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PINKSIE THE TUTORIAL

The last project was fun and it included quite a few new things I hadn’t done before, and not just trying to figure out how to draw “soft-looking-fur”. So I guess this will show a tutorial on how to be a talentless bad “artist” just like me! Really, this is just to show you my process; I’m just making up what I do as I go along, so if anyone has any tips I’d appreciate it, I haven’t taken any classes so I don’t know what techniques and options are out there.

How I dun drawed the thing:

Step 1: I started with a mental concept of what I wanted (something cute with a selection of adorable animals surrounding Pinksie The Bunny)

Step 2: I collected pictures of the various cute animals I wanted involved. Usually I just use pictures I’d taken (for example the cat one is one I took at an animal shelter), but since I didn’t have a fox, a raccoon, and a hedgehog around, I had to search for images of those.

Step 3: I threw together a rough idea of what I was going for in MS Paint (I even added basic color schemes), a compilation of cutouts of the pictures I would use and the pose of the character I would draw.

Step 4: I drew the outline, trying to find various edges and features I liked about the original pictures, and adding/changing ones that I wanted to otherwise.

Step 5: I add a bunch more detail, tweak a bunch of things. At this point I wanted to try something new. I’m used to the “clean” lines I usually do for Pinksie The Bunny, but I wanted to try to draw hair like I did on the realistic critters as well. I didn’t like this stage, I thought it made the character look like a Muppet.

Step 6: Mock my inability to draw and my learning from tracing how to draw all you’d like, but this is the part I REALLY love; the coloring. There’s just something so cathartic about coloring in the outlines. I’m actually going to save the lines to let other people color them in if they want in whatever color they want. It’s just so satisfying. In any case, I make the background bright green so if I miss a spot when I’m coloring I can see it.... If I was smarter I’d just use the “fill” tool, but again... coloring is fun, and that’s the point of art!

Step 7: At this point all the coloring is (mostly) done. I have one layer that I do all the colors on, and I put it underneath the shadow layers and the outline layer, and erase any coloring that spills out of the lines.

Step 8: Now that I’ve got the color done I have the “flat” image that I can lay under the outline. At this point I know kinda what it will look like in the end, but I need to add details and depth.

Step 9: I create 2 layers for shadows and 2 layers for lighting. I color in areas white or black depending on where I guess the shadows and light might be. I really have no clue if there is a trick behind this, I just try to imagine where I think the light would be and shade accordingly. (If the “light source” is above, then I put white on top and black on bottom in any area that would have depth of any sort. I think about it like a relief carved into stone where the outermost is the brightest and the innermost the darkest.) Once I make one layer of shadow and one layer of light I adjust the transparency to where I like it over the color layers. I do the same with a second layer of shadow (for details and ultra-shadowy spots) and light (for anything shiny or that stands out).

Step 10: This was the first time I thought I had “finished” the drawing. All of the outlines were jagged and 100% opaque. But the more I looked at it, the less “soft” it looked, it looked more sharp and off-putting than I wanted. So I tried to soften things by making the outlines translucent.

Step 11: At this point I made a ton of variations; I had some where the harsh outlines were almost transparent, but that made the details less noticeable and the whole thing looked washed out (particularly the cat’s face and Pinksie’s eyes). Ultimately I landed on this version; I fixed the harshness by adjusting the transparency on all of the outline layer with the exception of certain parts of the faces of the animals; those I left opaque for emphasis. I scrapped the idea of the jagged fur, and drew another outline layer over it in bold to give a pop-out cartoon look to all the creatures. Is it less realistic? Sure, but it had a really neat look about it, and it might be something I try again, though maybe not...

Conclusion:

So, what’s next? What should I draw next? What new technique should I try in my next project? I might try to do cartoons without outlines; I’ve done those in the past, but there is something appealing about the classic “dark outlined cartoon” look that I wanted to play around with more.

I hope at least one person had fun learning about this process, it certainly was fun to write down what I did and sort it out!

#art tutorial #drawing tutorial #cartoon #digital drawing #DRAWMA #drawing #Pinksie The Bunny #Pinksie #Rabbit #fennec fox #raccoon #hedgehog #cat #Illustration #too many words #artists on tumblr #illustrators on tumblr