Illustration

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  • What Is an Inspiration Board and How to Create One for Your Bullet Journal
    Illustration

    What Is an Inspiration Board and How to Create One for Your Bullet Journal

    Discover this creative technique for organizing your ideas and defining your bullet journaling style When starting a new bullet journal, it can be difficult to kick your creativity into gear. However, certain techniques can guide you in making creative decisions and help you overcome creative block. Creating an inspiration board is a great way to organize your ideas and gather your reference images, says journalist, expert in creative journaling, and creator of the stationery brand Little Hannah, Chris Bravo (@littlehannah) from Madrid. In this post, she shares tips on how to design your own and get the most out of it.

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  • 10 Free Online Watercolor Classes For improving Your Technique
    Illustration

    10 Free Online Watercolor Classes For improving Your Technique

    Discover the techniques used by watercolor experts that will help you achieve unexpected results Watercolor is one of the most ancient forms of painting, and although you don't need advanced tools and materials to start out in this technique, you will require a great deal of confidence and control to achieve the best results in this medium. Following a watercolor painting course can help you master it and explore the possibilities of this technique, which happen by combining water, pigment, and playing with transparency.

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  • Free E-Book: Patterned Tile Coloring Book
    Illustration

    Free E-Book: Patterned Tile Coloring Book

    Unwind and enjoy coloring in different tile patterns with this free e-coloring book Tiles have been around for thousands of years. In fact, their origins date back to the 27th century BC in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (a historical region that today would include most of Iraq and Kuwait, as well as eastern parts of Syria). In this post, we look back on the history of tiles and share a free e-coloring book filled with Portuguese tile patterns, created by studio Gazete Azulejos (@gazeteazulejos).

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  • 12 Free Watercolor Photoshop Brushes
    Teacher Illustration

    12 Free Watercolor Photoshop Brushes

    Explore watercolor and illustration techniques in the popular imaging software using these free downloadable brushes When we think of watercolor, we tend to imagine an artist using paintbrushes. However, there is no limit to creativity, and nowadays, it is more and more common to combine traditional with digital techniques. The magic of watercolor traditionally happens through playing with water, pigment, and transparency. You can also master volume, light, and color through digital programs such as Photoshop. Illustrator and print designer Camino López (@caminolopez) admits that watercolor is a discipline that does not allow for mistakes. You need to be very skillful, and although this is a challenge she likes to take on, she works digitally, as this will enable her to achieve impressive results.

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  • Photoshop Tutorial: Essential Shortcuts to Create Textures
    Teacher Illustration

    Photoshop Tutorial: Essential Shortcuts to Create Textures

    Discover how to use basic keyboard shortcuts to create textures in Adobe Photoshop, with Nicholas Stevenson Adding textures to your illustrations and designs is a great way to give them more personality and depth, and it’s an easy way to take your work to the next level. While the end results are impressive, the process to get there is surprisingly simple once you've mastered a few basic tricks and keyboard shortcuts in Adobe Photoshop. Nicholas Stevenson (@nicholasstevenson) is an illustrator, animator, and university lecturer who is known for creating highly textured and layered illustrations. In this tutorial, he shows you step by step how to use shortcuts in Photoshop to create and manipulate textures.

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  • 18 Free Photoshop and Procreate Drawing Brushes
    Teacher Illustration

    18 Free Photoshop and Procreate Drawing Brushes

    Draw on a daily basis to define your style and unlock creativity with the help of these digital brushes When you start to draw it is as if you are learning a new language but with your hands. Each stroke, line or color is a reflection of your creativity. The best thing is that everyone can venture into this challenge with just a sketchbook or notebook and a little practice every day. For the illustrator Catalina Bustos Mendoza, better known as Catalina Bu (@catalinabu), drawing is a kind of personal manifesto. It's not just perfection or beauty that matters, but the ideas you express through it. In addition, nowadays, it is also important to bring your style to the digital world. This will allow you to refine the results and experiment without limits in the language of your drawing. At the bottom of this post, she shares eighteen digital brushes to experiment with your style.

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  • What Is a Comic Book and What Are Its Main Features?
    Illustration

    What Is a Comic Book and What Are Its Main Features?

    We look at the features and uses of this popular narrative format made up of pictures and words If you want to tell a story, you can be really experimental using a comic format. You can write humor, social commentary, or fantasy, and even tell secrets. You can fit all sorts of genres and ideas into a comic if you know how to exploit it. To evaluate all these possibilities, it is important to understand what exactly is a comic, and what are the main elements it consists of. Once we know this, we can start to structure and organize our messages on the strips. Illustrator and artist Sol Díaz Castillo (@soldiazcastillo) is an expert and explains some of the essential technical notions.

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  • What Is Kawaii art, Japan’s Culture of Cuteness?
    Illustration

    What Is Kawaii art, Japan’s Culture of Cuteness?

    Discover the power of cute and the secret formula behind Japanese kawaii adorable illustration characters The concept of kawaii was born in Japan during the 60s. In just a couple of decades, this idea of "adorability" has spread to all corners of the world, attracting legions of fans. It is difficult to resist smiling at the perfectly designed features of a kawaii illustration but, what does kawaii exactly mean? We spoke to Azul Piñeiro and Carlos Higuera, two designers and illustrators specialized in kawaii illustration and founders of Estudio Kudasai (@estudiokudasai), to learn more about the origin of this term and above all, what is the formula to create kawaii —or extremely lovable— characters.

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  • 21 Free Photoshop Illustration Brushes
    Teacher Illustration

    21 Free Photoshop Illustration Brushes

    Gain speed and ease in illustration by practicing with this series of brushes in different types of exercises In illustration, the first years are essential to gain ease and confidence. The illustrator Del Hambre (@del_hambre) knows this well. He has spent more than 15 years professionally dedicated to this world. Practicing so that your works are unique is the most important thing. Del Hambre, who draws every Sunday in El País newspaper, recommends you put on daily routines with exercises of all kinds. In addition, he also provides you with a series of 21 brushes for Photoshop. The goal is for you to learn to draw immediately and without thinking too much, something that is only achieved when you feel confident illustrating.

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  • Watercolor Tutorial: How to Create Shadow Using Color Theory
    Teacher Illustration

    Watercolor Tutorial: How to Create Shadow Using Color Theory

    Learn the basics of using Color Theory to create shadow in watercolor for beginners, with Sarah Stokes Sarah Stokes is a watercolor artist based in Worcestershire, UK. Known for her animal paintings, she uses tone and shadow to create movement, definition, and texture in her work. When working with color like Sarah, Color Theory is a great tool to use as it illustrates the relationship between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and how to use them together. The color theory tells us that by adding a complementary color to a base color, we can create a darker, more neutral shade, and dull the original base color down. This new shade can then be used to aid composition, depth, and balance when applied as a color to create shadow. In this beginner's tutorial, Sarah Stokes explains how to use a color wheel to find the complementary color to your base color, and how to create a muddier version of this shade to add shadow.

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  • How to Combine Watercolor and Oil to Get the Best Results
    PLUS Teacher Illustration

    How to Combine Watercolor and Oil to Get the Best Results

    Ale Casanova explains how to improve your creations by combining watercolor and oil painting techniques Ale Casanova (@casanova_ale) is a painter and teacher with a degree in fine art. He works mainly with oil paints and watercolor to create striking portraits and nudes. His work has been exhibited in cities across Spain and Europe and has enabled him to build a career as a teacher, carry out workshops around Spain, and develop a technique where color and light become focal points in his paintings. In this exclusive tutorial for the PRO community, Ale challenges what we have always been told: we shouldn’t mix watercolor paints with oil paints given that they are oil- and water-based. He shows us how to combine these seemingly opposing techniques. How? Using an intermediary element. The painter guides us through his process so that we too can mix these techniques and use them to our advantage, no matter our level. He shares tips and helps us to discover new uses for our paints that will give us unexpected results.

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  • Free E-Book: 100 Creative illustrations By Weberson Santiago
    Teacher Illustration

    Free E-Book: 100 Creative illustrations By Weberson Santiago

    ArtBook features vibrant designs by an illustrator who specializes in children’s illustration Aside from lots of practice, illustration is a creative process that requires a vast library of references and influences. It is only then that an illustrator will be able to develop their own style and succeed in capturing our attention with lines and colors. Weberson Santiago (@webersonsantiago) is an illustrator, writer, and teacher who has published several projects and books for children since the beginning of his career. He has worked with major Brazilian and Portuguese publishers, as well as Veja magazine and Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.

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  • The 6 Most Expensive Comics in the World
    Teacher Illustration

    The 6 Most Expensive Comics in the World

    Check out original artwork and first editions of comics that have sold for over a million dollars each The current NFT craze (NFTs are collectible certificates that certify the authenticity and exclusivity of a digital artwork, some of which have been selling for tens of millions of dollars over recent months) grew out of the obsession humans have with owning something unique and special. This, of course, also applies in the world of physical art. In January, the 1936 original Tintin cover for The Blue Lotus–the fifth volume in the legendary comic book series created by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé–sold for $3.84 million. The drawing–painted in gouache, watercolor, and Indian ink–is a much more elaborate version of the final printed cover, including Chinese characters, textures, and other details that were eventually removed. Hergé gave it to the seven-year-old son of his editor at the time, Jean-Paul Casterman, as a gift. It remained "forgotten" in a drawer for decades until it was discovered in the 1980s.

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  • 5 Bullet Journals Accounts that Will Inspire Your Work
    Illustration

    5 Bullet Journals Accounts that Will Inspire Your Work

    Discover some inspiring bullet journal approaches to help you organize your life creatively Bullet journaling is a simple and creative way to help you organize your life. They are also a powerful tool for mindfulness and help you channel your creativity while keeping you centered, grounded, and productive. Annie Weir (@_a_journal_by_annie) is a Scottish artist who specializes in bullet journaling, a craft she discovered by chance on Instagram. Her background is in graphic design, which is where she learned that you could combine words, lettering, and images together on a page to create something striking and meaningful. Bullet journaling turned out to be another happy space for her love of lettering, illustration, and art, so much that she decided to start sharing it online in 2017. She created her first Instagram account, @ajournalbyannie, and quickly became one of the leading voices in the bullet-journaling online community.

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  • Free Guide: How to Draw the Oblique Projection Perspective
    Teacher Illustration

    Free Guide: How to Draw the Oblique Projection Perspective

    Do you want to add volume to your drawings using a simple perspective method? Check out this guide Mattias Adolfsson (@mattiasadolfsson) creates illustrations for magazines like The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, and animation studios like Nickelodeon, Dreamworks, and Disney. His artwork is filled with playful characters and detailed objects. His sketches are intricate, yet he manages to create harmonious and balanced compositions that invite the viewers to observe each little detail up close. Mattias found inspiration in Chinese art and oblique proportion perspective to help him achieve volume in his drawings.

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  • 10 Online Courses For Getting Creative with Botany
    Illustration

    10 Online Courses For Getting Creative with Botany

    Explore the creative possibilities of botany with our experts in illustration, embroidery, and flower pressing Botany has always provided artists with endless inspiration. Whatever your discipline of choice, capturing the beauty of nature is one of the greatest creative challenges you can set yourself. If you like to observe nature’s textures, colors, and shapes, let them inspire you to start creating with your hands. In the following list, you will discover ten online botany courses for beginners exploring illustration techniques, embroidery, and printing on paper or textiles. If you like drawing, you will also find a sketchbook course. For those looking to go a step further, you can even try your hand at designing flower and plant-inspired tattoos. Basic Botanical Pressing Techniques, a course by Happy Green Family Would you like to create unique botanical compositions with flowers? In this course, Camila will introduce you to the world of herbaria and teach you about the history of this practice. You will then learn how to collect and preserve plants and try out different pressing techniques to create a page separator or a picture. The founder of Happy Green Family–a botanical laboratory focused on creativity–will encourage you to embrace her passion for plants and what you can do with them.

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