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Drawing Anatomy and Cel Shading – My Process Video and Brushes!
🕑 Added 2025-08-01 14:00:01 +0000 UTCHey, quick news, my boards are temporarily hidden by Pinterest. If you can't see the pins, it's not your account. Pinterest flagged these boards as "potentially unwelcome" and hid all content. I'm working on fixing it. Thanks for your patience, I’ll update soon.
Now here are some thoughts about my last practices!
Climbing
In this practice I was focused on nailing those anatomic shapes through drawing, aiming to make a synthesis out of all the muscle silhouettes as well as the shading. The main reference had a light coming from the back, creating a rim light on the left side of the body. Then the front of the body had slight shading, and finally the right, closer to the mountain, shows the darkest version of the shadow. This, roughly speaking, is how I split the shadows for this particular case. Yet I did not want to have two levels of shadows, so I decided to move the light coming from the back a bit forward so half the body would be illuminated and the other would have the main shadow. I did play around adding different tones and shadows in some spots, but in the end I decided that less is more. That's the direction I’m lately taking.
Rock band
This was supposed to be a very quick drawing practice but it really got haywire. I wanted to make something more expressive with the singer’s face but I had no idea what to do. In the process video you will find all my attempts to fix this quickly. Eventually I got into a dark kind of mood in contrast to the cheery energy the character in the back had. When you are stuck with a face, think of one feeling, like happiness or anger, and search for actors that often play these roles. This trick will help you define a character's personality quickly and get a reference to nail that expression straightforwardly as well. The render I kept simple due to the high amount of information the drawing already had.
Pills
Another hard drawing practice, but this time more tedious than skill demanding. The challenge here was to pump the volume out of those pills without a high amount of different values. Similar approach to the climbing exercise, it’s about imagining what position the light can be in to define some key shapes on the focal points of the composition, then leaving the rest very simple for balance and harmony.
Banana
So I challenged myself to make this picture more complex than it looks, yet with less realistic information. The key to simplifying reality the way I did this time is to define the shadow with one tone and put extra care into the shadow silhouette, like I did inside the banana peel. It looks real but not at the same time. I was struggling to keep the way I did at the end because I felt it really needed more values, but eventually it turned out well.
Dancer
Face expression + hands, one of my old tricks to get traction in social media. I just don't know why, but people really like these combinations. I hesitated to try this reference in the past because it did not have high contrast lighting, no hard shapes, no great darks or clear highlights. But since I'm changing quite a lot the references, I felt comfortable approaching this practice. I did push the gesture a bit more towards the right to make it feel a bit dynamic, and finally kept the same light position but boosted the contrast a bit more.
Tree
I was curious how this latest art direction would look in an intricate landscape reference. Often I aim to capture the realism using textured brushes, making the practice almost similar to the real picture. But for this case, I wanted to use big, clear, and clean shapes to cover the details from the tree. To some degree I was doubting if this was a good idea, as it looked a bit too cartoonish for my taste, but once I added the shadows and highlights it went the way I liked. I guess this cell-shading style combined with dark shadow tones turns the mood a bit more serious. That was the goal, since the reference feels a bit gloomy.
Practices 50-51 Process video: https://youtu.be/D0iUVXFSypM
Brushes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wHu8wuEHjDk-VfnZqv8iy8rwnvu8Ngmj?usp=sharing
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Welcome to all new patrons. Remember you can now pre-order my book Life in Every Sketch on the 3DTotal shop.
https://rebrand.ly/The-Art-of-RamonN90
Please let me know if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help with art advice or book details.
