Art Trade with Serena!

As Serena mentioned last week, the two of us decided to do an art trade of each other's characters. Since we wanted to challenge ourselves as well as have fun, we chose an action scene as our theme.

I chose to draw a character from a recent scene that I read. While Milla is older at the start of the book, the scene was a flashback to her at a younger age. I used a reference picture just to aid me in the posture of the drawing, but as I often do when drawing from a reference, I changed it a lot to make it fit my imagination.

I started with a pencil sketch and began to polish it, and make it more accurate. Actually, I had been intending to draw a slightly later part in the scene, but I started sketching this and then realized I could totally use it. So here is the first sketch:

I only did a little bit of shading (and not all I did do came through when I scanned it); this was more of just an outline. I went on then to experiment with pens. I had actually never really drawn much with pens before, but as I just got a nice set for Christmas, I figured I'd give them a try. And I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

As you may notice, I made some changes to the drawing between the pencil sketch and the ink sketch, including the absence of the bows and some changes to the face to make Milla look less like an eight-year-old and more like her twelve-year-old self.

After I finished this sketch, I was pretty happy with how it turned out, except for one thing. The ear was too high. So I went back one more time with the more familiar pencils for a final draft.

And here it is! I checked back with the original reference and a couple other pictures to edit the face proportions a little, and I did a lot more with shading this time around. One thing I've been experimenting with recently is "drawing" with my eraser, so rather than shading everything, particularly the dress, the lightest shade it would be and then adding more layers for the shadows, I shaded it the darkest shade and used the eraser for highlights, blending it with a paper stump for smooth transitions between the shadow and light.

And she was finished!

I'm so glad we decided to do this! I absolutely love your story, Serena, and I had so much fun sketching a very heroic and awesome Milla. Hopefully there will be more art trades in the future, but that's all for now!

- Auriel