Cow Witch - Process

Hello my lovelies! I have returned to you to show the drawing process for the Cow Witch. This drawing started as an ask I received on Curious Cat  

It inspired me enough to get THINKING, and when I get THINKING I sometimes get INSPIRED - and so inspired I was enough to start out my next drawing. This actually started pretty much immediately after I said I was gonna take a break since my thumb started to feel better, but I wasn't gonna rush it and push it out ASAP.

If you're at all familiar with me from long, long, LONG ago - before I even used Tumblr... you'd know that I drew almost exclusively fancy frilly dresses. I love the look so much that it was basically all I ever wanted to draw. But unfortunately, as my artistic skill improved the time it took to start and finish a drawing to the level of quality that I like to push out drastically increased. And so I stopped drawing fancy frilly dresses, until I got inspired with this drawing. I wanted to draw a fancy frilly dress!

I also knew that I wanted to involve cows somewhat in it, and while browsing through my library of saved witch art (yes I have one) I paid particularly close attention to the way a lot of artists these days draw witch hats with exaggerated proportions. The brims are huge and the pointy bit at the top ridiculously long... almost like a tail - and that's when I realized that making a witch hat with a cow theme to it could be a REALLY fun idea.

And so I got to work...

I was really happy with this pose, the shape was fantastic to me. The right amount of weight and roundness in proportion. But it was all for naught...

As soon as I added the boobs and the dress, everything I sketched out originally was lost. Not that I'm particularly bothered - I always try to give my work a solid foundation. I see a lot of other artists who draw boobs on this scale tend to really exaggerate the length of their character's torsos so that you can see more of their huge hips/ass, and maybe that's a good look for them but to me it just looks weird. If losing everything I drew originally is what it takes, then so be it...

This stage was very rough as you can tell, and it served for blocking out what the final drawing might look like. It's also important because I use it to figure out my colour scheme. Originally the drawing was going to have more purple because I like purple, but then I decided to swap over to a monochrome colour scheme. The reason is because I wanted to include more cow elements in her design. I was very tempted to put a simple cow pattern in somewhere like on the cape or on the hate, but it started to feel like a copout. So instead I chose to have a mix of blacks and whites made to break up the flow of colour on her dress much in the same way cow print does. I can't really say for sure if this idea came out the way I intended, but I think it looks good regardless.

The next stage is to start work on my clean outlines. A lot of artists hate this part and I agree - it's boring as FUCK. But this one wasn't so bad for me since I used this stage as the one where I really start filling in all the small details. I also changed the look of her dress to be more flowing and poofy, simply because I thought it looked better.

Next I fill in my basic solid colours. Usually I feel like my drawings look the worst here. Compare this to the plain outline above and somehow the plain outline looks better. I feel like this is because when I block out my solids, I don't particularly think much as to what each shade should be, and if I spent more time on this stage tweaking values etc I could probably make it look better; but that's a waste of time considering I'm going to do that later anyway.

It's also around this time I started to think of the background I should do. I felt like a simple floating brick platform was cool and effective (and this style of background is something I may use more in the future). To me it makes it feel more like the drawing is a snippet of something much grander, like a moment in time has been sliced away and preserved. 

It's probably not that deep though. Basically it just looks cool.

Anyways that's more or less the last stage. After this I just chip away at adding shade and tone to other misc details until the drawing reaches the completion stage. Which you can see on the other post I made here.

Technically speaking this character is just my persona wearing a cute outfit, but I feel like she has taken on enough personality of her own to be an entirely new character. Does she exist in the same universe as Briti? Who knows I haven't decided that much yet.

Thanks for reading!