My Process - Volume 1

As promised earlier, I wanted to give insight as to my sketching, drawing, inking, and coloring process. Today, I am going to focus on my sketching process. I am going to go into the brushes I use as well as to how I have things set up. 

My goal is to help give insight into how one can get started. I like to think I start off simple enough that most who wish to get their art ideas down onto paper can follow along. 

Even without prior experience. That's right, you read that right. 

Let me preface. There is NO EASY BUTTON for learning how to draw. The techniques I will be talking about in this post will require practice. As with any skill, one has to actually make a habit of getting better at it. There is a lot of discourse about AI generated art today, but I am not going to get into that in this post. I think I will post my thoughts on that at a later date. 

The Tools

First of all, let's get the physical tools out of the way. I currently use an iPad with an Apple Pencil. However, that is just one set of tools among many. I won't get into the weeds about personal preferences when it comes to the tactile feel of certain tools. This device and accessory are what just work well for me.

Secondly, the software I use is called Procreate. I have used many programs throughout the years on my iPad, but Procreate strikes an amazing balance between the robust tools and ease of use. And, through updates, the app just keeps getting better.

My goal for this post is to not be a tutorial on Procreate itself, as that would serious narrow the scope of what I'm trying to achieve with these process breakdowns.

As far as the settings go, I have used nothing but the defaults. I have played around with the canvas sizes and resolutions, but nothing super crazy. Now, the question that I see often when people post art online is “What brushes do you use?”. My answer, I feel, is somewhat surprising.

The Process

Behold, the Round Brush

What I always use to start out with is the Round Brush. I have made no customizations to the brush. As I said earlier, I pretty much keep everything at its default. I do, however, make the brush size about 2% to 3% of its max size to give the paint brush an extremely thin look. I also bring the opacity WAY down so now it's more like a soft, thin marker vs a round paint brush. 

From there I start making my rough draft of my sketch! Will usually start with rough shapes and build in detail on multiple layers. I'll wait to talk about that in Part 2 of my process. 

I keep to basic shaped to make up my figures. These shapes include cylinders, ovals, triangles, and rectangles. I use these shapes to build my figures out. If you're looking to learn how to draw, the greatest thing I ever did was grab reference images and "trace" those images using only basic shapes. This gave me a feel for the kinds of shapes that make up the human body. Eventually, the need for tracing goes away and you start using the shapes to build figures from scratch. Here are some examples. 

Screenshot of the Procreate interface. All rights reserved.

When breaking these figures down, you can see the basic shapes I am using. That's the trick I am going to leave you with today. Don't look at the above figures as whole entities. Break these figures down into their basic shapes. 

If you stumble upon this blog and you try this, let me know in the comments. I would love to interact with any budding artists out there. Next week I will post Part 2 where I start adding detail to these figures. Meanwhile, make it a point to draw figures everyday and you will find the progress get ever better. 

​See you soon!