If the sun was the spirit, it would probably bring snow along with a cup of hot chocolate. Afterall, the sun loves the snow.
This is my entry for @opheliafu's Round 10 of the Doodle Challenge!
I discovered this post on my scrolling through the feed and decided, heck, why not? Doodle Doodledayeo!
The theme this week was : Wonderland, Chocolate and Snow.
I got the idea of sun spirit from the word wonderland. At first, I just wanted to draw a girl/elf taking a spiritual walk in a forest, but got carried away by the flow of her hair and just made a fire spirit. In other words, the sun drinking hot chocolate while the steam carries away into the air, turning into the first snow of the winter.
Here's a little GIF of the drawing process. I found that the sun is a very strong and powerful thing, so I decided to make her body shape appeal to that. A thicc and tough body for a powerful spirit, strong and sure eyes, and chocolatey skin.
AND HERE COMES THE STEP BY STEP!
STEP 1 :
Sketch the body and anatomy with blue and her clothes with a different colour. I find this always helps in differentiating which is which. Use flowy lines and let the breath of the air flow through your hand with each stroke...
STEP 2 :
Outline it with dark colours (because later on we're going to use the quick selection tool (on Photoshop) to select these layers and recolour it. Get different quality of lines (that means thickness) for different parts of the drawing. As my lecturers have reminded me time and time again before, the quality of line is very important and I think I still lack the understanding of it today. Feel free to look it up, if you wanna know more.
STEP 3 :
Colour first with some FLAT colours! That means no other shades. Get an overall theme for your drawing and just try to keep to it. I used hot and cold colours for this one.
STEP 4 :
Add some of those SHADES on the skin and detailing. (Did you notice she's holding a very festive cup? The sun may be fiery and haughty but she's super fun too.)
STEP 5 :
Next, we have the Background (BG) colours. I wanted to make her look down on a city landscape so... Add some green- bluish hills... a mint sky... the light brown of the earth...
STEP 6 :
Take note, the farther the object is, the more the colour fades off into the background. In this case, the mountains at the back are lighter coloured than the ones in front of it. And the cities gain more colour being closer to us. And the snow is just more white strokes and white dots in the air.
STEP 7 :
Here comes the fun part ! The hair omg. The colours I used here were so fun and fiery !! If you've noticed, big fires tend to have some extra flames that are small here and there. Add that to make fires look more realistic. Often enough, fires usually start with lighter yellow, and on to orange then red.
STEP 8 : Time for that quick selection tool. (PHOTOSHOP) First, select the layer with the outline in your layer tab. Then, simply click the quick selection tool and drag it over your canvas. It should do a precise job of selecting all the black outlines. After that, create a new layer and re-colour over it with the colours matching to that part of the drawing. Such as the outlines at the fire --> use orange/red/yellow. If you were looking for a lineless artstyle, this really helps get rid of the lines without having you to do much clean up if you decided to delete the outlines instead.
And that's about it. Thanks for reading. Hope you got something from this!