Drawing Snapshot - Little Bird in a Christmas Tree (Patreon)

I drew this sweet little bird this week based on a sketch that I showed you last month, and I thought you might like to see a snapshot of the drawing process for it!

It's also quite a good example of the impact that adding lighting can have. Because there are big, obvious lights in this composition I wanted to add lots of highlights, and you can see the difference they make in this comparison.

I drew all of my highlight layers with a light colour, using a soft brush (mostly my Soft Crayon and Medium Texture brushes), and with the whole layer set to 'screen' blend mode.

Here's a simple breakdown of my digital drawing process, plus you can download the colour palette below if you'd like to use it yourself!

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

First I drew a sketch of my composition - I drew this one last month when I was getting ready for some winter illustrations but wanted to draw the colour version a bit closer to Christmas.

Then I made my sketch layer about 30% opacity and 'multiply' blend mode so that I would always be able to see through it.

On new layers underneath the sketch layer, I coloured in all of the elements of my illustration.

I added lots of little line details like on the scarf and the pine needles.

Then I added texture to pretty much everything! I mostly used my Soft Crayon brush because I like how broad and gentle it can be.

I drew in some shading in areas that should be darker, like under the bird and on the pine.

And finally I added lots of lighting layers! I drew some soft lighting behind the lights themselves, and then with a smaller brush I drew some highlights around the edges of the bird that were most likely to be catching the light.

Lighting can be a bit challenging for me so it was fun to experiment with drawing big lights in this illustration! ✨