And the making of one!

Like many other visual artists, I’ve had an affinity for drawing from an early age. As long as I can remember, I enjoyed drawing macabre, horror-inspired art that would depict anything from a monster dismembering people, to a walking cigarette-smoking brain with hairy legs. As I got older, drawing was more and more confined the limits of the nude human proportions, or capturing the accurate nature of still objects. However, if there is one thing that I carried with me from the days of doodling poorly-drawn cosmic horrors, it would be my deep love and unbreakable habit of drawing skulls. It’s sort of like my go-to thing when I’m nervously awaiting something or just starting to practice. This week I thought it would be fun to show my process for drawing a skull from start to finish with photos and a time lapse for anyone who is interested!

Like most of the skulls I drew, this particular one had no specific inspiration or intention to it, just started out as a doodle at work that I carried home with me so to speak. I started with procreate on the iPad, referencing a photo of a skull. Typically I start drawings with some loose and suggestive shapes and progressively work in details.

Then I started to add details to the top part of the skull. Often times I’ll just leave the top part of the skull finished or close to finished without adding a jaw. I find that I run into the most amount of trouble around this step and it is usually related to the proportions of the skull’s face… almost always with the alignment and size of the eyes. However this time I felt pretty decent about it on the first pass.

Added in polished line art! I also decided that I wanted to play with color as bit more on this design, so I made the background a dark olive green and the line work a navy blue.

Finally, I added some color inside the skull and a some design elements to the background, as well as a rough texture over everything to give it a little more of a matte feel. As stated earlier the color choices are essentially just playful and experimental, not meant to be reflective of any kind of theory. If you enjoy the piece, maybe you will enjoy the time-lapse of it being done as well! Check it out at the bottom of the post.