Inktober 2018 Day 9: “Precious”- with process shots

Smeagol was the first thing that came to mind when I saw today’s Inktober prompt (precious). Since I’ve never drawn him before, I figured it would be a good time to do so. First I had to find proper reference and run it through the Drawing Grid app on my iPad. I chose this image because it had a good mix of heavy tones and highlights, as well as a good close-up of his face:

The tools I would be using are Copic sketch markers (Copics are great because of the subtle value changes each one can give you. I used a lot of cool gray and warm gray), Pentel brush pen (for the heavy black parts), and Zebra ballpoint and Staedler pigment liner for details:

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Then, I drew a grid on my drawing surface :

Next I layed in the rough parts just to establish where everything was gonna go. The grid helps with accuracy, but I’m not going for a photo-realistic interpretation. I just want to make sure that the proportions are correct:

After that I tightened up the pencils and erased my grid lines:

Now we can begin putting in the inks. It is INKTOBER, after all:

Takes a while to get going, and it looks bad before it gets close to looking any good; using warm grays for his flesh, and cool gray for the shadows:

Working in more details and fleshing out:

And finally, throwing in the backgrounds and finishing details:

I hope you enjoyed the process. It was fun to work on 😁