Pikachu is a popular Pokémon! It’s no mystery as to why I was commissioned to make an ink drawing of the fun, electric creature.
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| Pikachu, Ink Drawing On Bristol Board Paper. |
But how did I do it? And what about inking the little guy? In my YouTube video below, I explain it all while showing you video clips & photos of the different steps of the process. Who is your favorite Pokémon to draw?
Here are some of those process photos that were featured in the video.
The first thing I did was to look at a lot of pictures of Pikachu from Pokémon, and as I did this, I drew the ones I liked. I finally found a picture of a cool model kit of Pikachu where he looks like he's about to strike so I drew that pose and changed a few things and added some lightning bolts on his cheeks.
Then I roughly sketched it out on a piece of paper of the size I wanted and then with my light box, I traced over it onto the final paper.
Then I lightened the drawing with a kneaded eraser.
I then went in and made corrections for proportion and scale by looking at reference images.
I began inking over the picture with fine line ink pens & brush pens.
Here I used little cross-hatching lines to add some depth to his eyes.
I find it's always good to remember that it's okay for me to turn my drawing around and rotate the paper so that I can make the marks in the easiest way possible. Sometimes you find yourself trying to make marks against the paper or against a natural position for your arm and it doesn't help.
Here I've done a little bit of hatching to show some shadows. I continued that throughout the drawing. In his mouth, I did cross-hatching where the lines cross over each other. I decided to put his tail in a different position than it was in the reference images.
Since his stripes on his back are brown and this is a black and white drawing, I decided I would use cross- hatching for put the stripes, but not as thick as in the shadow areas. And I did the same thing for the brown parts of the tail. I used the ruler to add the horizon line. And then started to add little trail in the dirt.
I then started to use this tip I saw online from a great comic artist from Japan. He has done manga for years & used a ruler and an upside down thumb tack to make radial lines of motion or light. What he does is he puts the thumb tack on the piece of paper pointing out with a little bit of masking tape to stick it to the drawing that way there's no holes. Then you slowly move the ruler around the drawing and use it as a straight edge
[Links to videos of this technique are toward the bottom of this post.]
I then used a white POSCA marker to white out all the lines where the leaf and other things should be.
I also added the lightning bolts around Pikachu's cheeks. This was a very fun part, but it was a little nerve-wracking too. I was afraid I'd get it wrong, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I wasn't worried about going over areas where it already inked, because I knew I was going to come back over with the white POSCA marker. (You can see this in the video.) Once I filled in those areas that I didn't want the black lines, I then went back over the edges with an ink pin to add an outline for the sparks.
And that's how I drew and inked this Pikachu. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe picked up a thing or two. Do you have a favorite Pokémon? Which Pokémon do you like to draw the most?
Until next time, thank you for stopping by & God Bless!
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