This summer is the perfect time to practice your skills and brush up on old ones. With all of this time during the summer, I decided that it would be a great time to practice my digital drawing. I am an illustration major at Marywood, so I think it is essential to know how to use all types of media when creating art.
I recently bought a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet, and with it, I get subscriptions to art programs. So far, I have been learning how to use the program Clip Paint Studio Pro; it has excellent applications, and you can use all kinds of materials. The program has settings for pencils, pens, markers, and paints.
I thought it would be fun to have a project to challenge me while learning how to use this program, so I asked my friend Ace to come up with characteristics for a character I had to create. For this character, I needed to reinvent a super villain, and the villain needed to be in military dress, have an internal power source, the weapon is a flamethrower, a staff as an accessory, and have metallic attributes. Ace got all of the criteria from a deck of cards she got from infectedbyart.com. After thinking about a villain I could reinvent, I chose Maleficent from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.
To start the process of creating the drawing, I needed a pose or stance to base the figure on. I used an app called Easy Poser to create this figure and I used it as a reference to pose my character. I chose this stance because of the confidence it has. I feel that Maleficent is a confident character in the movie.
When starting my sketch, I thought of the characteristics of Maleficent and how she fits what I needed to include in my drawing. She matched the criteria because of her own internal power source, magic. She uses her magic to create fire, so I thought she could use her staff to create fire, and it would work as the flamethrower. I am fascinated by knights, so I chose to draw her in armor as it is a type of military dress. For her other features like coloring, skin tone, and the horns, I used Disney’s Maleficent for inspiration.
This is the finished version of my drawing. I learned a lot about the program Clip Studio Paint Pro while creating my drawing. I tried several different looks but I liked the effect I got by blending colors to create highlights and shadows on the figure.
