for precision/speed of repetitive
movement/pressure. Line art, or cross hatching, or pressing hard to get
the darkness of the brush you need, are all high stress activities that
strains your hand much more than, say, rendering or putting down a base
painting. Knowing that, you can:
Use a higher brush opacity or turn off pressure sensitivity
for opacity to prevent yourself from having to press really hard to get brush
impact you want.
Go to your wacom tablet preferences if you have one, and
set the hardness of the brush so that it’s easier to get the brush
opacity/size you want. You want to have the problem of having to try to press lighter for
lighter lines, rather than having to press harder for darker/thicker lines. The latter strains much more than the former.
If your grip of the pen is too tight purely because the pen is slippery/too small for
you/hard to grip, such as old bamboo tablets, there are rubber tablet
pen paddings that you can buy online, or you can just use a layer of
masking tape all around the grip area to increase friction/grip comfort
and make it easier for yourself to hold your pen. A Cintiq or Intuos Pro pen is ideally what you want your pen to feel like: have friction on the surface so your fingers don’t slip, large enough so it rests and takes up space comfortably between your thumb and index fingers without you tensing and curling your hand inwards really hard, and shaped so that your grip is stopped right before the cone of the tip, preventing slipping.
The third
cause is the schedule of your drawing. This may or may not be possible
to change because for a lot of us, a deadline is a deadline. But try to space your tasks so that you cycle between
intense, detailed, hand-straining work, and relaxing, loose, more
brainstorming work. The latter is excellent for hand rest while still being productive creative work. For example, if you are drawing comic pages, it
might make sense in terms of efficiency to sketch 10 pages, then ink 10
pages, then tone 10 pages. But when you are inking those 10 pages
consecutively, that’s when you give your hands no rest and your hand
will start to hurt a lot, while you have no choice but to push through the pain to get the work done. Instead, try to draw these pages one by one, or have a few
drawings at various stages of completion to rotate between. eg. you work
on inking drawing A, then when you feel your hands are strained, switch to
putting down loose underpainting for drawing B, switch back to inking
drawing A, then start brainstorming drawing C and think more/draw less. Give your hands some natural times to rest up with less intense work, and you get work done without
having to lose time by having to really stop drawing altogether.
—
As tempting as it is to try to feel like you are working as hard as you can to achieve your dreams and aspirations, while feeling guilty about resting/taking the more relaxing route, remember that your hands make your art possible, so treat them well!
The six SSSS postcard print illustrations that I made last year for the book printing campaign. Got all the peeps in their home settings plus darling Kitty showing off her usefulness.
1. QUEST - the plot involves the Protagonist’s search for a
person, place or thing, tangible or intangible (but must be
quantifiable, so think of this as a noun; i.e., immortality).
2. ADVENTURE - this plot involves the Protagonist going in search
of their fortune, and since fortune is never found at home, the
Protagonist goes to search for it somewhere over the rainbow.
3. PURSUIT - this plot literally involves hide-and-seek, one person chasing another.
4. RESCUE - this plot involves the Protagonist searching for
someone or something, usually consisting of three main characters - the
Protagonist, the Victim & the Antagonist.
5. ESCAPE - plot involves a Protagonist confined against their
will who wants to escape (does not include some one trying to escape
their personal demons).
6. REVENGE - retaliation by Protagonist or Antagonist against the other for real or imagined injury.
7. THE RIDDLE - plot involves the Protagonist’s search for clues
to find the hidden meaning of something in question that is deliberately
enigmatic or ambiguous.
8. RIVALRY - plot involves Protagonist competing for same object or goal as another person (their rival).
9. UNDERDOG - plot involves a Protagonist competing for an object
or goal that is at a great disadvantage and is faced with overwhelming
odds.
10. TEMPTATION - plot involves a Protagonist that for one reason
or another is induced or persuaded to do something that is unwise, wrong
or immoral.
11. METAMORPHOSIS - this plot involves the physical
characteristics of the Protagonist actually changing from one form to
another (reflecting their inner psychological identity).
12. TRANSFORMATION - plot involves the process of change in the
Protagonist as they journey through a stage of life that moves them from
one significant character state to another.
13. MATURATION - plot involves the Protagonist facing a problem
that is part of growing up, and from dealing with it, emerging into a
state of adulthood (going from innocence to experience).
14. LOVE - plot involves the Protagonist overcoming the obstacles to love that keeps them from consummating (engaging in) true love.
15. FORBIDDEN LOVE - plot involves Protagonist(s) overcoming
obstacles created by social mores and taboos to consummate their
relationship (and sometimes finding it at too high a price to live
with).
16. SACRIFICE - plot involves the Protagonist taking action(s)
that is motivated by a higher purpose (concept) such as love, honor,
charity or for the sake of humanity.
17. DISCOVERY - plot that is the most character-centered of all,
involves the Protagonist having to overcome an upheavel(s) in their
life, and thereby discovering something important (and buried) within
them a better understanding of life (i.e., better appreciation of their
life, a clearer purpose in their life, etc.)
18. WRETCHED EXCESS - plot involves a Protagonist who, either by
choice or by accident, pushes the limits of acceptable behavior to the
extreme and is forced to deal with the consequences (generally deals
with the psychological decline of the character).
19. ASCENSION - rags-to-riches plot deals with the rise (success)
of Protagonist due to a dominating character trait that helps them to
succeed.
20. DECISION - riches-to-rags plot deals with the fall
(destruction) of Protagonist due to dominating character trait that
eventually destroys their success.
There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!
I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)
PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.
Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.
The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.
I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.
There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.
This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.
I use this one to accurately track my hours, both to inform myself and for commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours counted and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.
I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant time that it ignores in ‘non-work’ programs by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.
I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.
Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them ‘right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.
Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.
So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too. Also, if Mac users have any suggestions for programs that fill similar functions, feel free to share there as well!
Anonymous asked: Hey there ! So, I've always wanted to get into environment drawings but I don't know where to start? Do I just like, go for it? Or what? Anyways, I was wondering if you had any suggestions for that thanks!
Yes. You really kinda just, go for it. I mean, you have to start somewhere, right? Just hop on it today!!! It is better now than later.
You need to train your eyes first. Starting with mimicking old master’s paintings and understanding what it takes to make a finished work of art. The little color studies you do will help you in a long run.
(p.s.: I don’t remember where I got this image from. Please notify me if any of you guys knows who the original artist is. Thank you)
Check out ArtStation. They have excellent resources and tutorials.
Also, please check out:
1. Scott Robertson’s How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination:
This book breaks down everything you need to know about how to create good environment designs.
2. Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, by. James Gurney.
This book is practically the bible for all artists.
Trust me. Your very first few paintings will look not….. so desirable, please don’t get discouraged by it. With practices and time, you WILL get better.
Tuesday Tips - Types of Shots (And What they Say.) Part 1
Camera angles and proximity really do convey a lot of information to your audience. Knowingly or unknowingly, your choices affect the viewers. What do you want them to feel or think at a specific moment?
The most important tip I could ever give towards drawing/creating good comics is to read comics. Good, bad, mediocre, read them all and learn from them.
