Hello everyone!
Welcome back to a new post! Today is a special day; the first time I post art that isn’t a Pokémon. This time, I drew a human character to switch things up. It’s still from an animated series though. This time, I drew Katara from ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’.
First of all, let me give you a little bit of backstory in case you haven’t seen avatar. Avatar is about the 4 elements; water, earth, fire and air. For all of these elements, there are people that can control it. Katara is one of these people. She is a waterbender from the Southpole.
Katara has some unique features to herself, which makes her interesting to draw. We’ll get back to that later. First of all, I tried sketching her with my pencil. This happened to be a lot harder than I expected. There was just something about my sketches that felt off. Below are my first two attempts.
As you can see, in the first one, the hair was way too big. While in the second one something just felt off. Her facial expression was not really the way I liked it, and her neck felt too long.
I wanted her to have a serious face. In her backstory, Katara is really damaged by her past. Many things happened in her life and to her family. Because of this, I didn’t want to just make a happy character; there’s more to it than a happy face.
I resumed sketching and got something I was kind of happy with. It can be seen below.
I gave her longer hair, to make her neck feel less ’empty’. I also removed her ears to add them later on again.
As you can see, Katara has a unique hairstyle. This is one of the unique aspects of her. Most of the time, she has two plucks of her hair pinned up with blue thingies. Another thing is her charm. It is a charm she (almost) always wears, as it is the only thing the has left of her mother. Another typical thing is her clothes. As stated before, Katara is from a village on the Southpole. This village is in waterbender territory. Because of this, she wears distinctive blue clothes.
Not that we’ve got that backstory out of the way, let’s get back to drawing. As you can see in the last sketch, the linework is kind of messy. Also, I wasn’t really happy with all the lines. So, of course, I took my fineliner and fixed both of these problems. The result can be seen below.
The result was actually exactly as I wanted it. The lines are a lot cleaner now. Also, some lines are different than in the sketch above. For instance, look at the lower part of her hair. In the sketch, it was very straight and started very much to the outside. While now, it has a lot of curvatures and starts far more to the inside, close to her ears (which I also added). Also, I changed the shape of her pendant a bit, to make it look more like a real charm.
Above I told you some things about unique aspects Katara has. A lot of this included certain colours. So this is a good time to add these colours. For the first time in a drawing, I’m using blending paper. Blending paper is specifically designed for art products that can, as the name suggests, blend into each other. One of these art products is alcohol markers, which I happen to own. So of course, I used them.
I started out with her hair. I actually had a brown coloured marker which formed a really great base colour of her hair. I also picked out a grey marker. When I combined the brown and the grey marker, it turned into some kind of dark/blackish brown. It was important to have two kinds of brown because I wanted to add darker spots/shadows to her hair. It took some time, but in the end I was really happy with her hair. At first, her hair got like a really even colour. I didn’t really like this, as hair isn’t flat. Because of this, I started adding random bits of grey to her hair. This made her hair seem more realistic.
Then I turned to her hairpins and eyes. The hairpins were pretty easy, as it was just a light blue colour with some grey overlayed in certain parts. Her eyes were a bit harder, as I wanted to create a reflection. However, after some thinking and trying on a different sheet of paper, I created some eyes that I liked. Finally, I added a thicker line to the top of her eye, to make it look like a shadow. The results of her hair and eyes can be seen below.
Now I had to add het skin colour, her charm and her shirt.
I first did her shirt and charm, as they were pretty easy to do. Since these are mostly flat objects, I didn’t have to worry about shading and colour blending. So for her shirt, I just applied an even layer of light blue. For her charm, I just added an even layer of dark blue for the thing around her neck and a yellow and a light blue colour for the pendant.
Now I turned to the skin colour. I picked out a marker that resembled her skin colour pretty well. I applied this colour to her whole skin. After doing this, I picked out a grey marker again. I applied this grey colour to all the places I thought a shadow would be. On her skins as well as on her charm and shirt. Earlier with the eyes, I made a reflection on the right side of the eyes. Because of this, the light source was on the right, so the shadow had to fall to the left. I think the shadow turned out great!
Finally, the piece was done! The result can be seen below.
So that’s the final result! I hope you like it. Let me know what you think about it :).
See you later!
Treatey Out
