ramonn90

Turning Real References into My Style – My Process Video and Brushes!

Added 2025-08-08 15:13:34 +0000 UTC

Hi there, quick update on my Pinterest boards. It’s been a week since I started contacting Pinterest daily, but I haven’t received any response or solution to my board issue. For those unaware, my boards are temporarily hidden by Pinterest. If you can’t see the pins, it’s not your account, Pinterest has flagged these boards as "potentially unwelcome" and hidden all content.

I’m concerned that if my situation doesn’t improve, I may have to stop offering this option to you. So please, if you are having this same problem, report the issue to Pinterest: https://help.pinterest.com/en/contact

I’ll wait another week, but given the effort from the Pinterest team so far, I’m not optimistic about a resolution. Let’s hope I’m wrong. I’ll provide an update soon.

Here are some thoughts about my latest practices.

Tuna Nigiri
This practice was a simple warm up, the best to take out of this is how to define hard shadow shapes (cell shades) out of not very sharp shadow silhouettes, as you can see in the tuna surface from the reference, I hustled a little into finding out what spots of the tuna would have this very distinctive shadows and what spots would have the local color or base tone. Since the lighted spot in the reference was the corner where the highlight is, I've decided to leave the base tone as dark as a shadow and focus on capturing reality through the little highlights, after this was done, I felt comfortable enough to change the actual practice by adding that shadow I mentioned in the beginning only in one of the sides. These answers come along the process, I don't really know how to approach these translations into simple shadows but by trying.

Geisha
This practice surprisingly has been one of my favorites so far, I guess it's been a while I don't do characters and by choosing a reference in which the woman was performing a simple but authentic act, felt like special. Can't put my finger on what exactly I liked about it but what's important for you to take out of this process is my approach when capturing very intricate fold shapes with loose and curved lines in the beginning. While I watch the reference I try to guess the relation of shapes in terms of distance, like if I make a line that defines the elbow, I use the elbow in the reference to guess the position of other parts of the body, this way I roughly can build a fair base of shapes for later be refined. When trying this, keep it simple and loose, it might not look perfect but remember your first goal is to stroke those awkward shapes as rough guides.

Box Gloves
What's in here to take is how realistic you can render folds with shadows instead of lines, while in the reference you can see very clearly black leather folds that a good drawing will define, I chose to make most of that information with shadows, these layers unlike line art can be adjusted in more directions, whether smoothing its silhouette to create volume or changing within the tone through darkening the color, this is just a different way to play with contrast and edges.

Seal
A little meme to have fun while warm up, more and more I kept finding references where the shadow does not behave like a simple cell shading anime sort, in this case, I applied this shadow to part of the seal body under the water and use a very peculiar highlight to boost that fur material these animals have, I say peculiar because it has different brightnesses and transparencies, for instance you could see the seal head through the light, but you could not see the tail, this seems silly and simple and I think coming into details like these increases your understanding on how reality is, in this case, the light reflecting on the water simultaneously in an animal with these characteristics.

Cleaning
I wanted to draw and paint a character while working, so I chose this model from a magazine which it was "cleaning". When doing practicing with reference in which there's a person, I like to make little tweaks from time to time, those changes spark later ideas I can connect while drawing or painting, like the vacuum cleaner with an elephant like head and the elephant pattern in the dress. I guess this is a form of "playing" in which I practice more than technique but creativity.

Chair
I've saved this reference a long time ago but I hesitated to try because it was way too boring. I liked the red and the values on the materials but lacked something more, so I simply pushed the perspective a bit far by eye at first but later on the line, by using the perspective brush from my set. There's use in trying simple challenges, for me, it pushed me to think harder into how I can make something ordinary a little bit interesting to look at.