Drawing tutorial

Drawing the image

When we got all materials its time to start drawing the image.

Preparation

First of all we need to decide the motive. When I started this, my idea was to go out in the World of Warcraft and like a nature photographer take screen shots of all my motives. This was harder than expected. For the first I couldn’t get to all the monsters I wanted to draw since I was too low level. Second it was nearly impossible to get the poses I wanted since the bastards kept attacking me. My rescue was called Wow Model Viewer, a nice little program that lets you view and pose creatures from the game in full 3d view. Ahhh, what a relief, I said, and started to pose my favorite monsters.

Sketching

First of all you need to get the basic shape of your motive down on your paper. To do this either try to draw the outlines and some details by hand, use a gridding method or use the “window method”.

Free hand is the hardest way to do this. A gridding method is simply to make a grid on your paper and an exact grid over the motive image. Then simply copy the counters if one square to another. The” window method“ is the easiest, and some would even call it cheating. Print an image of your motive, place in against a window and place your paper above. Now simply copy the outlines to your paper. How you choose to do is up to you, it doesn´t really matter.

Shading

When the sketch is ready it´s time to build up the image and give it life. Our only weapons to do this is our mechanical pencil, the rubber and tortillions. All colors of the original image will be converted in to a shade of gray. Study other work to see how the artist handles shadows and shades. At this stage it´s all about building up different shades of grey, but take it easy and build up the darkness with several layers instead of make it black at once. Use the tortillions to make an even grey color. This will be used as base color to add details and highlights to.

Highlights

As you might see in my images, the thing is to get contrast between really dark and bright white areas. For the bright parts we use our rubber. (If you want a complete white area try not to get any lead in that area at all). The rubber is used to light up bigger areas where light is falling, make a really bright detail on a belt buckle and for adding realism to hair and textures.

To light up bigger areas simply stroke very smooth over the surface with the rubber and carefully remove enough lead till your satisfied. For really bright details you need a sharp piece of rubber, carfully use the rubber as a pencil and add "white strokes". Textures and hair is done in similar way, either use a blunt piece of rubber to add variation on a surface as leather or metal, and a sharp piece to add some highlights to add to the realism.