Note: This site is still under construction.

Hi there, thanks for visiting my blog!

As a self-taught digital artist, I learned a lot from the generous art community sharing their advice and tutorials online for free. I made this blog to give back to the community and help other artists who are struggling to learn on their own. In times like these, it’s more important now than ever to encourage people to learn and make real art.Since there are tons of great free resources and tutorials out there already, I’ll be sharing tips that I personally wish I knew when I was learning digital art.I’ll do my best to keep sharing and uploading helpful content, but updates will be slow because I’m currently busy working on a big project.I’m taking an indefinite break from all social media to focus on my health/family, so if you want to ask me something, feel free to do so on my website’s Contact Me page. (It may take a while for me to get back to you).

Happy drawing (and learning)!

There are a lot of great tutorials for any skill level or art style on YouTube. Your favorite artist might also even have a Gumroad or Patreon where they show/explain their process.The courses are pretty expensive, but I highly recommend Schoolism and Underpaint Academy.

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Photoshop is expensive, but industry standard. It can be a bit overwhelming at first though, so I wouldn't recommend it to beginners.When I was first learning digital art, I used Paint Tool Sai and a Wacom Bamboo Tablet. Procreate on the iPad is also a great option for beginners. I haven't tried Krita, but it's free and I heard a lot of good things about it. Clip Studio Paint is probably the best digital art program; it even has 3D assets that you can use for pose reference.Blender and SketchUp are great for creating 3D assets to help you draw backgrounds/props in perspective. Webtoon artists typically use them to make quick backgrounds.ToonBoom is a 2D animation program; I used it when I was first learning animation. After Effects is good for making 2D motion graphics.Spine 2D and Live2D are great for rigging 2D Vtuber models.3D modeling: Blender, 3ds Max. 3D sculpting: ZBrush. Rigging / 3D animation: Autodesk Maya (very expensive and buggy but industry standard). Painting textures for 3D models: Substance Painter. 3D motion graphics: Cinema4D. VFX: Houdini. Compositing: Nuke. These all have cheaper plans or free versions for students.

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• Legacy brushes

• Perspective Tools V2

Plugin for Photoshop that makes adjustable perspective lines/grids.

• Lazy Nezumi Pro

Plugin for Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint that helps you draw smooth lines. Great for those with shaky hands.

• Coolorus

Plugin for Photoshop. A much better color wheel with more options.

• Colour Constructor

Not a plugin but an app that lets you see what colors look like in different lighting scenarios.

• Advanced Skeleton

An easier way to rig characters in Autodesk Maya.

• ngSkinTools

An easier way to paint weights in Autodesk Maya.

• brSmoothWeights

An easier way to smooth weights in Autodesk Maya.

For studies, I like to roughly block out the forms first, then blur everything and "carve" out hard edges with a hard brush, kind of like I'm sculpting. It's my personal favorite way to paint.Steps (most of the time): Sketch > Block in local colors > Paint light and shadow areas > Shade with standard round brush > Paint ambient occlusion > Blend with mixer brush or airbrush > Blur everything > Paint with hard brush > Slightly blur > Paint with hard brush again > Paint highlights > Cleanup

Drawn in Photoshop and/or Procreate.Sometimes I like to start with a sketch if I want to get more accurate proportions, and other times I just roughly block in the colors and fix the proportions later. My main focus with these studies was to practice the hard-brush painting style, rather than copy the photo exactly. Looking at the works of J. C. Leyendecker inspired me to try this painting style.It's easy to "over-render" with a hard brush, so when that happens I just blur everything and paint over it again. This process can repeat several times until I'm satisfied with the result.In my opinion, rendering is the hardest thing about digital art. Especially for realistic paintings, it can be difficult to find the right balance of hard and soft edges. I used to either paint with too much airbrush or too little. What helped me understand which areas need hard edges and which areas don’t, was to study the face planes and how sculptors sculpt faces.In order for this painting style to not look “messy,” I try to make the brush strokes follow the planes of the face and/or wrap around the form. It's harder to make these brush strokes look "right" on faces with softer facial features though. (You can see that I barely have brush strokes on Jungkook's face, for example). I still need to do some more studies to figure out how to make this work.

Recently I've become very inspired by the works of Chinese artists like Yizheng Ke and Wangjie Li, and their masterful use of textures. The studies below are my attempt at using textures and painting a bit more roughly. I had a lot more fun than I expected with these experiments, and it felt liberating not having to focus on drawing the details. For a few of them (the curly hair and the grayscale portrait), I tried to see what it would look like using both texture brushes and hard brushes. For the other studies, I tried making them a bit more stylized instead of realistic. The reason I’m trying out different things is to figure out my new art style, and also to see what works and what doesn’t. I’m still unsure what I like best, so I need to do more studies.Steps (most of the time): Sketch > Block in local colors with texture brushes > Paint light and shadow areas with texture brushes and airbrush > Paint ambient occlusion with lasso tool and airbrush > Paint with texturey mixer brush > Slightly blur > Paint with texture brushes > Cleanup

For my mutuals' drawing requests (of their OCs), I used a soft texturey brush + mixer brush instead of the hard brush that I usually use. (I'm still trying to figure out how to make the hard-brush painting style look good on semi-realistic drawings.)Drawing an (attractive) face that doesn’t exist in real life but also resembles the original character is a real challenge. Sometimes I spend hours just on the face, fixing it or redrawing it until I'm happy with the result. I'm usually never satisfied though, so this can go on forever…You can see below that the red-haired character’s face changed a few times; In reality, I redrew that face about twenty times before I got to the final result.When drawing semi-realistic faces, often times they can end up looking uncanny. That’s when I look at successful examples of semi-realism for inspiration, like Final Fantasy and BJD dolls; I compare my work to theirs side by side and try to figure out why theirs are working and mine isn’t. Is it the proportions, is the rendering not 3D enough, or are the facial features too realistic-looking or too stylized, etc.

There are times when I just can’t get the drawing to look right no matter how much I work on it. That’s when I just scrap the drawing and start a new one instead of trying to fix it. It does feel like a waste, but it actually saves a lot more time. I hated doing this at first because I get attached to drawings that I spend a lot of time on, but it always turns out better than before.Steps (most of the time): Sketch > Block in local colors > Paint light and shadow areas > Shade > Paint ambient occlusion > Blend with mixer brush > Slightly blur > Shade > Paint highlights > CleanupSketched in Procreate, painted in Photoshop, and refined in Procreate again. I usually just paint in Photoshop when I’m at home, but I like to take my iPad with me everywhere so I can keep drawing.

Some process step GIFs of my (old) fanart. I used an elliptical brush to paint and a mixer brush to blend. I used to be obsessed with the “smooth” rendering style back then, but now not so much.To achieve the smooth rendering style, using a hard brush first and then blending with mixer/smudge or airbrushes is the best way to do it; but you have to be careful not to over-blend or your art will look blurry/washed out.Steps: Sketch > Block in local colors > Paint light and shadow areas > Shade with elliptical brush > Paint ambient occlusion > Blend with mixer brush > Paint highlights > CleanupDrawn in Photoshop.

Some timelapses of my studies. Usually studies take around 1.5-3 hours. Drawn in Procreate and/or Photoshop, recorded with OBS, and sped up with Premiere. (I had to speed these up a lot because this website doesn't allow large video uploads.)

Steps (most of the time): Sketch > Block in local colors > Paint light and shadow areas > Shade with standard round brush > Paint ambient occlusion > Blend with mixer brush or airbrush > Blur everything > Paint with hard brush > Slightly blur > Paint with hard brush again > Paint highlights > Cleanup

I wasn't able to record all my drawings, unfortunately; I always forget to record or couldn't because I don't have enough storage space on my computer. I'll upload process steps for the ones that I wasn't able to record.I plan to later upload a full real-time process video explaining my process in detail on YouTube.

Some timelapses of my fanart, drawing requests, original art, and doodles. It takes me much longer (and a lot more revisions) to draw fanart/original art than studies. Copying is hard, but drawing from imagination or drawing your own interpretation (in your own style) is a lot harder in my opinion. They’re very different skills; Being good at copying doesn’t mean you’ll also be good at original art/interpretations, and vice versa. I still find it challenging to draw 2D characters as if they were 3D characters and also maintain their likeness. Sometimes it even takes me multiple days to finish a drawing and be happy with the result. For a couple of these, I had to combine multiple recordings that were taken on different days. I often forget to record though, so some of the videos don’t show the entire process, unfortunately.Drawn in Procreate and/or Photoshop. Recorded with OBS, and sped up with Premiere.

Steps (most of the time): Sketch > Block in local colors > Paint light and shadow areas > Shade > Paint ambient occlusion > Blend with mixer brush > Slightly blur > Shade > Paint highlights > Cleanup

Some process shorts of my old fanart. I had fun making these at first, but I stopped making them because I spent too much time on filming/editing videos and finding the right background music.Edited in CapCut and Premiere.

If you found any dead links or want to suggest more resources to add to this site, you can do so here. Please note that it may take a while for me to get back to you. Thanks!