Hello everyone!
Welcome to yet another post! I hope you are all having a great week :).
Today, I was looking through different drawings I made in the past. One of the first drawings I made is the following.
You might recognize this as Shinx from Pokémon. If you did, congratulations! It was actually an attempt at drawing Shinx. I drew this about one and a half years ago. Back then, I was pretty happy with how it turned out. However, when I saw it this morning, I mostly saw things that I could improve about it. I think this means I’ve improved as an artist, which I’m very happy about.
Because of this, I thought it was a nice idea to draw Shinx again, one and a half years later. To make it comparable to my old Shinx, I chose to use the same pose as above.
I first had to get the foundation down, so I started sketching. While the outline of the old drawing is not that bad, it could use a few tweaks here and there. For instance, the shape of the head and ears aren’t perfect. Also, the arrangement of the legs felt a little bit off. I first drew the outline with my pencil, after which I overlined it with my fineliner. Both steps can be seen below.
As I said earlier, Shinx is a Pokémon. In fact, Shinx is my favourite Pokémon. I never really had a favourite Pokémon until I started playing Pokémon Diamond. Very early in this game, you can encounter Shinx. When I did, I found him really cute. When I found out Shinx is an electric-type Pokémon, I was sold. Ever since this moment, I tried to get a Shinx in every Pokémon game I played.
Now that I had the linework down, I started colouring. I chose to use my alcohol markers, as I think they could look really nice on Shinx. Shinx only really has three colours; blue, yellow and dark grey. Well, there’s also a really small red mouth. Because the biggest part of his body is blue, I started with colouring in the parts that had to be blue. I started out with adding a base layer of light blue.
After blue-ing the parts that had to be blue, I added some grey to some parts that were blue. I did this to give the drawing some depth. I wanted the face to have some curvature. I tried blending in the grey with the blue. I did this using a colourless blender. A colourless blender is a marker that has colourless alcohol ink in it. It is really useful when you want to blend two different colours together. Below you can see the drawing with only blue and the drawing with blue blended in with grey.
Then, I started with colouring in the parts that had to be yellow. Sadly, none of my alcohol markers actually had the right colour for Shinx. I fixed this by taking two tones of yellow and just combining them. Finally, I added some grey and used my colourless blender to make a grading. For instance, the yellow at the bottom of his left ear (, the ear on the right in the drawing,) has to be darker than the yellow at the top of his ear. This just followed the shading I had already done. The drawing after I added the yellow can be seen below.
Now, all that was left was adding the grey. I actually used three different tones of grey and just combined them. This part of the drawing actually went pretty quickly. Probably because I didn’t find it that important how the grey parts would look. After all, the most important part is his face. So, the final result can be seen below!
So, we went from this one and a half years ago:
To this one today:
I’m happy to say that I think I have improved quite a bit. I’m happy with how the new one turned out. That being said, I don’t want to take anything away from the old one. Back then I was really proud of it. Maybe, in a way, I still am. What’s difficult for one person is easy for another and the other way around. Back then, I barely had any experience drawing. Right now, I have a bit more. So it’s not weird that the one I drew today is different than the old one.
One key thing to take away from this is that practice makes you better. If you would really like to acquire a certain skill or to achieve a certain something, just work hard. Put effort into it. If you do so, at the end of the day you will see that you’ve improved. And don’t forget, the journey is at least as important as the destination.
Treatey out
