A Prior Knowledge of Anatomy is Key

‘Suuuuuup.

I’m in a good mood today! And… I doubt it will last. I will use the opportunity to work on a story of mine.

Anyway, like I promised here is the new drawing I made. I realise that I only draw avatars of myself, but I guess before I want to use the opportunity to make nice avatars rather than depending on other images. I’ve always been jealous of people who drew their own avatars so this is kinda a big deal for me.

So about the drawing process (because I like to log my experiences). I started off using a sort of quick ‘model’ sketch, which I haven’t actually used that much and I certainly didn’t use it in my last full length drawing.

Now I haven’t got a very steady hand (and I didn’t actually know how to make straight lines until a few minutes ago) so it didn’t actually come out right. I did do a lot rubbing out and redrawing  and the end result was this:

 

First I drew gridlines to help with the proportions and so I didn’t draw something too wonky… Yeah… I know the gridlines are wonky…

I then drew this rough model

 

I guessed it looked okay so went ahead and traced the outline… and got this:

 

Yikes…

Since I wanted a more human look than an alien one, I set to work restructuring it.

 

I first worked on smoothing the shoulders and arms and dealing with the torso and adding boobs…

Then worked on the lower half- smoothing out the hips and thighs…

And finally worked on the hands.

And of course I worked on other minor details. The upper body proved quite hard to do and I spent at most 30mins (though I wasn’t timing myself). The arms were also quite a challenge (I made a big mistake with them at this stage- can you spot it?). The legs proved to be somewhat easier than the rest. The hands were also a killer. I was struggling with it quite a lot- drawing things that were less like hands and more like… God know what… At the same time I was doing a Logicked marathon and his avatar had his right (my left) hand in the same position so I just used it as a model. Thumbs are a particular killer though.

So I was pretty much happy with the body to go ahead and work on the face and hair. I did something I almost never do and that’s use a little model for the face, just so I get things in the right places. I remember seeing this in this book called Draw Manga by Bruce Lewis and in some random online sources.

I ended up moving the mouth and the nose a little when I finally drew them and then added some sexy eyebrows for good measure. Not gonna lie, I did use copy and paste for the eyebrows. Also for the outer parts of the eyes way later on just not at this stage. I also added the ears (using copy and paste) and, of course, the early version of the hair. I decided to go short and simple again.

The face model and the final face superimposed. The left (my right) eye had been drawn at this point and not a copy of the right.

I redesigned the hair slightly and did some basic colouring. The eyes were quite simple. Although it’s harder to see, but unlike my other drawings, the eyes here don’t have that shininess under the pupil

 

I also did this in GIMP btw, not paint, lol. Just pasted this here to add the text

 

There’s obviously other differences with the eyes. The shape for example. I thought it was a little too bold for me and probably won’t do something like this again. I prefer the above shape. Still, just wanted to try it. I smoothed out the nose and made it dark brown instead of black. All that led me to this:

After all that, I was ready to start shading. I used a similar colour- only slightly darker- and used the smudge tool so it’s quite faint. I also tried adding blush and it seems it went pretty well so I’m very pleased! I got the idea from this anime character maker which I use to plan out my characters appearances in stories I write. I also tried something new (probably) with the hair. I took the colour I use for hair shading and drew lines onto the hair on a new layer, I then went crazy with the smudge tool to give the hair a little extra. I have to give credit to Miss Misa because I see he do this in her speed paint videos (déjà vu… for some reason I feel like I’ve talked about this before… sorry if I have). She does it a lot better though (obviously).

 

I’ve taken off the main hair colour layer to show this layer better.

I then went on to do the clothes which didn’t take that much time. I did the same method to make the clothes look more interesting and less two dimensional.

 

Also fixed the arm mistake!

So with a little fixing up, I finally decided to export it. I may change it in some way in future, but I decided ‘this is all I’m probably going to do now.’

So that’s it for this post. I’ve got posts scheduled for Wednesdays as usual. Thanks for reading and I hope you gained something (anything!) from this.

Till next time.

~Peanut

 

Final drawing with text added later in paint. The top says ‘yaoi’.