Tools & Tutorials
Digital Illustration
Although I originally wasn’t too interested in digital art, I grew more and more fond of it over the years.
Especially due to my Game Design studies it became an elemental skill to learn.
Nowadays, with online a limited amount of time given and being on the go often, I find myself picking up my IPad more and more often.
I’m currently working with an IPad Pro, 12.9″ (2017) and a first Gen. Apple Pencil to create the majority of my drawings.
Due to popular demand I created my own brush set for Procreate with 12 brushes I use on a daily basis.
Its a wonderful brush set! It made me reconsider Procreate because it feels like CSP while using these brushes and thats what i have been looking for. I can’t use CSP on my pc often and I am so happy I found these brushes for Procreate. And the blending ones are just wonderful too!
Arvy
through Etsy
Layout
My artbook projects became more and more complex over the years and I found myself in need of a proper Layout program quite soon.
Although I never had a professional training in Graphic Design, I really enjoy seeing my works come together in Affinity Publisher while creating my next art collection.
video editing
In order to share my process and behind-the-scenes material, I record making-of videos while drawing and painting.
The process usually takes a couple of hours. Therefore I use different apps to edit, cut and speed up my videos to make them easier to understand and more social media friendly.
I edit most TikTok videos and Instagram Reels on my mobile phone directly through CapCut. For more complex videos I’d use Magix through my PC.
traditional Illustration
Traditional drawing and painting is something that accompanied me for most of my life. Hence, I tried out many different techniques and stuck with most that I have tried out.
A clear favorite trio is the one I use for sketching though: Hahnemühle Nostalgie paper, mechanical pencils (Uni Kuru Toga & Pentel Orenz, the finer the better) and Mono erasers never fail me. I mainly like to use the harder grade pencil leads (B-2H) in sizes 0.2 to 0.5.
As for coloring, every medium has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Various qualities that might be more suitable for one illustration than the other.
For example, if you want to create a solid colored area, it is way easier to use alcohol based markers than watercolor. However, for shapeless structures and textures it is easier to use watercolor instead. Therefore, I really like to mix different media, mostly including:
Watercolors
( Schmincke Horadam, ShinHan PWC, Old Holland, Mijello, Daniel Smith, Winsor & Newton, Jazper Stardust, Prima Marketing, Kuretake Gansai Tambi, [Finetec pearlcolors] )
Although I started to introduce watercolor as one of my main mediums to my technique only a few years ago, it really grew on me for it’s versatility.
It is easy to blend, creates nice texture, enables subtle color changes and transparent layers and offers an extremely big color range. With a basic set of only a handful of colors you can create many more. This makes it very budget friendly. The downside of the transparency is that it is hard to get dark & even colors onto the paper and it takes quite a bit of time.
I’m personally quite a collector and not to keen on mixing too much every time. Therefore my watercolor set is definitely on the larger side. As for brands, I do not have a real preference as long as the quality is up to par. Same goes for the brushes I use.
Alcohol Based Markers
( COPIC, ShinHan,
Graphmaster &
Stylefile markers )
I got my first markers back in 2005 in Christmas and never stopped using them since. Markers work way different from watercolors or any other wet medium. What I really appreciate about them, is what the watercolors lack: You can lay down uniform layer of color without streaks if you are using the right technique & paper and the colors are really lush, yet apply transparent. Blendability is great as well.
In contrast to watercolor, you cannot fix mistakes that easily and they require more precision. Most alcohol based markers are quite expensive and you need quite a few of them to get a good starting set with decent possibilities to blend colors. I always would advice artists who want to give a go at them to get a few grays. With those, you can create complete illustrations and test the markers out without making a big investment.
Deleter Kent BK, Lana Bristol, Mondi Color Copy (similar to the others but way cheaper)
Colored Pencils
( Faber Castell Polychromos (allrounder, neither too soft nor too hard) Caran D’Ache Supracolor II ( a little bit harder, therefore great for precision + linearts) )
Colored pencils are great for detailing , subtle color changes and very controlled blending. They can be used to fix areas that show minor flaws. I use them more on dry media drawings than on mixed media drawings as the paper texture shows up too much sometimes to meet my quality standards.
They are also a great tool to create softer looking linearts.
There are many different brands of colored pencils out there and they all show different characteristics and color palettes. Mainly due to this reason, I use quite a lot of brands in combination.
poster colors
I found out about postercolors by reading about Japanese anime studios like Ghibli and the way the create the beautiful sceneries for their animations.
Postercolors can be used in a similar way as watercolors, however, if not used with a lot of water, they are opaque. Postercolors dry mostly matte and you can create an uniform layer of color with them as well. Benefitting from their opacity, you can paint on top of other colors. I really like them for creating backgrounds and fixing mistakes.
The four mentioned mediums above are the core components of my mixed media technique with wet and dry media. However, there are situations where I use even more media like Pan Pastels for larger and light gradients and color shift. Other times, I’m using the same medium, but I apply it with a different way, e.g. with an airbrush. It is also very fun to play with non-traditional art supplies like stamps and washi tape.
As for traditional lineart, I like everything from multiliners, ink, regular ballpoint pens and fineliners. It is important to me to have a variety on hand so I can choose the best combination for each situation.
Draw this again : 10 yrs. later
From time to time, I like to go back and revisit my older artworks and draw them again to see, how much I improved over time.
In this case, I went back to my old Animexx gallery and found this “gem”, which I created in 2009.
At that time I was already interested in digital art, but wasn’t really studying it and just did a handful of paintings like the one on the left for the following two years.
Drawing a similar piece again, I wanted to improve the overall colors, proportions and render everything with more precision.
Starting out
For this redraw, I started out with a rough sketch.
Sketching helps to bring your vision to life and let’s you plan things thoroughly before wasting time and effort. As for painting, the same thing can be done using shapes instead of lines.
I construct the face by keeping the proportions in mind. As for sketching in Clip Studio Paint, I like to use pencils with tilt support.
I only sketched the facial features as I felt more comfortable with blocking the hair in at a later point (Step #1).
I duplicate the sketch and add another new layer in between. I always like to keep a backup copy of the sketch just in case something doesn’t work out and I want to go back.
Introducing some color
I picked a gouache brush and blocked in some first colors on the recently created new layer (Step #2).
The secret to a appealing digital artwork is to keep a nice balance between sharp and soft edges. Referencing photos can help you get a grasp of what kind of colors to pick. One tip that really helped me out is getting to know where to add warm and cool colors. I apply them with the help of a layer in “color” mode with a quite low opacity.
Facial color zones
In addition to that, the face has three facial color zones. If you want to simplify it, you can say that the forehead has a yellow tint, the middle has a reddish tint and blues/grays are prominent in the chin area. If you want to find out more about this, search for “color zones of the face”. I personally really like to emphasize the reds as I think this adds life to the character I’m drawing. Once I was happy with the base, I lowered the opacity of the sketch layer and fused it with the base (Step #3). The next steps is to get rid of the last traces of the sketch by blending.
About highlights and shadows
Highlights and shadows not only reveal the light source, but tell you about things such as texture as well. My favorite places to highlight are the cheekbone, the eyes and the cupid’s bow. I often use an airbrush which is particularly noisy in combination with an “add glow” layer on low opacity (Step #4).
Adjusting the image
If you feel like the color combination is too gray looking, create a new layer in “saturation” mode and fix the issues using a soft regular airbrush. Once I’m done with corrections like these, I merge the layers together and mostly work with only this one layer at a time. While working on the “saturation” layer, I like to add a highlighting border to some parts of the skin with a high contrast between the shadow and mid-tone border. You can see some very saturated neon red lines I created with this technique. The saturation of the underlying colors in- or decreases depending on how saturated the color on the “saturation” mode layer is. If you want to brighten things up, you can simply take a very bright red, blue or whatever saturated color to make it more neon and a grayish color to tone down too saturated areas. If you feel like the effect is too strong, simply turn down the opacity of the saturation layer.
Painting the hair
With the skin mostly done, I proceeded with the hair. Using a large pressure sensitive brush, I painted the masses of hair in general first. This acts as a guide for me to sketch in some lines a new layer. Working with a new layer lets you add color to your main layer without ruining the lines. Once I placed my shadows and lights on the main layer, I merge it with the hair sketch layer and start blending and adding individual strands of hair so that the hair doesn’t seem chunky and more lively and ruffled (Step #5).
As the color of the hair was too ashy for my taste, I started to play around again with “saturation” and “color” mode layers. I added some warmth to the center while decreasing it at the sides.
Devil in the detail
Everything you can do to make it look more 3D without too much trouble is extremely valuable.
As the old drawing only featured the loads of shaggy hair and blood streaming down because of me trying to hide my inabilities, I didn’t necessarily wanted to do a revisited copy of what I did before. Due to this reason I opted to go for a bloody scratch instead of a bloody eye.
In the last step, I additionally darkened the ear as it stood out way too much.
I created the fur with the help of a fur brush from the material catalog and later erased it partially with a watercolor brush to make the borders feel a bit more organic and less artificial.
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