Drawing Katie (Part I) - The Phantom Inker's Art

Part I: The Head | Part II: The Body | Part III: Clothing & Shading

April 14, 2004

I've had some people ask questions about how I draw these things, so I thought that when drawing Katie McBride, I'd post images at regular one-hour intervals of work so that you can see what goes on in my head while I'm working. Each of the images below is clickable; if you click it, you can see a much larger version.

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1. Very sketchy after the first hour

This is after the very first hour. The first step is to lay down a few lines to get a feel for what the image ought to look like. There's not much to look at, but already the basics of her facial shape and attitude can be seen. Many of these lines are out-of-place, and will be moved into better positions as the work progresses; there's at least four more hours of work on her head alone before she'll be done.

There's not that much else to say at this stage; you either have the ability to sketch a basic head shape or you don't. The best suggestion if you're trying to learn to do this is to start simple: Draw a basic egg shape, and put marker lines where the facial features ought to be (if you click the image to magnify it and look closely, you'll see two of my lingering marker lines still in her eyes). Specifically, you'll want a vertical line running down the middle of the face that will show where the nose and mouth will be centered; and you'll want a horizontal line where across the middle of the egg where the eyes will be; and you'll want another horizontal line halfway down from there where the mouth will be. Once you've got the basic egg and marker lines, draw the facial features over the lines. Then add the hair lines, and finally get rid of the marker lines. If this description isn't really good enough for you, consult a good art book.

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2. Make the eyes look good in the second hour

I first moved the crown of her hair farther back, since her head is tilted, although it looks like I may have moved it too far. After that, I gave her more realistic and lady-like eyebrows. In total, that was only about five or ten minutes.

I spent the rest of the time working on her eyes, on getting all the shapes and shines just right. Eyes are important; they give a character life. Even with nothing else really done on her, she has a certain "realism" now that wasn't there before. The first step was to first get the shape of the eyes to what I wanted; then I fixed up her eyelashes so they were big and black with the "Cleopatra" look that shows up in a lot of good anime and manga. No doubt Katie's using a bit of makeup to get them that big and black.

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After doing the eyelashes, I went into her eyes and drew the irises, first as a green ring around the black pupil, and then covering up various parts of the green ring with black and white to simulate shine. The green ring is shaded slightly and divided down the middle to make it look more like a real iris instead of just a green ring. Once I got the one iris right, I copied it to the other eye, adjusting the size, and removing some of the shiny bits since it's in shadow. Last but not least, I put shading around the whites of the eyes, since they are partially in shadow. If I were really ambitious, I could try to darken the eyes to just a little less than full-white, which would make the shine seem brighter than white; but I don't think that will be necessary here.

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3. Get the hairstyle right; then flat-color everything in the third hour

Okay, so I moved the crown back up a bit, and then took away the placeholder bangs and put in real ones. These big, poofy cascading bangs are far more realistic; of course, nobody actually has bangs quite like these big poofy things, but this is art, and we can take a little artistic license and ignore gravity when it's convenient. Besides, there were hairstyles that did some of this back in the '80s when people were using too much hair conditioner, so it's not an unbelivable hairstyle. Note that although the right and left sides of the bangs look very different, if they were true 3D models, they would be very similar, and could conceivably be mirror-images or nearly so. This is significant; since she parts her hair in the middle, both sides ought to be the same, to within the limits that most peoples' left and right sides are the same.

Once the hair has a good style to it, the only remaining thing is to play connect the dots... er... connect the lines. We go through the image, selecting parts that ought to be more-or-less the same color, and join them together to make closed shapes; and then we fill them with a suitable color. This image is the result.

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4. Finish any facial details; then shade the face in the fourth (plus) hour.

This stage is complex enough that I have broken it into several parts. Our objective is to finish the face in this stage. First, that means fixing any little details, such as the position of the mouth or the clover she's holding in it. When the little details are taken care of, then we have to start the real shading.

The first step in the real shading is to figure out which direction the light comes from (in this case, to her left, in front of her; or beside the camera to the camera's right). When we know that, consider the part of the face that points toward the camera and call it the "front" side, and the part of the face that points away from the camera is the "back". When you know where those two parts are divided (which, in this case, happen to be right down the middle of her face), you draw a line right between them and color the "back" part one level darker than the "front", which should be whatever the person's skin color is.

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(Part 4b.) The face has been separated into "front" and "back"; now we go around the outer edge of the "back" part and shade it darker yet. Anything that is supposed to be even darker (like under her chin) will get darkened again to compensate for this change. You can see that I shrank the extra-dark part under her chin because much of the required shading there would already be taken up by the dark "back" part.

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(Part 4c.) Next, take care of shading details on the "back" part of the face. Her right eye socket gets darkened. A slight glow is added on her cheekbone. A suitable shadow is added below her nose to make it stick out and look triangular. Her lips are colored and shaded down the front/back line, with a glow-circle added on the bottom lip to indicate the shine of lipstick; and the clover's shadow is projected onto her face.

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(Part 4d.) On the right side of her face, we go through and add the rest of the "natural" shading: That's shading and highlights that would be there if her hair weren't there. Thus a shadow in her left eye-socket; a glow on her nose and forehead; a glow on her neck; and a glow on her left cheek to highlight the cheekbone.

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(Part 4e.) Last, but certainly not least, we project the shadow of the hair onto the face. Where the hair is far from the face, the hair must be far from its matching shadow; where the hair is close to the face, the hair must be close to its matching shadow. We shade extra-dark in places where the hair would block even more light, such as near the back of her head and neck, her ear, and near the roots of her bangs. We also darken part of the left-eye socket to indicate that the bangs are blocking some of the light that would fall on the eye (but never, ever darken the eye itself except for its white part: If you darken the iris or pupil, the person will look dazed, confused, or dead). I also added a little extra white highlight in the highlighted areas to emphasize the smoothness and shininess of the skin (she must use moisturizer!).

The facial shading can easily take an hour or more, depending on how many levels of shadow and highlight you intend to use (and whether you intend to use blending or blurring to make their edges smoother); in Katie's case, it was about an hour and a half in total.

Because there are so many different steps that take place during the shading, and because the steps change the image in such subtle ways, it can be useful to compare the stages side-by-side to more easily see the differences between them:

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5. Start shading the hair in the fifth (plus) hour.

This stage is also complex, so I have broken it into several parts. Shading hair is difficult. It gets even more difficult when you want it to look realistic, and even more difficult when you want it to look hyper-realistic (as in Katie's case). In high school, I asked my art teacher how to draw hair; he told me something rather noncommittal at the time, and that was where the subject dropped. I learned much later why he couldn't give me a good answer: Although hair does have some defining characteristics, the majority of it has to come from your own imagination. So I'm going to try hard to explain this stage, but most people will either just get it or they won't, and no explaining will really help those who don't. Sorry.

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(Part 5a.) We'll start simply. Initially, we can conceive of the hair to just be a solid almost plastic-like object, stiff and molded into shape. That's not true, but it's good enough for this stage. The face casts a shadow on Katie's right-side hair (our left side), because the light source is obviously sitting over our right shoulder. Thus we start by darkening the back part of the hair as though it were solid plastic. This is a good time to do some other simple darkenings as well; the eyebrows, for example, have to follow the same shading as the face, as if they were just painted on; and little tufts of hair can usually be quickly painted as well (like between her bangs, at her crown, and behind her ear). In most cases, we're just darkening things that have shadows falling on them from either some other part of the hair or from the face.

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(Part 5b.) Katie is going to have shiny, glowy hair. The official description for her says that she has "firey red hair", and we're going to take that to an extreme. Nobody has hair this good, but everybody wants hair this good; it's another example of anime-styled artistic exaggeration. Thus while the base color of her hair is a nice orange, and the shadows are a red-brown, the highlights are going to be bright neon yellow.

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Let's take a closer look at that single shaded tuft of hair. There are several things to notice about it. First, the near edge has the bright yellow where it reflects the light source; the far edge has a gentle brown for the shadow. The gentle change in colors makes it look round, so that it has volume; and the bright streaks make it look like it's composed of many individual strands. Last, but not least, there is a horizontal "bar"-shape that hints at how strongly the hair reflects the light source.

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(Part 5c.) Alright, so now that you know how to do one tuft, can you do them all? Take a close look at this and see where the shines and shadows are placed. Shines point to the light source; shadows point away. There are streaks to indicate that the hair is made of many strands, and here are horizontal bars to directly reflect the light source (the bars are a very anime/manga-thing, although often there they're done as simple zig-zaggy white lines). In addition, we use a dark, rich reddish brown underneath the bangs at the widow's peak; the extra dark color will help accentuate the shininess of the rest of the hair.

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Still having a hard time seeing how this works? Take a look at this close-up of the hair and see if you can figure it out.

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6. Do the other half of the bangs in the sixth hour

Okay, this is just as complex as the first half of the bangs, but by now you should have the basic principle figured out. Since most of this faces away from the light, it will be mostly shadowed. Some of it faces toward the light, and there you'll see yellow highlights. As usual, there are streaks to indicate that the hair is composed of strands. In addition, I've added just a little more detail to the back side of the hair below her chin to suggest that there are strands there also, and darkened some of that area to strengthen the highlights elsewhere.

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Here's a close-up of the left-side bangs to help you see what's happening. These are mostly streaks and shadows; there's very little else required.

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7. Do the rest of the hair in the seventh (plus) hour

Here's a close-up of the left-side bangs to help you see what's happening. These are mostly streaks and shadows; there's very little else required.

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Here's a close-up of the shine on the side of her head. Notice that it's composed mostly of curvy streaks. In the center of it, there are some white streaks; this is the only place white is used (or necessary) in her hair. Notice how the streaks follow the curved path of the hair itself, and actually help define that path.

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Here's a close-up of the shine on the lower part of her hair. Notice how the shadows in the middle of this picture imply that the upper part of her hair is pulled behind this part, that this "sticks out" from behind that hair. Real hair has many, many more layers that do that, but we only need enough here to hint that it's happening for the eye and the mind to do the rest. Notice also how few streaks are necessary here to make the hair look like it's composed of many strands; and noice also how the streaks are lined up such that they seem to form a "band" of brighter area across the hair. That "band" should exist throughout the hair, and it should always point to the light source; notice that there is another similar band near the top of this picture.

The hair shading can easily take three or four hours or more, depending on how many levels of shadow and highlight you intend to use and how complicated you want to make it. Remember that simpler is better, and if you can successfully pull off a look with very few lines (as in the last picture above), by all means, do it. Don't overcomplicate when you don't have to.

Next: Part II: Drawing The Body >>