Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello everybody, this is Yasmeen from YarkspiriFantasyArt.com
Today I'm drawing a female archer that was requested by one of my subscribers.
There was a couple of design elements that went into the creation of this piece.
Before I began working on this piece I reference female archers.
In order to see what of poses they would typically do.
Women tend to move and talk slightly differently than men and it's important to give that female aspect to the character.
Once I figured out what I was going to do pose, I began sketching it out.
This is what I'm currently working on as you can see.
When I began drawing the pose, I started off with a basic stick figure.
Beginning this way allows me to get the basic information and work the structure around that framework.
This also prevents me from getting too caught up in the details of the drawing.
Once I figured out a pose that worked with this character I began figuring out the proper anatomy.
Some of the important factors were the eye direction and emotional state of this character.
Once the basic structure was figured out, I began adding some additional details into the design.
I began finalizing the structure and costume design.
Most of the female archers on my reference material were wearing modern clothes.
I did want to make this character into more of a mercenary type, medieval character.
Originally I had planned to have this character wielding a very large bow.
Since this character was more of a mercenary, I did have to shorten the bow significantly in order for it to be more portable.
I went through a couple different concepts for the clothing designs and settled on having a sash type material.
The key was not create this without taking away from the curves within this characters body.
One of the most important parts of drawing a female character is to not take away from the characters curves.
Even with all of the armor, your character must still have an appealing pose and it needs to showcase her curves.
This is a very important factor when it comes to female characters.
I'm just roughing out some of the background,
I'm plotting down my basic shadows before I begin adding additional highlights and refine the shadows.
For female characters I do approach the shading a little bit differently.
I find that it's better to hint at the shadows rather than fully flesh it out.
Not unlike the character design, since she doesn't have any hard edges you do need to take a minimal approach when shading.
I slowly add in shading and try to keep it as minimal as possible.
If I add too much detail, then it takes away from the character design.
In this case, that's the last thing I want to do since the focus is on the character in this drawing.
The focus in on the overall body shape and the posture. The focus isn't on the details.
For this character I began by hinting at the shading, then I slowly added some additional information as I was working.
This helped to insure that I wasn't adding too much at the same time.
I normally start off with a contour edge that I've talked about in the past.
I do that I can turn off my line layer bellow it if I need to.
It helps to ensure that the characters popping out from the background to keep her from blending into it.
Unless I'm painting a character who's supposed to blend into the background and is camouflaged.
I want that character to pop out of the drawing as much as possible.
She needs to almost be a separate element because in this case she's the focus point in this illustration.
The background is secondary to her, it's still important but it's still secondary to the character design.
It is for this reason that I make sure that the character has a back light.
It's this back light which causes that strong edge behind the character.
Once I've figured out her general body details, I go back to the hands.
I tend to leave the hands and feet for last because they require quite a bit more attention than the rest of the body.
There's a lot of subtle details that need to show correctly.
Otherwise the hands and feet just don't look right.
I'm sharpening some of the edges in the boots to make sure that the information still reads.
I'm trying to do so without adding too many outlines.
I'm doing the same thing in the clothing as well.
I've started on the feet and I added the white border around the structure so that I could turn off my line layer.
Doing this gives you so much flexibility because the character shouldn't need the line work once it's fully painted.
In order to show all of the desired information.
I did notice at this stage that the leg wasn't correct so I lengthened the top of the leg and shortened the bottom.
I wanted some of those edges to be very crisp so I added some additional highlights and shadows.
I do have a specialized brush for drawing the hair now but for the longest time I drew hair without one.
You don't require a special brush to draw hair.
If you want those strands to show, use the default round brush set to 100% opacity and reduce it's size until you can barely see it.
This is essentially how I've painted hair for the past 2 to 3 years.
Before I a got this specialty brush.
You don't need a specialty brush to paint hair, it does save a lot of time but it isn't a necessity.
It does speed up the process which is useful, but you do learn a lot more if you do it by hand initially.
This will allow you to learn a lot more in the long run.
I recently had a question from one of you guys regarding how I achieved my crisp edges.
All I do is scale down my round soft brush and all I've done is reduce the size until you don't notice the fuzzy edges.
You can use the same method with the brush set to 100% opacity but with the hard edge brush to get an even more solid edge.
That all you have to do, you don't need to change any of the settings, you simply need to change the size and opacity to 100%.
If you do this you'll be able to achieve really nice edges for your piece.
I'm just working on the trees right now.
I'm simply changing the opacity of my brush as I work.
I did use a textured brush for a short period before going back to using the hard brush.
This helps to strengthen some of the lines to give them a more solid look.
I just used a basic color layer above my grey-scale shading.
I then I go in and add some more additional colors on top.
They're on two separate layers so I can modify them without affect my base layer.
Once I have my basic shading I will add in my dark band for the shading.
This really makes the character pop out more and gives the character a more finished look.
There's two layers which I'm using to create this shading effect.
I set the first layer to color burn and then I created a second layer on top.
The second layer's set to normal but I've sampled the darkest area within the illustration and used that as my color.
This image is almost done.
I will be adding additional lighting the other side of the character where there's less lighting.
This will further help make the character pop a little bit more.
I keeps the shadows from becoming too harsh.
I've switched to the hard brush at this moment in time.
I'm softening out the edges by erasing the edges with the soft brush setting.
This is the final piece.
That you guys for watching and I hope to see you soon. Thank you and take care.