Hey friends! I’ve gotten a lot of questions about that Maul copic drawing I did (like a LOT of questions) so I’m going to go through the steps of how I do marker art, and hopefully this will hit most of the questions I’ve been getting!
Step 1: Sketch your subject and block out colors! Use as little pencil as possible, because marker will pick it up and make your drawing all smudgy. Maul is easy bc he’s just red and black, so do the lightest version of these colors that you have (so here I picked a light pink and a light grey, because I’m going to be building up colors as we go)
General art tip: start light, it’s easier to go over lighter marks than darker marks
Step 2: Mark out your highlights! Remind yourself where the light is hitting your subject; it’s easy to lose track of lights/shadows if you’re not careful. (Sometimes this step isn’t necessary if you’re going to use the light values from step 1 as your highlights)
General art tip: highlights on black aren’t necessarily grey; often they look better if you use another color (I like blue, personally)
Step 3: Put in your lighter values/colors! For Maul, his reds are lighter than his blacks, so I did those first. Remember that red isn’t just “red”, so where the light is hitting him I made the red more pink or orange
General art tip: Your drawing is allowed to look crazy along the way! Don’t be discouraged if things are looking rough, a lot of art only comes together in the last few steps (so embrace the weird awful journey!)
Step 4: Block out your dark colors/values! Since Maul’s “dark” colors are just black, I used a dark grey, leaving room to darken it up more as I go along. I also re-did the blue highlights, and used a medium-blue to put shadows over the reds
General art tip: It’s safer to not jump straight to black. Build it up as you go to avoid unfixable mistakes. Also– shadows don’t have to be darker versions of the same color. Since my highlights were light blue, I used a darker blue to put in shadows.
Step 5: Black! Since this Maul is a cartoon, I used a black thick-tip pen to put in outlines and make sure all my shadows were dark enough. I also built up more shadows using greys and blues to make sure there was enough contrast
General art tip: I usually don’t recommend outlining drawings, but it felt right in this case so I went for it. It’s a judgement call. Do it if the universe is telling you to.
Step 6: Strong highlights! Go in and capture those shiny bits that you want to make stand out. I used a white acrylic pen for this step.
General art tip: use white highlights sparingly. Most highlights aren’t white, but you can get away with it if you don’t use a lot.
And that’s it, folks!
Hopefully this helped anyone who is struggling with using marker. It can take a while to get used to, since there’s a lot of careful layering that can’t be erased/painted over/deleted.
There are a lot of different ways to approach using marker, and this is by no means the “best” or the “right” way. It’s just some general steps I use that have worked for me. A lot of drawing is trial and error, so figure out what works for you.
you know a joke that never EVER gets old is when a character says smth like “I will NOT go to [place] and that is FINAL” and then it cuts to them in that place I eat that shit up every single time
Equally good variant: when the character says smth like “what’s the worse that could happen?” and it cuts to a scene where it’s so much worse than what they imagined
So I looked up funny wedding photos and I was not disappointed.
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These are all so wholesome and make for great draw the otp/draw the squad things for when you want to draw characters getting married but also be total dorks.
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