Basic advice:

• Don’t be afraid to use references (from real life examples)

• when shading, it’s best to shade with slightly dark colors but never straight up black/gray unless you’re FULLY rendering in greyscale first!

• Anatomy can be broken down into basic shapes such as cylinders and boxes!

• when shading, first treat what you’re shading like a basic 3D shape before worrying about shading the extra details.

More Advanced advice:

• when you’re doing full scenes, pay attention to the color “hierarchy” and how that draws the viewers attention, a piece with primarily cool colors (blues), if you add a small amount of a warm color (red), that red will draw the viewers focus/attention giving them the impression that it’s supposed to be the focus of the scene!

• focus on details that are meant to be in the actual focus of the piece, the more detail something has the more “in-focus” it would be in real life, as if you look at something in real life in the distance you notice that it has significantly less detail than it would close up.

• with rim lighting, rim lighting is ALWAYS going to be touching the darkest shadow in the piece, opposite of the light source.

• both soft and hard shadows/light exist, so don’t be afraid to use a softer brush and harder edge brush! But look at real life references to understand how to properly use them both. There is usually never just one or the other in a setting though unless it’s specific circumstances.

• anatomy, it can easily be broken down into three different repeating shapes. Boxes, ovals, cylinders!!

• although the spine ends halfway down the human body the line of action connected to it goes down to the foot, when drawing if you’re struggling with a pose try to extend that line of action! It will help and also make the pose more dynamic.