[1,560 words, 8 min estimated read time]
Drawing my Character Oliver
I’m gonna be playing a new character in a text rp, so I decided to go ahead and make a full illustration of him this month!
If you want to read more about the initial stages of making this character I talked about it in my November 2024 Blog Post, and I’ve also made a page for him on Toyhouse. I’ve tried to start adding more characters on Toyhouse to keep all of their info together in one place, and it’s especially handy for characters I’ve played in text rp’s since I’m able to add literature to their pages and not just visual artwork.
I wasn’t sure about giving him facial hair but I think it turned out alright, he looks a lot like a college professor now.
I also filled out one of the “My OC in Symbolism” sheets for Oliver. This is where I originally got the template for it if you want to use it for any characters you have too! I really like making these, especially when figuring out new characters.
Redesigning an Old Character: Percival
I started to think about redesigning an old Dungeons and Dragons character of mine, a divination wizard named Percival Mercer. His design originally had a teal color palette I still wanted to keep, and a star motif that I wanted to incorporate more throughout the design. This month I started by exploring some different color palettes for the outfit, but I plan to experiment more with the shapes later on too.
With some of these I got very finicky with saturation, and honestly looking at some of them a lot of them look the same now that I haven’t been staring at them for hours on end, hah.
Misc Character Illustrations
While watching the X-men ’97 show there was a cool pose I used as a reference to draw my character Morrigan. I felt like maybe it was a little plain without a background, so I may come back to it and add more later on, but for now I’m happy with it.
I also drew a headshot drawing of one of my characters, The Clone, who I discuss the backstory of in my blog post Parasitic Aliens and Body Horror. Please keep in mind that there are content warnings for body horror and gore in the post though! I added the art from that blog post at the end of this one with another warning if you just want to see the artwork.
I have one character named Quinn that I haven’t drawn in years now, and I wanted to do an illustration of him for his Toyhouse page. It ended up turning out okay but I wasn’t super happy with it. I think it’s mostly due to having not drawn him in so long, it just doesn’t feel quite right. But for now it’s at least some newer art of him and closer to what I’m going for!
I also ended up drawing a friends character Illaes for fun! Here’s their Linktree if you wanna check out their art.
Art Style Study: droolingdemon
For another art style study I decided to focus on art by Jack McGee (goes by droolingdemon online, here’s the link to his Tumblr and Bluesky accounts). He’s a storyboard artist and has a webcomic called Star Impact. The way he draws characters is super stylized and I love how he simplifies shapes to get really expressive poses. I think one of the strengths of storyboard artists in general is with their work they get really good at valuing efficiency and speed over perfection, figuring out what the simplest and quickest way to convey something is.
I went in wanting to focus on three main things with this art study; (1) learn how to simplify the designs of characters, (2) spend less time worrying about precision with my lines and draw more loosely and freely, and (3) learn how to push and simplify shapes to get more expressive poses.
I started by picking out some drawings by droolingdemon and breaking them down into their base shapes. I tried to focus not just on the space the shapes took up, but also the negative space in between them.
When making my first attempt to replicate the style I made sure to pay attention the type of brush used and the range of colors used. The lineart brush was thin and had a consistent weight, without any texture to it. The colors mostly seemed more de-saturated, but some exceptions were yellows and pinkish reds. Drawings also had at least one area of black colored in, even if it was just accessories.
My first attempt is the drawing below. It was alright for just getting the feel of things, but I still felt like there was a lot of room for improvement. For one, the poses could be more exaggerated. But the main issue I was running into was still not letting my lineart be as free flowing. I still spent a lot of time trying to get the lines to be precise, redoing the lines and erasing off any stray marks.
I spent some more time focusing on the lineart, and definitely preferred my next attempts at it. I also tried to pay more attention to the colors and a few times pulled directly from the color palettes used by droolingdemon as a reference.
Because I was wanting to practice drawing faster, I decided to work on a character lineup I’d been wanting to draw for a while. Until now I’d always shied away from it because I knew it would have taken me a while to make.
I ended up making a character lineup of each tiefling character I’ve played across Dungeons & Dragons games. I had a lot of fun with the drawings, especially since I hadn’t drawn any of these characters in a while. One of the main things I struggled with was finding areas of black to add in each of the designs. I’m still not sure about some of the areas. The only one I feel good about is the second character in the lineup, since she already had black included in her design.
Another Lineup I ended up working on in this style was my trio of characters Morrigan, Killian, and the clone. I ended up struggling a lot with the colors for the other two. Droolingdemon doesn’t seem to tend to use greens and browns as often, so picking out colors ended up being really tricky. I still tried to match it as close as I could manage so it would still resemble the style.
In order the characters are Killian, the clone in the middle, then Morrigan at the end.
Overall I found that I enjoyed the shapes in this artstyle a lot, but for myself prefer to use thicker lineart with variable line weight. One thing I would like to explore is to use pure black for shaded areas, so I’ll keep experimenting with that. I think doing this art style study also made me realize how much I’d prefer to use a less detailed style to be able to draw more frequently. I’ve struggled with keeping ‘doodles as doodles’, and not feeling the need to make them super detailed and add more shading or highlights, etc, etc.
Anatomy Practice
I tried out a new method for anatomy practice I’m hoping will make it seem a little less intimidating to tackle. I’ve wanted to focus on improving at drawing anatomy for a long time but always felt really daunted by the whole process.
I chose a pose to draw from a reference image and split up my canvas into a four square grid. In the first box, A, I’d just try to draw the pose by looking at it, as realistically as I could. In box B I then traced the image and broke down the limbs, head, and torso into different colors to better understand the shapes and what errors I made. In box C I draw a stylized version of the pose in the style I’d typically go for now; a bit exaggerated but still aiming for some semi-realism. In box D I draw a very stylized version, trying to see where I can push the pose to make it more dramatic and give it a clearer silhouette.
I was pretty happy with my first couple attempts, and I’m hoping to keep using this method to practice!
Designing a Character with Body Horror
[Content Warning: body horror/gore]
This next section has artwork containing body horror, so if that’s not your thing you may want to pass on this last section.
If you’d like to read more about my process behind the art and the references I looked at to create it, or more about the backstory behind the character I’m drawing in these pieces, then you can read about it my blog post Parasitic Aliens and Body Horror.
First I have some of the practice sketches I did to get used to the general shapes and designs.
Then I finished an illustration of my character!
Overall I was happy with how it turned out! I was working on some of the initial sketches while watching The Thing with my friend which was a ton of fun.
Leave a Reply