Using Video Tutorials to Broaden Your Art Techniques

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 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.

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 then spend more time running various filters and other techniques to liven a finished digital piece that could’ve been achieved much faster 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:

This character’s main color palette is actually purple; so applying what I observed in the color basics video, and in another purple-shaded videohere.

I was excited to take Ahmed’s color harmony theory and apply it with my coloring style:

The skin I could figure out pretty easily, since both tutorial videos really focus on mixing the colors to great a cool/warm/cool base as you build up the tone, but as I got into the hair, that concept pretty much fell through for me; and I was fudging my way through the clothing as I leaned less on the video material and more on my own style, relying on the color palette I established at the beginning. Overall, I think it turned out well; and I look forward to incorporating some of the principles I learned about color harmony palettes to a future piece

I encourage anyone who is learning digital coloring; or anyone who feels stuck in a rut to go explore the great tutorials and content out there. Follow another artist's path for a piece to expand your horizon and grow. I hope you found this article interesting, and that it inspires you to try something new.