Drawing Tips for Advanced Artists

     How's everybody doing? These following tips are for those of us who have been drawing (or painting, sketching, coloring etc.) for a while. Many talented self-taught artists may have missed these little tricks, but no worries! They are easy to incorporate yet make a world of difference.

• You may have heard of the uncanny valley; it refers to the unsettling feeling of something that is almost identical to humankind, yet not. In character design personification tends to make a nonhuman character more likable, but that charming effect suddenly reverses when it becomes similar enough to a real human. People may be unable to tell what is off about the character, but there is an uneasiness to the situation.

1. When you draw a person out in the far distance, their facial features are blurrier than somebody close up. This means that if you keep sharp details in the background, your person can become uncanny. Being slightly off when measuring proportions or rendering realistic colors can lead to the uncanny valley too.
2. Foreshortening is the tendency for objects to shrink in length when they protrude out at the viewer. For example, think of a superhero fighting multiple villains. A fist coming straight out at you will have shorter arm while the other fist would have a longer arm if it was punching to the side of the page. This is a difficult technique to master, but one way to better visualize it is to use the slinky method. Think of the limb being covered by a thin spring for example, the hero's arm. It is closer in some places and further in other places, however, there is also a variation of girth. The more muscular areas of the arm will be thicker than the joints. Picture the spring contouring perfectly to the surface of the arm and just draw the spring. Then you can use this guild line to draw the limb accurately.
3. When professional painters make their masterpieces, they typically avoid using pure black. They usually mix in a tiny bit of other paint to give it a hue of whatever is in the shadow. When creating a realistic and relaxed outdoor setting, subtle shading is a must-know art skill. Try to add some color to white paint as well. 
4. If you look up a picture of a ball or sphere shaded you may notice that a shiny one may have a sliver of light on the darker side while a matte one may just fade to black. In extreme lighting, there can be many layers of light and dark, and many highlighted edges. You can add light to the edges of objects to make them look more realistic. This technique is called rim lighting, and a heavy handed approach works best for art which is very dramatic, dark (dimly lit), or art that wants to emphasize the contours of an object. It can improve other types of art too, just be a bit more subtle.