Sketch With Me ◆ Portraits, Figure Studies & Dnd Character Art

A while back I had character design ideas to sketch and wanted to practice figure drawing at the same time. So I tried to combine both for this sketchbook session. Grab a drink, a snack, your own pencils and join me. But first let's nerd out about sharpeners. Since I also have to sharpen my colored pencils before I start sketching, I thought I'd do a quick rundown of all my sharpeners. I have a whole bunch at this point, because not every sharpener works for every type of colored pencil, especially the thicker ones like the Derwent drawing. And if you like drawing with pencils and colored pencils, maybe I have some recommendations that can work for you as well. Pretty much all of my sharpeners are of the very small and portable variety, so if you're looking for travel sketching supplies, I hope these are helpful as well. First a quick recommendation for the KUM automatic long point sharpener. If you're like me and just for the life of you can't sharpen with a cutting knife, it just never worked out for me. I did it a lot in art school and then never got back into it. So I'm using this recently. If you're looking to sharpen your pencils to a very fine point, maybe you have some detailed drawing to do, a line drawing to sketch, then this one is amazing. I'm using it a lot for just B and 2B pencils to give me more precision and control. It sharpens the wood to a longer point first and then the graphite lead inside with this second hole here. Here you can see how in comparison to the KUM sharpener, the Derwent tool sharpener that I used just now on this Derwent drawing pencil, keeps the wooden part very short. We are creating a much lower triangle shape. So I like this one for colored pencils that are softer, that need not to be sharpened to such a fine point and that can withstand some pressure. Now this just demonstrated why I never use this sharpener for thicker colored pencils. This is the miniature size of the Faber-Castell sharpeners. I also have the larger one here. I think this is quite popular, right? But I have to say, the small ones, they really only work with thinner colored pencils. So Prismacolors, any kind of standard sized colored pencils work with this travel version. I've also found this to be quite leak proof. I've never had any pencil dust spill all over my travel bag, which is an issue with this one. Because it has two halves that are kind of stacked on top of each other, you can even see that there's some colored pencil dust stuck to one side. I wouldn't recommend this one for travel sketching for that reason. It has all of these different size options, but I just don't find it very practical for on-the-go sharpening. Just to demonstrate, also doesn't work for the Derwent Drawing and similar. So also not for the Caran d'Ache Luminance. And so I actually find these kind of awkward, because you have three sizes, but it's a very small and a very big one. And I rarely use really big colored pencils. I wish instead of just color and graphite as a separation, they had a medium sized option for pencils like the Caran d'Ache Luminance or Derwent Drawing. Yeah, even the graphite tins and ink tins also don't fit in these. So actually, I have not been using this one all that much. I can use it to sharpen regular pencils though. I can close this one as well. And it's been working really well for when I go to art market kind of events. I actually prefer this one over the Faber-Castell one. It can handle the thicker pencils, and you can see now in comparison here how my two Blackwings look. The one from the long tip sharpener, and now here this one has a specifically short tip. So you do have to sharpen your pencils quite frequently, but it has a very even finish, doesn't scratch up the wood of my pencils, which is an issue some sharpeners can have. Like for example this Staedtler, which I won't demonstrate here. It's a powerhouse, like this can sharpen pretty much anything. It's incredibly aggressive. I've had some issues with splinters happening, and my pencils just not sharpening beautifully. I just complained about how aggressive that red sharpener by Staedtler is. I still use that one a lot actually for kind of just cheap pencils, if I want to sharpen a lot of them really quickly. But I really like this two-hole sharpener. It's the newest addition to my collection. I bought it kind of in a rush, because I was going to an event, I had forgotten my sharpener at home, I was picking up packaging supplies at the art store, and this one was right there looking tempting. This one creates a much longer colored pencil tip here, because I can only use the graphite side here for all my pencils, while very thin pencils like the Chromaflow by Derwent are a bit too small for this one. They are a bit loose in there. So my at-home daily sharpener is mostly this Derwent Drawing Two-Hole, because it works for everything. I also reach for this one quite a bit, when I want a shorter tip for the pencil, and then for anything that requires detail, or for regular pencils, I reach for the graphite sharpening side of the Staedtler, or this Longpoint sharpener by Kuhn. What will I be sketching today? I'm working on a character portrait, or character design, for a D&D character. It's one of my own this time. I've done a lot of client work this winter, I'm still kind of in the middle of about five commercial illustrations, I think, right now, so this is just something to experiment with and play around with on my day off. Here are some pose stick figure sketches, this is for a different illustration, and here I have an outfit design. I kind of want these bandage-like wrappings, and overall this very layered but lean look, and I'm not yet sure what I want to do with the skirt or coat, if I want them to kind of flare out like stripes of fabric, or have a heavier feel to them. I'm kind of focusing on this sketch just because I like the expression here, it's not quite the style I'm going for. I'll do the actual painting in color, of course, but I like this gentle smile that she has here, so I'll keep that to the side as a reference. I had to cut the ribbon in my Hane Movie sketchbook because my cat got really obsessed with it one evening and bit like half of it off, and so now it's very short. So yeah, working in my Hane Movie sketchbook for some warm-up figure studies, and then I'll do some portraits. I started with two portraits unrelated to my character design, just to warm up, because it had been a while since I'd sketched portraits after all. The Derwent Drawing Colored Pencils are great for loose warm-up sketches, as they are so soft and can block in shapes quickly, and they keep me from honing in on details too soon. I didn't really focus on guidelines or exact proportions, I just wanted to loosen up my hand a bit. You can see how I just start in at her face and then move down to the neck and the second arm later. For the arm poses, I usually look at the negative space that the pose creates. What does this abstract empty space look like, and how can I capture it with the arms and face around it? It's a quick, if less precise, way to establish a figure. It's been a while since I just sat down for some figure drawings or even portrait practice. My art goal for this year, that I even talked about in an art planning video, is to be more focused on final illustrations, especially for books. And so far, that's really all I'm doing. So even when I have free time to draw and sketch outside of client work, I often end up painting more on those anyway, with color studies or just spending more time on them, as I enjoy the process so much. But I do miss my sketchbooks as well. I also find it helpful to look at the hair parting, especially if it's a middle part, like in this portrait here. The line that creates really helps with establishing the angle of a head. I've accepted that an art practice goes through phases. Maybe that's something you've experienced as well. Maybe I'm just not in a sketchbook phase at the moment. It might be external factors, like schedule changes, or even the weather, or internal ones. If I feel more in the mood for finished large pieces, or have something I want to focus on with quick practice sketches, that's a completely different mindset. Right now, as I finally edit this video, it's April, and I really wanted to go outdoors for plain April. But it's been storming and raining a lot this month, and so I've retreated to my table easel and paint palette instead. For my second warm-up portrait, I went with a face looking to the right. My art nemesis. I still find it so much easier to draw characters facing to the left, especially when I draw very quickly. The reference had a clear light and shadow separation, and even with a soft ochre shade like the one I'm using here, I try to keep those shadow shapes clear. I tend to just shade in everything too finicky overall, so I'm trying to pick either the light side or the shadow side when rendering details nowadays. Like exposing a photograph for the lights or the darks. It's quite subtle in this sketch because there's just not much detail there to begin with, but because her eyes are in shadow, I chose to focus on the shadow side for details and texture, and left the light side mostly simple and blank. When sketching portraits, I often find myself focusing too much on all those features we as artists want to usually kind of hyper focus on, right? The eyes, the nose, the mouth. But it helps to look at the portrait as a bit of an abstract object when I first start out looking at just those shadow shapes and ignoring all those eye-catching features at first. You can probably also see some influences from the Asaro head and similar head models as I try to sketch in some of the facial planes. Instead of just following the photo reference and sketching exactly what I see there, I try to capture some of what I know about faces. I try to, for example, capture the angle of facial planes with my shading and kind of overemphasizing that, so that maybe in the future I can paint something similar at a similar angle without a reference, just from maybe a bit of a better understanding of how a face works. I shared some of the upcoming colored pencils in an art haul a while ago. I've actually been using these a lot and here the Graphitint felt amazing for simple pose studies. They are not as soft and intense as the Derwent drawing colored pencils, but still thicker than regular colored pencils, so I can shade in surfaces quickly. The Graphitint really feels like a soft, maybe 4B pencil when used like this for drawing. I still just went with the flow of the pose instead of measuring out proportions, which I will regret later. But I just enjoy this process when I'm in the moment and this sketchbook session was mostly for me to relax a bit, so I embraced that part. You can see how I use some guidelines for the diagonal angles on her torso, which was my focus for this pose. The lower body kind of just fades out towards the bottom as I started too low and the edge of the page got in the way. My reference was a simple 3D render I'd made earlier for just this exercise and I'd placed a strong spotlight in that scene. While I of course prefer real photos of real people for expressive portraits or to capture natural poses, 3D models are a great tool for when I just want to practice something really quickly with a specific lighting. They also leave much more up to the imagination because they're just simple 3D models after all and I find it easier to break away from the reference and just use it as a rough guideline. By the way, even if you're not into fantasy art at all, give your figures a staff or a sword to hold. It's a great organic guideline. Even without measuring, I could observe how her torso disappeared behind the staff, the curve of the waist angled away from it and then how the hips disappear behind it again. Same for where it intersects with the arm and connects with her hand. It's why figure drawing models sitting in simple chairs or on shapes like cubes can be really helpful when sketching too, as they give my eye something to latch onto that is very simplistic compared to a human body which can come in so many shapes and forms and twist and move in all kinds of unpredictable ways as well. I really enjoy the soft blending of the graphitint with water. It doesn't dissolve completely, especially on this paper where I don't want to use much liquid. So there's a natural texture that remains and going back over the wet areas with the pencil again also creates more intense lines and darker colors for variety. So I couldn't stop and drew a second pose with the same graphitint in midnight black again. There are other water-soluble graphite options out there, but I found that the graphitint in midnight black, even though it looks like graphite, has less of that shiny metallic finish when dry, which is why I reach for this one so much. The second pose was a bit more complex and so you can see me sketch in guidelines on her chest, hinting at her sternum or ribcage. I think the strong spotlight that I placed in this 3D scene, clearly separating the underside of the arms or neck, for example, from the planes angled upwards, really helped with quickly establishing the pose. Though please don't look at the legs where my proportions completely fell apart. A lot of these figure drawing or character design explorations here are just preparation for a character portrait I want to paint. So I'm focusing way more on the upper body than the lower body, which will not appear in that. Which is really also a bit of an excuse, I should probably sit down and do proper figure drawing anatomy practice of the entire body that I usually avoid. My last quick sketch here brought a material change. The inktense can be a bit scary, but I felt in the flow of things and ready for a new challenge. Much darker than the graphitint, but still functioning similarly. Shading and sketching like with a regular pencil, but then using a clean water brush to blend and darken the color. I really enjoyed this pose, and again the spotlight creating these strong shadow shapes across her torso was really interesting to sketch. Right, this is how far I got this morning, and you may be able to tell that the lighting has changed quite a bit over the last 10 minutes or so, which is probably a sign that I should head out and run my errands before it starts raining. The first warm-up sketch is incredibly rough. I really like this combination of using some kind of terracotta shade of the Derwent drawing to roughly sketch in the overall portrait or pose, and then going in with a darker shade. This time I just used ivory black to add definition and actually define shapes. If you've watched previous sketching videos of mine, you've definitely seen this approach before. I don't really enjoy erasing a lot in my sketchbook practice, so I just like this approach of using two different colors to kind of layer my sketches. The next one is then much softer. It was also done in a Derwent drawing, but I used a lighter shade. Using a lighter shade automatically makes a sketch look a bit more delicate. The value range is much more constrained, so I find that it helps me observe light and dark in my reference more precisely, because even just a small difference, I just don't have as much room to correct, right? So it kind of helps with this very clear separation of light and dark, and then not much variation within the shadow. I have to say, I really enjoyed the graphite tint. I used midnight black for both of these pose sketches. It gives me this very soft pencil drawing look, but then I can go even softer and blend out my sketch with just a hint of water. And because it's so little water, really any sketchbook page, even this very drawing-focused sketchbook, the Hahnemühle DNS, can handle that much liquid on the pages. Now, proportionally, I really messed this one up. That's just a feature of drawing on a flat surface, which I do for filming here. I should probably have moved to my actual drawing desk where I have the table easel, because if you draw on a flat surface, at least for me, I often exaggerate the length, because foreshortening kind of messes all my proportions up. But I still quite like the shading overall. I think the graphite tint with just a bit of water is a really nice medium if you want simple sketches, but with a bit of room to push and pull softness, but still have visible line work. It's really fun. And then I kind of can't pick a favorite, because I think if I started with the inktense, it might not have turned out all that great. I think starting with the graphite tint gave me kind of a good warm-up for this more intense version with the turbulent inktense in Chinese ink, and I just really enjoy how the cast shadows really look very intense with this, and I think that captures the overall shape really well. So if you use a reference with a strong cast shadow over the body, like here, that's her arm casting most of the shadow, or her head here, something like that, you can go quite intense if there's no fill light coming in from the other side, and for that I found this really fun. It's also a much more decisive medium than the graphite tint, so I definitely needed the warm-up to be kind of in the flow before moving to this. I imagine it could be a bit challenging to just start with this, but also really fun for quick warm-up sketches to really let go. So I might just keep these as they are and start on a portrait next. I didn't have time for more that day, so I started again the next morning, though I still felt kind of in the flow of it. Sometimes what you did the day before kind of goes into the next day as well, I definitely feel that way as well when I'm working on a book illustration. If I've been mixing with the same color palette for a couple days in a row, I feel much more secure with it, and the same goes here for these figure sketches. So this one went really quickly, and I love how it turned out with some very subtle expressions, and I focused more on creating these transparent layering effects using the clean water brush, kind of independently from my pencil sketch with the ink tense. I think just getting a single inktense pencil is a great addition. I'm not sure if I ever want to get a full color set of these, as I don't see myself creating finished paintings with them, but it's such a unique effect and great tool for experiments, I think. So you'll probably see this one show up quite a bit more in future sketchbook sessions. Her expression turned out, it's barely there and a bit mysterious. I think this might be a great material for some movie scene sketches with dramatic lighting, where you can barely see the face of the actor. So yeah, I'm keeping that in mind for future sketching. I had that awkward space on the left side of my sketchbook spread that was still empty, and decided to sketch an actual character portrait. I wanted to use the graphitint, but especially the inktense, for the shadows on it and for the sketch underneath, and then go over everything with gouache. The inktense are waterproof after they've been activated once and dried again, like the traditional ink I sometimes use. So I want to experiment more with them in combination with media like gouache and watercolors. Similarly to when I used a light and a dark Derwent drawing colored pencil for that very first portrait, I started with a vibrant blue inktense here. That would be my rough sketch underneath, and then I layered on top of it with the graphitint in midnight black and the inktense Chinese ink shade, to deepen and detail the shadow side of this sketch more and more. Looking back at this stage of the drawing now, I wish I'd kind of stopped at this point, if it were just for an expressive sketch. I really like this point in time right here, with the inktense creating those dark shadows around her eyes, but I went in with gouache instead. The winter palette from the Holbein Irodori gouache sets was what I had close by, and the Rikyu Grey and Geisha Blue were the perfect colors for what I had in mind for my elf monk here. I experimented with layering on top of the graphitint as well, to deepen the shadows, and had to stop myself from layering and blending too much, because this paper really isn't meant for any water-based media. It held up alright to this mixed media approach, as I could rely on the dry pencil shading for some areas, and kept my gouache relatively opaque. Alright, I'm done with this sketchbook spread. For something that I'd originally just wanted to be some simple figure sketches to warm up, this got a bit more elaborate, right, with some different art materials, and I really want to always make time for sketching like this. I always learn so much from them, even if it's just about how to use a specific medium, or exploring a character design, and I really, really enjoyed all of the water-soluble pencil mediums that I tried here. I mean, the Durban Drawing are fun, they're always really great pencils for these soft, simple studies, but the graphitint and inktense, I highly recommend, even if you just get a single color each, kind of like I did, a couple colors in open stock, they are amazing for studies where you observe light and shadow, letting you take care of the line drawing, and quickly shading in just shadows you need, and then you can intensify them where needed, and tone them down where needed by using water, and that's a really interesting combination to play around with. I'll paint the actual character portrait based on all these experiments and sketches on our hot pressed paper in acrylics. I recently bought this neat square format that I'm excited about for busts and portraits with a hint of an environment. I hope you sketched along with me, maybe drew some of your own characters, and I hope to see you again in my next art video.