Absolute Anime

Ah, alright. Layers are helpful, although in this scenario I'm not sure they'd do you a whole lot of good. Personally, I hate the blur tool. I'd say stay away from it when doing colored pieces, because it'll just make it look fake.

The best way to merge is to set the strength of the dodge/burn tools down to somewhere between 5-15% and do it gradually. It's automatically set on 50%, if I'm not mistaken, and a lot of people don't know you can change it. All you have to do to tweek the strength and opacity is to click the dodge or burn tool, and a palette will appear at the top of the screen (You'll see your brush sizes and types here), and you can play with the opacity and strength. Put it down way lower, because 50% is too much for those gradual blendings.

Ooooo okies. I will have to install Photoshop again cause I recently formatted my laptop

Definitely, it's addicting once you realize how well it makes your artwork stand out, and how simple it is to grasp wen you get the hang of it. It really makes everything look professional.

Yeah, I've seen some pics online which have been edited through Photoshop. I wish I knew how to use photoshop.

have you looked at my pictures slash? could you tell me how i could improve on them?

I took a look at them. They're great, I see what you mean with the shadow effect, I'm actually still trying to work that into my pictures. But I notice they're a bit wavy so may want to use something to make them less wavy I guess. Colours are good, pretty bright, but I'm guessing you weren't going for a dark theme for it. Your figure on your people is good, some are a bit small, others have weird shaped shoulders and such, but overall I think it's great. Not much more I can say right now, Will have more of a look when I'm more awake lol.

Hheheh okies thank you (^^) I know I need to work on stuff, I'm actually drawing right at this very moment in time hehehe, trying to make body shapes look more realistic

They all looked pretty good to me. Some pointers I would suggest is getting to know and understand gesture drawings. Most of your drawings are pretty linear, in that they all have a similar stance or frontal complex. I did the same with my drawings, until my teacher taught me to do a rough gesture drawing first, to get anatomy and, well, gesture, down on the paper before any details are added. Am I right to assume that the first thing you do is pick a point, probably the head, and work your way down, filling all the details as you do so?

Gesture drawings are to be done very, very, VERY lightly in pencil, as literally all of these marks will be erased.

I thought it was one of the BS art terms that everyone tells you to do, but it doesnt seem essential. I thought the same, until I saw how it helped make my characters look more realistic and less like robots. It makes everything flow a lot nicer.

http://www.mmwindowtoart.com/gesturedrawing.html

That's a brief overview on gesture drawings. I would ALWAYS use gestures from real photos until you get in the habit of establishing gesture and good anatomy practices. I started out using Lars Frederiksen as a model for my character for a few years, and sometimes still even do.

Other than that, you're doing wonderful. I epsecially love the kitty and wolf one, that one is sweet! I can tell you put a lot of time into that one.

Okies I will take a look at that site. At the moment, I do the manquins (like the sausage shapes) to map out the position of my drawings. i have some more recent ones i havent scanned yet, but will do soon, i think they are better. and thank you for the help (^^)

Yeah I actually only just started doing that last year cause I was made to in my drawing class >_>. It does work well I must say

I need help in drawing hands. I draw them horribly! I try to hide them in any way!

And I have a question in photoshop..I am also noob in using it. I can't even use a single tool properly T_T I have a scanned drawing but it's in pencil. Do I have to ink it or not so that I can color it once I've learned how to.

What I suggest for drawing hands is look at some books of people and look at their hands and copy their hands a couple of times, eventually you should get used to it.

As for the photoshop question, probably better Slash answers that, but I don't think you have to ink it....O.o

What about anime hands?

When I say books of people I don't necessarily mean real people, any person will do. Just so long as they're detailed hands It should help with doing hands more detailed for anything really be it anime, cartoon or real life drawing.

Ohhh...ok

Thanks

No probs. Hope it helps