Everybody at some point in their artistic journey develops their own artstyle. You refine and perfect that skill and way of creating over years of practice, and after a while you develop your artistic personality. In this tutorial I will show you my process on how I create illustrations. Of course I am no where near professional, I just thought it would be fun to share and possibly give you inspiration for your next illustration❤💖❤

First Draft

My idea for this drawing is simple. I'm going to draw a girl in a simple sweater, glasses, freckles, and hair in pretty, curly, ringlets.

First, create a new file. These are my paper settings below:

Now on your first raster layer, we're going to create our first draft. Get your pencil and put it on about size ten. I prefer either the real pencil or the colored pencil, but it really doesn't matter which one you use.

For each layer/pencil draft I like to use different color, so for the first draft I'm going to use a bright yellow color.

Here we're going to sketch out our head at three-quarter view. We'll start with that and draw the rest of the body later.

Nothing has to be perfect on the first layer! I know it's never that way in my case.

Now here are my guidelines for the rest of the body.

There it is! It's sort of messy, but remember it's only the first draft.

Second draft

Go on and bring the opacity of the first draft down to about fifty percent and create a new raster layer above that. Switch your color to something that will contrast your original, I chose blue.

I started out by roughly sketching the hair

Now for the facial features. I decided to draw her winking because I wanted to express sort of a playful nature around her

I left the eye empty because I like coloring in the inside of my eyes.

Now for the freckles. All I did was create small circles of various sizes.

Now for the glasses. I created these by creating a layer above the one I was drawing on, drawing the glasses, and using the lasso select<transform function to move her glasses around until I was happy and then merging this layer with the original.

Now for the clothes! I know clothing folds and seams can be a real pain, but I'm not doing anything intricate. All I'm going to draw is a simple low cut sweater with an under-shirt and a tie, complete with a simple pleated skirt underneath.

Very simple. Now were going to draw her one visible hand, and a backpack strap in that hand

All done with the second draft!

Final draft

First of all, hide your first layer and bring down the second layer to half the opacity. Create a raster layer on top and bring your pencil size down to seven or eight. Now clean up all your lines, fix any mistakes you may have, and prepare your drawing for inking!

Here it is complete

Go on and hide your second draft so that your final draft is clear and consise for inking

Ready for inking!!

Line art

Delete all your drafts other than your final one and create a vector layer above everything. You don't have to use vector, but that's how I ink in all my illustrations.

You can use any pen you want, but I'll be using the "real G pen".

Very clean and consise. Now for coloring!

Base color

Now it's time for base color. I'm going to create a folder and add four layers inside of it. One for base colors, base shadows, refined shadows, and highlights.

Once I'm done with base colors and before I start shading, I'll tackle the subject of coloring in the eyes.

First I'll color hair. I have another tutorial for coloring hair that goes into more depth, but for now I'll just give a summary.

Here are the colors for hair:

and here's how I applied:

Here's the skin tone I used:

And how I applied:

Here I simply created a labeled color pallate:

And here's how I applied:

Now simply fill in the eyelashes, nose, and mouth with grey, the eyebrows with the darkest hair shade, and create eye whites with (you guessed it) white.

Eyes

Set up another folder with another three folders, one for base color and pupils, one for the eye shadows, and one for highlights.

Ignore the "Layer 2", that one wasn't supposed to be there!!!

Base and pupil:

For these eyes Im going to use aqua. Here's the base:

Use dark brown and create a pupil on the same layer:

Using a shade about four shades darker than the base, create ~squigglies~:

On the layer "First shadow" take a color about two shades darker than the base and create the following shape:

Now bring that layer down to about fifty percent and clear up the pupil like so:

Now on the "highlight" layer, set the layer setting on overlay and color the shape below in a color about a shade lighter than the base:

And clear the pupil:

On the same layer, in a light grey color, create the following shapes:

And in a bright white, same layer, create the following shapes:

And there's your eye, easy as pie!

 

 

 

I MADE A RYHME!! I've always been such a poet~~~

Base shadow

To put it simply, we'll be going a little darker than each base color, and shading in cells. It's not a very tedious process so I'll just go on and complete it and show you the finished product looks!

Although you could call the picture done, I like to refine my shadows even more

Refined shadows

For refined shadows I'm going to go a shade or two darker than each shadow color depending on the hue. Again I'll just show you the finished product.

Highlights

All I'm really going to do is take a very light color, a cream-ish sort of shade, and add highlight bubbles in the buckle and on the hair and on the glasses on the highlights layer. See below:

And now we add a background and we're done!!

Thanks for reading!!💖💖💖