Art Study: CASF

I have permission by to use her drawing's for this piece.

This is more of a self study than a tutorial, but you can learn a lot of what I just did. Recreating famous pieces of art can really help an artist improve. Just keep in mind to expand and create your own style. It's not very artistic if you mimic another artist's painting style.

Original image: [link]

Steps from the image. (In case you can't read it.)

Part 1: Sketching It wouldn't help me if I trace. I draw through observation, that's the best way to learn. In the picture to the left I first imagined the basic shapes of Skye (The dragon). A circle here a rectangle there, and I can sketch anything. You can see the circles in the sketch. When I draw the sketch I saw the importance of the circles in the head. Everything follows the curves. The horns, spikes, and other things like the chest follows the curves.

Part 2: Line Art Line art is where I suffer. That's why I prefer painting realism over cartoon drawings. So this is an excellent opportunity for me to brave it and just do it! Not too bad, a few mistakes here and there.
One thing I noticed is that CASF likes to start within the drawing to start the line art. Especially around the muscles and wings. Very creative, it helps define the muscles without too much details.

Part 3/4: Base Colors and Soft Shading The basics of coloring, base colors and soft cell shading. This is an important step that a lot of artists do in their drawings. The purpose of doing this is to lay down the basic colors and lighting for the drawing. It will later aid the artist later when it's time to draw the detail.

In the first screenshot to the right I picked light green, purple, and dark blue as the main base colors. One thing I learned is how hard it is to get that purple in those little points at the end.

In the second screenshot, I had fun using the pen tool to create the shading. It is pretty easy, but it's hard knowing where to put it. I didn't try matching the colors on the left. I'm saving it until I get near the end of my art study.

Part 4: Details In most drawings, the amount of detail really brings the art together. Even in cartoon/comic drawings, the level of detail gives a sense of realism. In CASF's case, the artist uses a little to a lot of details throughout the drawing. It amazes me how small details can bring life to this character.
To recreate the style, I used a lot of the pen tool. For the small scales, I used a 1 px brush on a blend mode of multiply or overlay. It was pretty hard, in the end I was pretty close but not exact.

Part 5: Background The background is usually done in the beginning or the end of the drawing. It sometimes helps to start in the beginning to figure out the appropriate colors and contrast for your foreground objects. In this case, my shadows are very green while CASF's shadows are purple. This reflects the color scheme and mood of the whole image a lot better than mine.
(I honestly didn't think I can recreate the background so accurately. It was fun to do.)

Final Image I went over the drawing a little bit more for another 12 minutes. I wanted to correct the coloring and details in some areas. The purpose of this was to learn, not to copy or steal. However, I ended up making an extremely accurate duplicate. There is some areas that are off but that's okay. I learned a lot from this experience. I encourage you to duplicate a painting from your favorite artist. The experience you'll get will help you create your own style.<b>