Drawing Snapshot - Ducky Picnic (Patreon)

Hello lovely artists 🖌️✨

I drew some duckies having a picnic this week based on the results of the last drawing poll, so I want to show you a bit of the process!

The illustration process went something like this:

First I drew a sketch of the composition which I knew I wanted to have lots of flowers. I drew a few flowers bigger down the bottom so that they would be in the foreground, and made the flowers smaller the further back they went.

Then I made the sketch layer about 30% opacity so that I would be able to see through it to use as a reference.

On new layers below the sketch, I coloured in all of the main shapes in flat colour. I experimented this time with drawing the foreground and background elements with a soft brush (like my Medium Crayon brush) so that they would look a little bit out of focus, and the midground elements I drew with a hard-edged brush like my Marker Pen brush.

Then I added texture and shading using my texture brushes. I usually give everything a broad pass of texture using a brush like Textured Pencil Light or Soft Crayon, and then another layer with more defined shading.

For this one I also added some highlights from the sun. Any highlights are drawn in a light, warm colour (like yellow or orange) and then I make the layer 'screen' blend mode and adjust the opacity until it feels right.

And that's it!

Here is a close-up of the brushes I used to colour my shapes on this one to make the foreground and background feel softer:

And here's the difference between the illustration with the lighting and effects and also without. Which do you like best? Did I go a bit overboard with the lighting? 😅

If you'd like to use the colour palette from this illustration you can download it below 🥰