I’ve had a bunch of people emailing me to ask about how I draw these things, so this week I decided to take a bunch of screenshots while I worked and paste them all together for you. While I was at it, I decided I’d do one on cleaning up line art too, because “lock transparent pixels” and “load channel as selection” are the two coolest things photoshop does.
While I was at it, I remembered two other tutorials on anatomy I did a couple years back that have been making the rounds on the internet that I may as well post up here. Remember guys, these are for character design. I keep seeing people posting them as though they’re work out guides, but they’re not. I am not a personal trainer, I’m just a cartoonist. I just got sick of seeing people drawing identical hulking characters with 14 abs apiece.
So yeah, here’s four things on how I draw those thing wat I do. If they help you out, that’s super.
Discussion (79) ¬
Its like what I do but much smarter and faster.
And better.
A lot better… XD
Ow my feelings.
“Lock transparent pixels” and “Load channel as selection”… I think I see what you did there.
Hahaha I have you tutorial on my dics for few years :D I didn’t even know it was your work until you post this.
I tried to draw faces your method, and even been good with that… I wish to have more time to practice.
Nice. Thanks for doing this.
Informative and quite full of detail! And I’ll never say you did this is short time. I am sure it took awhile. I love the colorful muscles in musculature/character design section. XD Good work!
The one on musculature has been around and is pretty popular. Especially the “Mr.Universe vs Strongman” part :).
Bloody awesome!
holy fucking shit
YOU are original poster of these tutorials?
I’ve been seeing them everywhere for months/years (2 years? more? don’t remember)
obviously /co/ masturbates to them vigorously.
Yeah, somebody told me once that they wanted to learn to draw but they didn’t know where to start, so I started a thing on how to draw easy faces then just kinda went nuts with it.
ahhh, 4chan loves passing around that musculature ‘mister universe’ form vs function bit – I’ll try to put in a link for you next time I see it. nice!
There’s a MUCH easier way to convert a flat line-art into a transparent layer, and you don’t have to lock transparent pixels or deal with white halos or whatever.
Just take your layer, select all and “copy” it.
Go to channels, hit “new channel” at the bottom, and “paste” your layer into the channel.
Invert the layer (so the black is white, and white is black). Then select ONLY this channel, and “load as selection”.
Then create a new layer, and fill in your selection with black, using the fill tool.
It will create a perfect transparent copy of your layer, with proper aliasing and no white halo.
It also looks like it’s about half the steps from your method, and you don’t have to mess with locking transparent pixels or opacity.
If you have any questions about this method e-mail me! I guarantee it’ll save you some time.
I dunno, that doesn’t really sound like it takes any less time, this is just a couple seconds. It just seems longer because I’m explaining a couple different fixes if you’re trying to remove colour from the lines or if the initial line art you’re trying to mess with is coloured instead of flat black, and I go through it in excruciating detail for people who aren’t familliar with the tools. This is more like three fixes for different problems mashed together in one walkthrough, cleaning up black lines, cleaning up coloured lines, and removing coloured sketches from black lines.
Seriously, it’s just duplicate > load channel selection > delete > lock > colour. Five clicks to clean lines.
“Coloured”? Since when are you British?
Since never, I’ve always been Canadian.
Okay, this is absolutely fascinating.
I keep coming across stuff that makes me want to pick up drawing.
Whoa whoa whoa, Klayton (aka Celldweller) is a good body reference? And other people listen to Celldweller? Fshyeah.
So im recommending these tutorials to my art teacher if you dont mind.
You read my email :D
Whoa. This is insanely detailed. I never would have realized you had such a grasp of the ancient drawing techniques… (derp)
This just makes me respect you even more, and NOW I know why is your art so good.
I will never to be able to draw anything else besides stick figures :(
I read your blog and your tutorials on drawing people like two weeks ago. It’s where I learned to draw faces with more variety. I love you
Ahaha. You know, I always wondered… your muscle tutorial is excellent, but how do these muscles look on a female body? Whether simply toned or on a really muscular woman?
I don’t draw women enough to claim to be any kind of authority on them, so I don’t even try. I mean like, I know how to draw women and all, but I don’t feel like I have any business telling other people how to. I guess just remember that women veeeeery rarely bulk up like men do unless they’re on some sort of supplement specifically for it, and their bodies cling to body fat more so they don’t get the same definition.
Do what I do and just throw muscles at the body until it is Liefeld enough to be TRUE ART.
It works, and is how every artist ever should do it.
Yay, a birthday present for me~ Thanks :D
I am not an artist, and the “structure” and “musculature” guides were no less fascinating for that. Thanks for putting these up. : )
Awesome tutorials.. I always had trouble with faces but now i think i see what i did wrong.
Ahahah, I make no claims that my way is the “right” way to draw faces, it’s just what works for me :P
Well it works for me too… tried it out soon after writing that and made a face i actually liked
You know what I truly love about this? I love that you know about human anatomy, and you put it into your art as well. I love that none of it is fake. I know so many artists who don’t know what they are doing. I went to school with someone who wrote a webcomic (of which I will not mention names here) who just does not know what said individual is doing. But this is neither here or there. I will say this, I will use your tutorials to help better my art as I still suck, lol…
And now I have no more excuses to draw blobbish arms. Oh well!
That being said, I absolutely love the emphasis put on various body types. It something I both admire and am terrible at doing.
What I find it rather amusing that your musculature tutorial debunks a lot of body-building myths. As a former rower who’s never really seemed to get the muscle definition I wanted from all those workouts, it was a rather informative and helpful from a body image perspective.
your lineart tutorial is excessivly long winded for such a simple procedure:
1. double-click BG Layer, click OK
2. Select> colour Range – click colour you want to get rid of, slide the bar till the preview is of everything you want to get rid of and click OK
3. press delete
4. if there is residue of the colour you were getting rid of, repeat with a different bar setting
ta-da!
20-30 seconds at best
I explained it in as much detail as possible for people who aren’t familliar with the program. Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and there are a lot of things in photoshop that can intimidate new people. I just try to second guess variables that could trip people up. Like they say, whenever you’re explaining something software related, pretend you’re trying to teach your grandmother how to do it.
Since I can’t afford Photoshop, is there any chance of a Gimp translation?
Never touched the program, sorry to say.
The “repeat with a different bar setting” part makes your method take way longer than it needs to.
Oh. My. GAWD. Thank you <3
I love you.
<3
Your lineart tutorial has saved me a ton of work on a project I’ve been working on where I needed to be able to do exactly that. Thank you so much!
If nothing else, the “This is the body of a guy that fights bears on a mountain” comment made me feel pretty good about myself.
The only reason to work at 300 dpi is if you’re planning to print the comic you’re making.
Monitors increase in resolution over time too, you know, in 5 years time it might be nice to be able to put up non-thubnail sized comics up
I’m not an artist myself at all, but I always enjoy reading stuff like this.
You’re awesome!
I’ve seen these tutorials (and the introduction of Jared) floating around for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve been on your site really. These tutorials are awesome, and so is your comic.
Wow. I have to say, the musculature tutorial really helped me. I’ve been drawing a webcomic for a couple of months now, and looking back at my earliest drawings, I was really just wingin’ it. Now I actually sort of have an idea of how muscles stack up.
Excellent anatomy talk, Coela. I like the clear color-over-monochromatic style, and the simple yet easy-to-see sweeps of the muscles.
I like muscles. They’re so fluid. And you address them quite well in a way that’s easy to take in and to read.
I really enjoyed your tutorials but there was one thing that I couldn’t grasp. You say you use a regular hard round brush and yet I see that you manage to render these excellent tapering lines (as best seen on the Commander’s chest). I use the same kind of brush and have tried and tried but I can’t seem to recreate the same effect. All I seem to do is make a really flat line throughout the drawing, giving it a coloring-book look. How do you do it?
A good tablet, I guess? Just gotta make sure your tablet drivers are all up to date and you have “shape dynamics” turned on in the brushes menu, with “size jitter” set to )% Control: pen pressure.
The rest is just being patient with it, not pressing too hard all the time.
I’m wondering…what sort of tablet do you use?
An Intuos 6×8″ at the moment, but I recently bought a cintiq 21UX. It’s what I use at work and it’s a lot faster because it’s basically a monitor you draw on.
Whoa…this is so helpful! I love how well science and art go together, the musculature bits are a fantastic example of that. :D
I thank you so much for these.
Looking at the “comic process” one, is it much easier to do that? because I simply make a layer for understructure, turn down the opacity as if I had a sheet of paper over it to trace it, make a new layer for the definite lines (occasionally this is where I choose to do the line art, too), make a layer underneath the line art and use the base colors, and then make a layer over that and do the “cel shading.” That’s usually how I do it. ^^;
And by the way, your “abs” reference is something I found very helpful and refer to whenever I need to when I get the time to draw manly characters. ^^ Thank you very much for posting that one!
If you do the clipping mask, it’s impossible go “outside the lines” so to speak when you do the colours and shading. Shading takes like ten minutes on a page like this working that way, you can just swipe it in. And if you want to add gradients to the characters, it makes it so much easier than trying to clip them into shape after the fact. Seriously, I used to do stuff the way you’re talking about, but as soon as I tried this out I never looked back, it’s just so fast and easy. Especially if you aren’t sure what colours you want to use, keeping them on separate layers over a mask lets you change them as much as you want and drop shadows on them in a couple seconds.
Hmm.. Since you put it that way..
I attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and I’ve had about.. oh roughly around 3 to 5 instructors that teach us the clipping mask and none of them know how to dumb it down enough like you did for me. (In fact, they just said “and use the clipping mask” as if we were born with the know-how.) I’mna give it a shot once I get into the jig of this new quarter coming up and see how that works. Chances are, I’m more than likely gonna find ’em easier like they are for you. Thanks for that tip. ^^;
AHH thanks so much for that! I have been playing around/experimenting with photoshop with your line art tutorial – it’s a godsend! :D
thankyou! by far these are the most detailed tutorials ive seen.
helped lots with the body shape and structure, ive never been too great at that.
i love you.
Anorexic nudes in post-chemotherapy procedure is the best I’ll ever be able to draw.
But damn thats a nice tutorial. My art teachers I’ve had through grade school could never explain it that well. They just take a look at the shit I throw out onto the assembly line and stamp a C- on it, claiming they knew what real art was with a BA in it.
Thanks for posting those awesome tutorials! They’re really well thought out and put-together.
This is the best set of tutorials I’ve EVER SEEN. It makes me want to try to make a comic strip and then cry in the corner when I find I still suck at drawing. :<
Woah, these are yours? I only recently (a couple weeks ago) found this comic, and have been loving it ever since, but I’ve been unknowingly using your tutorials for nigh on a year now. So I guess now I know who to thank for making them. Your efforts are much appreciated, and it’s probably safe to say my understanding of anatomy wouldn’t be where it is today if I hadn’t had your muscle charts and explanations to draw from.
So thanks very much.
I read this and just came away with “I am really gifted at writing.” Whether you intended that or not.
I also came away with “and Tim Buckley has no excuse.” I hope you intended that one.
In all seriousness, for the quality of art (not to mention humor) of your comic, I’m amazed at how often you can churn out material. You’re not one of the most frequently updating sites, of course, but you update far more often than I would expect for how great it looks and how much work apparently goes in to it.
And I know you have a day job. . .
You spend entirely too much time staring at mens bodies.
Dohoho, see what I did there? I questioned your sexuality because I wish I could draw hands. Or arms. Or straight lines.
What? Coelasquid is a woman. She can look at male bodies as much as she pleases and there is nothing you can do.
Really, I could still look at male bodies as much as I wanted if I was a guy.
I’m thinking you failed at your plan.
I’ve never been one to think through the possible setbacks of my plots.
Might be the reason most of them fail.
Never let the failure of a plot stop you from enjoying it.
Holy mother of cod, I love you long time, you have no idea how much this has helped me.
Wow what awesome tutorials! I love your descriptions and explanations too.
D: I LOVE YOU COLASQUID!!!!! <333 Seriously it was so nice of you to help us all out on muscles and stuff…i didnt even know some of the muscles even EXISTED until you showed me. xD
This is mighty interesting. It’s nice to see your workflow, but as a 3D artist the muscle part is currently the most interesting for me. With this I can define characters a bit better. If I ever get to model them with a bare torso…
Extremely helpful. I have a friend who wants to draw more and asks me for things like this. I was going to give him your anatomy tutorial (which I’ve used) but couldn’t find it. Now I look and there’s even more!
Thanks from both of us.