Improving My Art

My friend and I do edits but I’d like to improve my art. Can someone give me suggestions? I’m fairly new to the editing game.

I use ibisPaint by the way :slightly_smiling_face:

Here’s my current style in art

For me, I kind of just like to enhance everything not just the face. I’ll add to the current shadows and highlights that the character already has, but something I might add are like a highlight to a character’s cheekbones or adding more lines to create depth in the hair and I’ll add to the clothing, too. Sometimes I even add a glow layer behind the characters in the background, but that part just depends on your style of art.

Another thing I like to do is combining more than one animation into a single pose to add variety. For example, if I like the face of the flirt_wink animation, but the arms/body of some other animation (can’t think of any off the top of my head), I will erase what I don’t want and blend the two together.

So yeah, this post was longer than I thought it was going to be, lol, but mainly it all has to do with highlights and shadows. (this all said by a self-taught artist, there’s probably better ways to do it, but that’s what I do as of now). I don’t know if any of this helped you, but here you go anyway. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, I’ll try it. How do you do highlights and shadows though?

blur the white part of the hair a little more.

No problem! And it really depends on where the lines are and what part of the character you’re editing.

Face:
For the face, you want more highlights than shadows. I’ll usually add some highlights (some do white but I like to do a shade or two lighter than the base color) to the forehead, cheekbone, tip of the nose and chin. Then, I’ll blend it into the skin so that it looks more natural. The most shadowing will come from cheekbones depending on how much you want to accentuate them. I do one diagonal line with an airbrush on the cheek(s) depending on face shape you use, then two shadow airbrush strokes (usually just a darker shade than the skin tone) on either side of the highlight and then blend them together.

Hair:
This one is easy cause usually depending on the hair type, the (guide)lines are already given to you. I’ll use an airbrush to add shadow to hard lines on the hair including the outside borderlines (the face may get some shadow here from the hair). Then, everywhere else gets a highlight usually in between shadow lines. The shadow will emphasize the highlight (the more you do this, the more it will “glow” for lack of a better word). In the picture you showed, straight hair doesn’t have as many lines so you may want to add some whereas beach wave you don’t need to cause you have plenty of them.
Side Note: You can use white for the highlights on hair if you choose, just make sure it’s well blended. A shade or two lighter than the base color is usually all you need (unless it’s platinum blonde then white is needed, lol.)

Clothes:
Pretty much the same as the hair, you follow the lines for shadows and highlight in between. (make sure you don’t use white for highlighting the clothing, it tends to stand out too much unless it’s a super light color).

And I don’t know if I forgot something, but that’s pretty much what I do in general besides adding to the highlights and shadows that are already there. :slight_smile:

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Moved to Art Resources section! :v:t2: