To get to know me a bit more, here's some of the artwork that I've created! Includes my sketches, a colored pencil drawing, and some digital art. Hope you like!
That's right, I officially attempted to sketch and color an animal and make it look believable.
It's hard.
Thus, me, the perfectionist that I am, took WAY too long to prepare for this monumental task.
I'll be talking about what I did. Prepare to be bored (because talk about this stuff is tedious, I just need to vent), frustrated (I'm probably doing this in the most inefficient way possible), and happy/disappointed (depending on your opinion of the finished product):
I took some of the advice from @CopperSparrow in their "How I Draw" book (go check it out) because I didn't have any type of clue on how to do it.
Okie, here we go-
Find a Reference
I wanted the drawing to be realistic, and what better way to do that than to reference a real sloth! Here's the picture (found on WWF):
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Outline the Guidelines
I'm tERrIBLe at proportions (just look at my humans!) so I decided that drawing grid-like lines would help me keep in mind how tall/long everything is. They look like this:
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Whoa, that lighting is garbage.
Moving on, you can (probably) see I split the page into thirds and drew lines about where the tops of specific body parts would be. These took WAY too long because I had to sketch, resketch, and sketch again at least 10 times, but now I can spatially think better and get the proportions right.
Basic Shapes/Rough Outline
I learned that to draw better realistically, it helps to simplify the drawing to geometric shapes. So I did just that, and created a rough outline of the animal.
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More garbage lighting!
I then better refined the image by erasing some of the guidelines.
Color Scheme
I was ready to color the image, so I erased the rest of the guidelines and then had to think about color scheme, using the color pencils that are available to me. I came up with this:
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Gar-bage Light-ing! *clap. clap. clapclapclap*
But yeah, I used a lot of colors.
Next I actually colored the image, using the reference to figure out the direction the fur was going in. Looking at the reference again, I added more details, plus some shading and highlighting.
The finished product *cue a makeshift drumroll*...
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There it is! Definitely not the most realistic but I'm still proud of it!
