Drawing Snapshot (featuring happy doggo!) (Patreon)

Hi my lovelies, I hope you're having a nice weekend!

I drew this very happy doggo on Friday and wanted to share with you a bit about the drawing process as it was slightly different to what I normally draw.

It's not often that I draw something that's so layered like this pile of leaves so it was an interesting challenge for me to figure out how to draw something that looked like it was made up of lots of individual elements without literally drawing every single leaf.

So let's take a look at the drawing process and I've also saved out my colour palette that you're welcome to use for your own illustrations (perfect for those of you who'll be coming into autumn soon!).

My process for this illustration went a little something like this:

First I drew a rough sketch to map out my composition

Then, so that I could use that sketch layer as a reference for drawing all of my colours, I made it around 20% opacity and 'multiply' blend mode

On new layers below I started colouring in all of my main elements. My stategy for the pile of leaves was to colour the whole thing in one colour as a big blob and then add in several extra layers of different coloured leaves on top

To layer the leaves I would make a new layer, take a new colour and then draw in a fairly even spread of leaf shapes across the pile, making sure to leave gaps for other colours. Then I would do that again with another colour, drawing in leaf shapes across the pile with some really defined leaves and some as little dashes. I also made sure that some overlapped with leaves from other layers

Once I had about 6 layers of leaves of different colours, I went through and added line details to the leaves of each layer (and the doggo)

I then went through each layer and adding texture and shading

And that's about it!

It was a fun challenge to draw something like this and gave me some useful tools for drawing more leafy bushes in the future.

Here's a little animation showing you the basic leaf colour layers coming together before details and shading (I hope the gif works!):

I'm really pleased with how they turned out, now I want to draw more dogs 😄✨