My drawing process

Written June 2026

I drew this silly picture of Sock Wizard (left) and Reb (right) for my Artfight profile, and on this page I'll show you probably too many pictures of the process of drawing it, and ramble quite a bit.

It's often a good idea to start with a thumbnail sketch. If a drawing is fairly simple or I'm being plain lazy, I'll skip this step. But if there are multiple characters and/or the composition is really important to the piece, it's really best to do a little something like this.

At this stage I'm basically just trying to scale up my thumbnail onto the paper I'll be drawing the real thing on. Just getting the placement the same is the key here.

Defining what I roughed in... I'm just trying to make it readable to myself.

And now I pretty much abandon the thumbnail sketch and make edits based on feeling. This is when I realized some arms kinda need to shift to look less crap.

Now I'm erasing everything. But just lightly. I'm trying to make it so that my sketch lines won't show through my paint too much. It's especially important to clean up areas that will be colored with light colors. Why don't I just use a lighter pencil or draw a little lighter? I don't really know.

Gouache paint time! I put a junkmail ad between my pages to keep paint off my next page. For this drawing I am primarily using my Citrus Summer palette.

Everything looks kinda weird honestly. Oh boy. eeeehhh....

At this point I consider all the base colors to be on. And it looks.... uh... low-key bad? But this is perfectly normal, don't worry yet.

Now I'm adding shadows and highlights with my paint. Exciting!
Sometimes I haven't decided what medium I want to line a picture with and at this point it's flexible and I could use anything I felt like.

This time, for the background I use graphite and red color pencil for lines and details. I don't often use graphite in my rendering process unless I'm going for a pencil sketchy vibe because of how it can be oddly shiny, but since my end goal for this piece is for a digital decoration on my profile, I'm not really worried about how it looks IRL, but normally that's a higher priority for me. I like giving my backgrounds a softer or lighter finish than the characters. I think of like how in old animations lined characters would stand out over painted background.
I start lining Sock Wizard with pen and wow I really don't like some of the lines I put down.

One of the things I enjoy about gouache is that I can cover up my mistakes if I try hard enough. It's hardest with lighter colors going over black ink, but I really had to fix Sock's hair or I would hate it forever.

It's fine. Everything's fine. Now I've got everything lined.

Next I thicken some lines, mostly outer lines of the characters. It's not much, but I feel like it really enhances the line art. It's also good for hiding and distracting from tiny inking mistakes.

Now I'm using my colored pencils for details. The three colors shown here are mostly what I use on this picture right now. I like Sock Wizard's hair being defined by the pencils instead of the harsh ink line I covered up. Finally this is starting to look okay haha.

White colored pencil really adds dimension! This part is short but really fun.

Finally I use my decades old white acrylic paint to add a few shines and better define the weird white outline. And the drawing is done! And it's okay~~~!

Scanned and made into a PNG with transparency! Ready for my Artfight profile.

Hope that was interesting! Besides my reference making process, which was much simpler, I've never tried to document how I go about making art, so I really don't know what I'm doing as far as explaining it goes. Hopefully it was understandable! It's actually really fun seeing my drawing at all these different stages, I'd like to take more process pictures going forward.

Bonus sketches

I often try to start a thumbnail a few times before I get the one I want to use. On top of that, I'm also often doing a little bit of doodles to experiment with a character's pose or expression seperately from the composition. This also serves as sort of a warm-up for drawing. This page is a total mess! But it's part of the process and that's why I wanted to show it, even if I'm not brave enough to put it at the beginning of the page.