Larry wrote
Hi Florent. Love your site. With the smoking girl from panel 3 to 4, can you provide tips on how you you get to the soft blending of shades of her skin, nose, etc using Paper? What combination and order of tools do you use? Thanks. Larry.
Hi Larry, unfortunately I haven’t got a recipe, since I’m not an “academic drawer”, it’s more about a trial and error process (which usually takes a lot of time).
To help, I made a new animated sketch of “The smoking girl” (with more details than the four-steps note previously released).
- I began with the shadows, using the black paintbrush on a slight pencil outline, adding layers of black watercolor, to complete the general “volumes” of the sketch.
- Shapes and shades are corrected with the pencil, using black and grey colors.
- Pencil marks are, then, smoothened with white paintbrush (by applying little touches).
- Grey paintbrush is also used to “warm up” the sketch, and smooth black and white tones, at the same time.
- Then, I do it again, with pencil (black, grey and white, by small and fast touches), smoothened by watercolors (black, white and grey), until it looks more “real”.
- By the way, do not hesitate to use the white marker on the shone parts, but with parcimony : only dots where the light is reflected. The rendering can be quite impressive.
I lack time, these days, but I’ll try to make a more “step by step” how-to for the next sketch (maybe a video, don’t know yet). Meanwhile, I hope the animated how-to attached here will help you.
- Oh wait, I forgot the most important : the model.
The smoking girl is inspired by this picture of I guess Kate Moss
