Tipping Is Compulsory

 
 

In the drag community, art is everywhere. Makeup is art, making clothing and costumes is art. However, fan art is becoming more and more popular. Chad Sell does amazing weekly drawings of queens, based on the week's drag race episode. More and more fans want to draw and paint queens. So, I have enlisted the help of three amazing artists from Twitter:
Mollie @molollolie
Ellie @strayheartmike
And
Ella @lxvenderblondex

Together, they have compiled a list of tips for any aspiring artists, particularly drag fans. This list includes a selection of great materials to experiment with, and guidance to help you develop your art skills.

• Tip 1: Keep your first few drawings! It sucks if you throw away your first ones, and keeping them will help you improve later.
• Tip 2: Art shouldn't be tedious. If you start to fall asleep while drawing, or you're sighing every 2 minutes at your art, you should stop. Even if you just take a step back to look at your art, grab a drink and put some music on in the background (Mollie recommends alt-J). 
• Tip 3- Always outline lightly! This applies especially when you're doing pencil drawings. If you end up engraving the page with your pencil, that means you've drawn too hard. If you're painting with watercolour, Ella recommends that you draw your first lines in light blue. This will keep it light and easy to paint over.

  

  An example of the light blue pencil outline- thanks to Ella.

• Tip 4- Attention to detail is key. This one really applies to portraits. If you're drawing a portrait and it looks nothing like the person, keep on adding detail until it does! Using a really sharp pencil should help with this. 

RECOMMENDED MATERIALS:

•  Pencils in various grades. I recommend any of the Faber Castell ones, available to purchase here.
• Ballpoint pens in different colours. You should be able to pick these up from most art supply or stationery store. These are really good for portraits.

  

  Ballpoint pens are great for dynamic tones- thanks to Mollie

• Promarkers, Copic markers and Flexmarkers. The metallic flex markers are really good, and are the cheapest out of the lot. Marker paper also helps the inks to stay still, and not bleed onto each other.
• Watercolours. It's genuinely a personal preference of liquid or palette colours, but Winsor and Newton is the best brand by far. Mollie's favourite is 'Intense Blue'.
• Coloured pencils. Whatever you're doing, you'll probably need different types of pencil crayon. Soft ones give a more intense colour, for portraits that look like ink. Hard ones give finer lines, and create a shinier feel. Prismacolors are soft, and Crayolas are slightly harder.
• Glitter! Ellie has used glitter to create dimension and glitz to her Raja art. No drag queen portrait is complete without glitter!
  

The most important piece of advice is DON'T GIVE UP! If you don't carry on going, you'll never improve. If you produce art because you're passionate about it, even for just a month, you'll see such a huge improvement from your first pieces. Art is such a beautiful thing, and you'll take such pride in creating it.

A massive thank you to Mollie, Ella and Ellie.