Drawing Snapshot - Sleepy Capybara (Patreon)

Hello everyone! 🌷

I sat down to do some drawing last night for the first time in a few weeks after being sick and then travelling over to Europe, and it was so nice to sit and draw something cute.

Thank you for voting in the poll that I put out a few weeks ago about what animal I should draw - the capybara was a great choice!

So here's a quick breakdown of my drawing process and the colour palette that I used (you can download the palette below if you'd like to use it):

First I drew a sketch of my composition. I knew that I wanted a capybara lying down so I googled some photos of capybaras as a reference for the shape, especially the shape of the head which is quite unique!

Then I made my sketch layer about 30% opacity so that I would easily be able to see through it.

On new layers below the sketch, I started colouring in all of the main shapes, keeping different elements on different layers. The whole capybara body is on one layer, all of the little flowers are together on one layer, but the rainbow has a different layer for each colour so that I can easily adjust the individual colours.

Then I added lots of little details like the fur, the sparkles and some details for the grass.

Next, I gave everything a few layers of texture and shading, making sure that underneath the capybara has the strongest shadow where they're sitting on the grass. I used my texture brushes, mostly the Textured Pencil brushes and Crayon brushes for this illustration.

And that's it!

This little cutie was so fun to draw, I think I'll need to draw some more capybaras now! 💖