Today I have a drawing time-lapse to darken your holidays! *Ahem* I mean brighten your holidays. Did I say darken? I meant brighten…

For Christmas this year we decided to draw and paint a Krampus! It was a lot of fun, and in the following video you can get a sense of how the image progressed from sketch to tight drawing . The pencils I was working with for this drawing were a standard 2H pencil, and a 2B 0.5mm mechanical pencil, one of my favorite combinations to draw in.  The paper is Strathmore smooth bristol and the entire drawing took about an hour to finish.

Thanks to everyone who came along for the livestreams and offered all the helpful advice. “He could use a machine gun.” “He needs less fingers.” “Have you ever drawn before, or is this your first time?”

It was a lot of fun hanging out with everyone and I was really happy with what we ended up with! I do find that drawing with an audience sharpens the senses quite a bit and strangely, I think some of the art actually turns out better for having an audience. I always tend to have my own peanut gallery going in my head internally as I draw (proof of my loss of sanity?) …as with the peanut gallery from the Muppets, these internal critics of mine are never nice. Yet even being my own worst critic there is something about working with others watching that always pushes me further. (Adrenaline-fueled terror perhaps?) At any rate, I do really enjoy the livestreams and am always amazed at how far we make it along while on camera.

Anyway, back to the drawing! Here is a shot of some very simple thumbnails that provided the basis for the figure:

I always find it really helpful to try and get all the bad ideas out during the thumbnailing phase.  (Doesn’t always work of course, but luck favors the prepared!) These were done in ink and the one on the right, in digital. I always find doing initial work in traditional ink works best for me, and then doing a more refined line drawing in ink to be great for really nailing down a design.

I hope you have enjoyed this one! Next time we will go over some of the stages we went through to paint the figure in color!