Drawing Tutorials

Last Updated: 21/8/04

Here's the gist of this page, it's a bunch of links to drawing tutorials. And my own personal tips. It also doubles as a review page for said links. Each one gets 0-5 stars, 0 being "Please let them win a Darwin award", 5 being genius.

Firstly, I'll recommend learning to draw real things before drawing unreal things, as the quote says "There's no new ideas in the universe, just recycled ones" so it's best to learn about what's out there, before you go mad creating. At least, that's the advice I got and agree with.

Sorry for the bland format, but it's for edumacational purposes. Who said it has to be fun? 

Julie Dillon's How to Draw Manga Tutorial

http://www.howtodrawmanga.com/tutorial/tutorial.html

As far as manga tutorials go, this is probably one of the best and most comprehensive. It was one of the very first I used to begin drawing manga, way back when it was hosted on her own art website. Naturally the www.howtodrawmanga.com site sells many excellent books, none of which I've ever seen or read. Julie's tutorial details the basics of drawing manga, and goes so far as to provide a few lessons on CGing your work. A good place to start for budding anime artists, but effectively, there are better tutorials out there. I recommend using Ms Dillon's tutorial along with others to get a better view of how to draw manga, her observations really are very useful.

Mike Brown's Anticz

http://www.anticz.com/learn.htm

Contains a good deal of information about animation, but the best bits are the hand and head tutorials. Really, the tutorials are by Ron Lemen; but the tutorials were posted on an art forum, so I'd rather link here. Ron details, quite specifically, the proportions of the human head and hand. His simple observations and sketches can get you to get your hands and heads looking good, rather than deformed freakish blobs. And when I say deformed, I mean obviously not meant to look that way. There's also a good tutorial on light and dark. Letting the rating count, this is one awesome tutorial. But doesn't deal with everything, great for realism though.

About's Figure Drawing Tutorials

http://drawsketch.about.com/od/figuredrawing/index.htm

Not too sure what exactly this site is meant to be, one of those multi purpose corporate ones. Either way, it's choc-o-bloc with heaps of information. This specific area deals entirely with figure drawing, I've only been drawing people, so I have no tutorials on drawing inanimate objects as of yet. But people are a good way to start. This section contains twelve tutorials all up, specializing in all aspects of the human body. I haven't read them all, but I intend to. The site's a bit confusing though, and some of their articles are taken from other sources. I don't like the cluttered look. Individually, some of these tutorials get 5 stars, others get less. So it only gets a 3. Poor about.

About's AnimeManga Drawing Tutorials

 http://drawsketch.about.com/od/animemanga/index.htm

8 tutorials in total, rather short ones. All tutorials are borrowed from other sites, or are so short they're nearly useless. Frankly, About only functions as a link page to other tutorial sites. Their AnimeManga section is sadly lacking in much content, rather rudimentary and stating the obvious. Actually, it sucks. I really don't want to say much mean about it. But they're clearly only in it for the advertising money. Let the stars speak for themselves.

Polykarbon Tutorials

http://www.polykarbon.com/tutorials/index.htm

And there sure are a lot of them, I got this link from About's Chibi tutorial, which is actually polykarbons. At least they don't make a secret of it. These are actually pretty good tutorials for beginners, or just for reference material. I won't say I'm a great artist, but you can see what's good. These are relatively short tutorials, which can be good when you can't be bothered reading through  someone describing how many different geometric shapes you can fit into the human ear. Especially good when coupled with Julie Dillon's tutorials. I don't like their stick figure presentation much, but each to their own. It's covers the whole range of topics, so it gets my vote anyway!

 

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