Good morning Steemians,

I hope you all had a great week, mine went alright happy that it went fast and that it is now Saturday.

Shouto Todoroki - My Hero Academia

Earlier in the week on a comment thread @omega-not asked me to draw this character from an anime called "my Hero Academia".

I've never watched the anime and I'm not suer what the character is like and I've also not seen enough to be getting this right without copying a reference image, but...

To get better I must draw from references but not references that I am redrawing. This is great and I'll get much better however when starting a drawing with new equipment it is a bit scary.

Stage One -Blocking out the character

block out the characters pose in a blue pencil with very rough lines. I had trouble with the leg on the right in this stage, if you look closely theres a big smear of blue around the rough final lower leg.

Stage Two - Refining the detail and picking the lines to keep

This stage actually is both my second layer of blue with the a layer of H2 pencil to pick out the details I like. In this stage I had more trouble from the leg on the right and it moved a ton of times!

Stage Three - Finalize the line using a pen

With a pen go over the draw picking the lines to keep, I used a 0.05 pigment liner for this. At this stage I really noticed that I'd drawn this character way to small, I knew early on that I wasn't using as much of the page as I should but it became clear when I was drawing the lines with 0.05 and it was for main lines! 0.05 liners generally are good for smaller,finer details which this drawing lacks with it being so small.

Stage Three and a half - I wouldn't call this a stage

I ended up going over the drawing with the 0.05 liner for a second time. It was time to remove as much pencil work as possible and in the process I ended up removing most of the ink from the pen as it was layered onto of the pencil I wanted to remove. This mainly happened with the leg on the right again but there was where there was the most pencil so I guess it is was to be expected!

Stage Four - BrushMarkers :D

It is worth noting I had a test sheet on which I tried out a bunch of different colours and tried out fire and ice techniques before starting this stage. As a first go with my new markers I believe I have done alright but I think it could be much better and that I have a long way to go. Many factors cam into the light in this stage, I really had done this drawing way to small as the markers require much more space than I had anticipated. I also came to realize that the amount of pencil work was way to much as the ink would not sit on the paper correctly which gave me some real issues when making a solid smooth block of colour which I had no problem doing on my test sheet.

Self Crit

The thing that strikes me the me the most in the amount of time I move the right leg about and the amount of pencil that had been put onto the page in doing so. It really messed me up in the marker stage! I need to get pencil layers right sooner than I did here and I also was way to heavy with the pencil lines making it hard to get rid of them later.

In the future I need to make pencil layers as light as possible never making bold strong lines until the ink layers. I also need to to reduce the amount of time I end up moving parts of the drawing so that there is less pencil over the page.

I've been over that in the stages and to summaries this has been a great experience. The perspective of the character went really well the whole way through and when I flip the page to check most of the time it all looked fine.

When it came to colouring the drawing I think it went well considering the problem I encountered. I think the fire came out really well and the contrasting ice also turned out great! I don't think the blue of the clothes is the right shade of blue and I didn't have a tone darker for the shading however a second layer of these markers works to darken bits up however the problem with the pencil did make this a bit tricky!

I need to buy some more tones and shades of marker but I think the collection I have is really good and it was really good fun to use them :D

Until next time
Stay Well!

@omega-not - remember how I said don't worry about symmetry especially with eyes? guess what, I really messed up the right eye on this, I hope it isn't to noticeable. Perspective should help to hide it along with the strands of hair in front of it ;)