I decided to create a digital character and see how far I could go in a drawing tutorial. First a little sketching. Then some line cleanup. Lay over some lineart. Erase the sketches beneath. Add details. Add color. Do cell style shading. I don’t get how professional digital artists pull that off in 6 hours. I worked on this guy for 6 hours and I was able to get the lineart done only. Now at 11 o’clock, I’m yawning too much to even see my keyboard. Since I’m on break, I want to see how far I can take him. Maybe I’ll even add a background.

When drawing or painting, the artist has a boatload of choices. Painters can choose between watercolor, acrylic, and oils. Sketchers can use graphite pencils, regular pencils, or go straight to pen. Digital artists can use a mouse, tablet, or pen tool. You can even combine different tools. For instance, you can start off with graphite pencils on drawing paper, then scan the drawing with a really good scanner, and then use the pen tool to replace the rough sketch with smooth lines. You can even print out a piece of digital art, fix a mistake, and then scan the image again.

There are lots of different approaches to all the different effects that artists go for when drawing. For instance, when using a traditional medium like a graphite pencil, you can cross-hatch, make short dabs with the pencil, or you can make really short sketch-marks. With digital art, you can fill certain parts of the picture with a shade of grey or a darker shade of a particular color, or you could use screentones. Some of these techniques are faster, while other techniques are felt to be faster for some artists. There’s really no rules with what you use and different methods can be combined.

I got this whole blockhead man thing going. By drawing the head initially as a box, I just might be able to draw a 3D head. Getting the box 100% right isn’t a big deal, since you’re going to erase the box anyway if you’re using this technique. Really, all the parts of the drafting stage are there simply to give you something to easily expand off of.

Then I drew arms. The arms look out of proportion, but that doesn’t matter because I can always fix it later. I drew what I was going to make a spear or wand. I drew circles where the knees would be, but that’s not so important if you’re not drawing bent legs.

I’m using a tablet by the way. I used to scan drawings that I created using drawing paper and a graphite pencil. Sometimes I drew with a really fine-pointed pen with really black ink so that I could ink the smallest lines. I made sure that I paid a few extra dollars to get a really good pen, so that I wouldn’t be stuck with something that would dry up halfway through a stroke.

After getting the guidelines done, I started crafting the body. With the limbs, I drew two ovals that come together at the joints. I drew an oval for the face on the front of the box and I drew the forehead on the top part of the box. I connected the top and bottom part of the body with curving lines where the waist is at.

Since I’m using a graphics program with my tablet, I’m able to do each step on different layers. Since I really don’t need the guidelines anymore, I deleted the guidelines from the character. Then I started drawing the wingspan. Yesh, he’s going to be an angel (or something).

Then I continued drawing the wings. I’m not all that experienced with drawing wings, but I tried

Next, I started drawing the face. I drew eyes, even though the hair I ended up using completely covered the eyes. But its important to draw all features so that you can more easily draw the features in the right spots on the face.

Then I got lazy and decided to plop hair that I drew earlier and liked on to the head. This hair looks really faded. But don’t worry. I am going to go over that hairdo with a pen tool. You might notice that the face vanished too. No problem! I posted the hair on a separate layer and I can use my trusty eraser tool to erase the part of the hair image that covers the face. Tada!

I also drew a cape for good measure. This was done with curving lines that curve outwards.

I had four other pictures, but I just discovered that there’s something wrong with them. I’ll have to redraw them some other time and add them to this post. For a general idea, I created a new layer. Then I used the pen tool to create paths that I then stroked using the smallest paintbrush. This is done by clicking on one point to create a vector, and then clicking where you want your line to end and holding. You can then move your mouse around in order to give the line a curve. I guess theoretically you could draw the entire character this way, but I found that characters drawn this way always end up distorted for some reason. So I’ve been drawing each individual curve instead. I then went to the lower layers and erased the messier lines beneath.

As you can see, I also added clothes and details to the wand. This guy is almost ready to be refined, shaded, highlighted, and colored. But there was one last thing I wanted to fix for today. For some reason his hand was abnormally large and his feet looked kinda on the large side. But no fear! I used my trusty lasso tool to create a selection that I wanted to resize. Then I clicked and held the box in the bottom-right corner and dragged the mouse towards the center of the selection until the hand was the size that I wanted. I rinsed and repeated for the feet.

So there ya have it. He’s not exactly perfect. If you squint, you can see all kinds of problems with his legs. He’s not exactly looking realistic yet, but I’m going to keep working on him to the extent of my abilities, maybe even give him a name.

Till next time, I bid thee adieu

Alex

Tags: angel, Art, character, drawing, fantasy, figure, halberd, sketch, sketching, staff, wand, wing, winged, wings