WALKTHROUGH: Pinedrifter
Hello Moonbeams,
So I realized at the end of last month that I had accidentally posted this month's larger PDF walkthrough (for my piece Lift the Veil) Oops! I can be quite a scatterbrain if you have not noticed. Luckily, I had this other mini walkthrough in the works so I will be sharing her with you today! This is the "Ochre Queen" a black unicorn-like creature I frequently work with and this piece is called Pinedrifer. She is about the size of a small tarot card and was created for my We Are Smoke and Gold collection
Surface: Strathmore mixed media paper.
Pencils: Staedtler 925 .05mm mechanical pencil, 2B lead Zebra DelGuard .03mm mechanical pencil, 2B lead Staedtler 2mm lead holder, 4B lead
Gold Leaf: 24K gold leaf applied with Kölner Miniatum from Golden Leaf Products
I began this piece by just having fun playing with the character and her anatomy. The sketch was done with my .05 mechanical pencil. I think I am obsessed with drawing animals from this angle for some reason! It probably looked really dynamic to me when I was younger or something.
Once sketched, I began filling in the darker areas on her first. Sometimes I will build up to this level of dark but in this case, I began with it because I wanted a reminder of how dark I had planned to go for my deepest values. I used my .02mm mechanical pencil for the super dark areas because of its small size which allows me to really grind it into the peaks and valleys of the paper.
Once I had her inner limbs filled in, I began to work on her body as a whole, using a mix of my .02 mechanical pencil and my .05. I like the way it feels to use the .02 but the .05 gives me a bit more coverage.
For this piece, I was allowing myself to be quite free and used little to no reference as I wanted to pull from my brain and just have fun. As such, her anatomy is certainly not perfect but I find it to be a good stretch to give myself these pieces where I can play with the knowledge I have internally.
I do want to mention the importance of reference in general. As a young artist, I used to believe reference was "weak" which is just absolute nonsense. Although I like to sometimes challenge myself and play, referencing is a good thing and I regularly check myself against references. Many master artists work solely with specific photo reference for an entire piece so I cannot stress enough how good and okay it is.
I continued to fill in and refine her. You might notice that I am doing things a little differently than when I paint. When I paint, I will usually put down a wash of colour on my character and gradually add loose details, tightening them up as I go. For pencil work, I sometimes work on small sections, detailing them almost entirely one at a time. It just depends on my mood and there is no right or wrong way to go about it.
Another difference between this pencil piece and my paintings is that I finished the character before beginning the background, something I usually do in reverse when I paint. In this case, I wanted to define the character and her values before deciding how the background should be rendered. Knowing that the background would be fairly simple meant that the background's main purpose was to add some dimension and interest to the piece. I did not want to base the character's values (light and dark shading) on the background but rather have the background work with her.
Finally, I finished rendering the character and begin to use my large lead holder to fill in the background. I love the lead holder because it has a thick lead which allows me to get a lot of coverage. It creates a lot of texture due to how fat and dull it is, so I will often use it to lay down basic values, and then refine them with my smaller pencils.
Once I had some basic values added to the background, I sketched in some pine trees with my .02 mechanical pencil to give a bit of atmosphere.
For the final part of this piece, I rendered in some clouds and dark sections of the sky. The clouds allowed me to keep the area around the unicorn light so that she would stand out against them, whereas the dark sections of sky helped create some extra texture and bring out the clouds.
I added a bit of gold leaf to the moon in her neck and her eye and sealed the piece using a UV matte spray varnish.
I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough!
~Aria
