How to broaden your knowledge base with art tutorials
So, this week I want to talk about finding and applying art tutorial videos. There are a lot of great places to watch, observe, and learn from fellow amateur and professional artists. A lot of people set up lifestreams and video tutorials to showcase their style and knowledge. Today I’ll focus on Ahmed Aldoori (www.youtube.com/channel/UCDyqxplQ3PQcCJhEW-GLgXg) from YouTube.
He has a fantastic way of coloring and shading—which he has posted videos to walk through his process; I found his basics video with how he develops color harmony palettes to work with. It was a technique I have used intuitively a few times, but I was a looking for a challenge: to mimic his signature palette, where he uses red and blue to base color his pieces: (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh12RA3ha0U).
As an artist, this is a great exercise in expanding your knowledge and developing your skills. Coming from a cel-shading base knowledge, I found a lot of his color combination and stair-step color picking tips very useful, as sometimes I find my colors landing kind of flat when I attempt more vibrant pieces. I usually then spend more time running various filters and other techniques to liven a digital piece that could’ve been achieved sooner if I applied such tips to my palette choices from the beginning.
Now, I must warn you before I showcase my results that my shading technique is a far cry from his painterly skills, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pieces of his process (mainly his palette and color-combining concepts) to apply to my own work and learn something new by working of someone else’s’ process. So, here it is. It begins with a line art piece:
