Alright, so I’m a couple of days late with my post for this week, but I promise you it was worth the wait. This project took me over 8 hours to complete, and is the best drawing I have ever done in my life (which is funny when I consider how many times I’ve spent more than 20 hours on a painting/drawing and it didn’t look nearly as good…).
Today I decided to not only show you the finished drawing, but to show you the process that I used to do it, from start to finish. This isn’t so much a tutorial as a “making of” post since I’m really inexperienced using pencil crayons for realism. There are other artists out there who can explain how to do this way better than I can.
The first thing I did was draw an outline. I don’t have a photo for this, though, seeing as you can see the outline in some of the photos already. It’s basically just to get the idea and basic shapes down on paper before diving in head first. After that, no matter what style I’m drawing or painting, I do the skin tone. I’ve always done it this way.
This tends to take a while…
Next I do hair. It didn’t take as long in this drawing as the skin did, but only because there’s not much there.
When the skin and hair were both done, the only thing left to do was his wing. I did each individual feather separately, so it took a while to finish.
So after a couple of hours colouring and detailing feathers, I finally finished it. I’m actually really happy that it only took 8 hours. I expected to be working on this for most of the weekend, so it went a lot faster than expected.
And here is the finished product:
In case you’re wondering, it’s my character Jamie from my book (Guardians). It was all done using Prismacolor pencils on a 14×22 inch sheet of posterboard. There will be another one of these featuring my character Julian, although it may not be done for a little while.
Hope you enjoyed seeing my creative process! I’ll get back to some tutorials very soon – I’m working on a couple right now.
Creating a Mess 