Introduction

Hello!

In this tutorial, I am going to share with you the process of designing and illustrating fantasy characters via combining human and animal/sub-race features and appeals. Before walking you through one project, I want to focus on a range of animal features, including ears, horns, paws and claws. At the end I will design a fantasy character and paint an illustration of it as an example.

 

 

Ears

>>> Soft furry ears

Who doesn’t want to make cute cat lolis or bois?

Ok just me.. (//∇//)

 

Anyways, replacing human ears with the ears of pre-existing mammals will soften the look of a race and invite descriptions of cute, fairy like, earthy creatures (domestic ears), or uncontrollable and fierce (wild ears). Here are some examples of ears and shape language to consider for your character design.

 

In real life fox ears look somewhat similar to cat ears, but I like to draw fox ears taller/longer to imitate the ears of fennec foxes. Below is rabbit ears which are usually indicative of petite, docile or innocent character designs.

To be honest I don’t ever draw bear ears but it may be of interest to you, because they’re quite cute as well.

Here are some other soft or furry mammal ears to consider.

Make sure that the ears actually look like they are attached to the head, especially at a bird’s eye view. The picture below is a little exaggerated but in reality cat ears are situated towards the back of the head. Also, if the head is tilted, the ears will not align horizontally and one will be lower than the other. Try to use horizontal cross contour lines across the head to ensure the ears aren’t inaccurately placed.

Horns

>>> Demon and dragon horns

Horns of dragons, demons and orcs are also ears to consider. After watching the anime 'Shingeki no Bahamut Virgin Soul', I can definitely conclude that semi-demons rocks! I highly suggest watching that to have a glimpse of sub-angels, sub-demons and sub-dragons.

 

The general shape of a pair of horns look like this.

On a semi-demon character facing somewhat 45 degrees, it would look like this. Foreshortening means the more a horn is facing towards us, the less we see the side of and thus it would appear less wide. The opposite also applies. The more a horn is facing away from us, the more wide it would appear. Best to use real life examples for further study!

From here, try sketching horns of different shapes, angles, sizes, length etc. Depending on the vibe and practicality of the character/creature that you are going for, sharper, jagged, curled, double, triple, gradient horns might suit your design better. For the sketches below, I used the default g-pen.

For painting the horns, I used the default oil paint brush (for solid colouring and light blending) and the default opaque watercolor brush (for heavy blending). Try to experiment with a variety of colours and palettes compared to a generic grey or red demon horn. Below are some quick examples of what I came up with, I suggest browsing the internet for other colouring ideas.

>>> Other types of ears and horns

Last tip for ears! If you are designing your own sub-human or mythical races, definitely don't hold back and incorporate anything that you can think of. Here are some other ears that I quickly brainstormed from pre-existing animals that don’t fall under soft furry ears or demonic ears.

 

1. Deer inspired

2. Sheep inspired

Like with the furry ears, remember that the horns are symmetrical and lie horizontally parallel on the head.

3. Insect inspired (personally I’m not that interested in insect based features but their simple so I included them XD)

Remember to use references of real animals if you’re stuck!

Paws and claws

Semi-tiger/lion/panther/cheetah/leopard paws have claws that are actually quite small compared to the entire claw, but can be reduced even further to imitate a semi-human vibe. Considering the human hand, adding padding and thickness to a regular human hand can already accentuate a semi-tiger hand feeling to it as below. Adding scales and elongating the hand can help with portraying dragon claws. Although rabbit paws also have four phalanges/fingers, like humans and tigers, I like to simplify them down to three phalanges to emphasise rabbits’ domestic nature and innocence.

Bird claws are a little different though. Birds have three phalanges/fingers and one ‘thumb’ of the opposite direction of the three phalanges to help the birds grip onto tree branches and claw prey.

Below, I used the deafult 'soft airbrush' for the overall light to dark gradient, and I used the default 'oil paint' brush for laying out both the base colours and shadow shapes.

Of course, there are plenty of our places that you can change, such as the tail, headwear such as helmets, skin texture such as scales etc. I recommend browsing the internet for more ideas and inspirations for your designs!

Designing a fantasy character

Depending on the aura of the race such as dainty, petite, majestic (so fairies, wood elves) or monstrous, villainous, dystopian (demons, orcs) or others, you will have different features and even gestures in mind. I tend to keep practicality and realism out of the way but if you intend to design your race with a story embedded, you might need to consider the being’s scavenging method and choose their limb types accordingly. Keep in mind shape language as well. Soft and rounded tend to imply the opposite of sharp, jagged, angular shapes.

Now I am going to create a fantasy character design as a demonstration. Today I want to sketch character designs that emulate the description of ‘majestic and pure’ with possibly a hint of ‘demon’ or so.

First I like to sketch 3-5 designs and block in rough colours. I like to make them rather ‘chibi’ in style because the point of brainstorming and thumbnailing is not detail. For sketching, I use the dae pen4 which can be downloaded for free here. For the rough colouring, I used the default ‘dense watercolour’ brush and just painted on one layer under the line art layer.

I will illustrate the second design because I thought it held up my previous description quite well and can imagine it being illustrated. I recommend sketching the front, side and back view help clarify both yourself and others, but I won't do it here because the illustration that I want to do will be a headshot so it wouldn't really matter in this case. Now that we have our design together, it’s time to illustrate it.

Illustrating a fantasy character

First I usually do a quick pose sketch/gesture sketch. Since I'm painting a headshot this time, I just quickly used the loomis head method to construct a head at a slightly high angle (looking down).

Now let’s do our line art or actual sketch. I'm once again using the dae pen 4. Depending on your art style, you may do a rough sketch or a clean lineart sketch. Some artists do another sketch after their first rough sketch, but for this case, since my style is pretty rushy and painterly, I'm just going to sketch roughly. I went way overboard with the details, your sketch shouldn't be so detail-oriented if you plan to paint without following the sketch too much like what I am about to do.

 

Now I am going to block in base colours for the hair, clothes, skin, face and horn. I'm going by the original colours that I used in the design. I used the default 'oil paint' brush for this as it's quite opacity-consistent.

Now, using the soft airbrush, I lightened the sketch, making the inside lines lighter and outside lines darker. In order to ensure I change the colour of the lineart easily without needing to erase anything, I use the 'lock transparent pixels' on the sketch layer.

For the lines around the clothes, I chose blue as it's a slightly different hue to the purple base colour, and for the skin lines, I chose brown.

For painting the shadows and midtones (values between the light value and shadow value), I used the default 'dense watercolour' brush to bock in simplified shadow shapes, with light coming from above. Make sure the shadow's colour is of a cooler hue if the light source is warm, which is what I did here. I painted the hair pieces towards the back/furthest away from us grey to indicate it being further away. In real life, objects further away appear less saturated, aka atmospheric perspective.

From here, I refined the shadows by adding reflected light in them. This is shown by the 'grey' in the shadows. I also added saturated strokes between the shadows and light to imitate the effect of subsurface scattering. A lot of artists do this and it makes areas pop with vibrancy and liveliness. All of this is done with the dense watercolour brush.

At the very end, I erased nearly all of my sketch. I merge all of my layers, including the colour layers and sketch layer, lock transparent pixels again, then I glazed over the top of the character with a soft airbrush on overlay mode, using a light yellow/beige colour to add more warm lighting to the top. Notice that the entire illustration is blue-orange, and this colour combination naturally works well as they are complementary colours. I also abused the 'adjacent colours' method with the blues and purples.

Thank you !

Thank you so much for reading up until now! Hope this tutorial has been helpful in terms of drawing animal and fantasy features, and the process of sketching, colouring and rendering an illustration of a fantasy character.

 

I'm not very active on instagram, but if you'd like to support me or if you're interested in my works, you can follow me at @pufen on insta.