How to Draw a Spaniel Dog on Drafting Film - Beginner Techniques for Realistic Fur - Colour Pencil

You know that feeling when you've spent a long time on a piece of work and at the end of it you still feel that it just looks a little bit flat and you're just lacking the volume in the fur that you'd like to see. Or perhaps what you're really looking for in your artwork is to achieve a realistic or even hyper-realistic finish to your animal portraits. If that sounds like you then stick around because in this video I'm going to take you through my process for drawing a spring Espanol dog on drafting film. And as we go through that process I'll explain some tips and some techniques as well as the steps that I follow to ensure that I capture that realism in my finished drawing. Okay, so sit back and let's get started. So after outlining the eyes with a dark brown pencil I want to make sure that the iris area stays quite vibrant and quite saturated. So I add in a base layer of a bright orange. At this point I want to stay away from the dark sepia outline. So I'm being very careful to stay just inside that dark brown line so I don't smudge it. The pupil is obviously going to be much darker but I don't just want to go straight in with a black pencil. I'm actually adding a dark blue into the dark area of the pupil too. The iris of an eye is never just one colour. So over the orange I want to bring in some brown colours and some ochre colours to mix the colour that I want directly down on the film. It's at this point now that I'm actually picking up that dark brown edge at the bottom of the eye too and gently dragging it into the iris to create a nice soft transition. I do the same with the pupil too. Start with the dark brown pencil in the pupil and gently pull it outwards and into the iris area to again create a nice soft transition. Blending between the areas is what creates a believable eye. There aren't any harsh lines between the shapes and the colours within the eye so I want to create those nice soft transitions. Once the colours are in place I'll use the lighter ochre pencil to blend everything together giving the eye that smooth glassy finish. I'm moving on to the fur around the eyes. In this area I'm working light to dark as I would if I was working on hot pressed paper. You don't always need to work light to dark. On drafting film you can go in with the darker colours and add the lighter colours over the top. But I'm working from light to dark here. So I start with a light grey base layer. I'm holding my pencil in quite a relaxed position. I'm not holding it really close up to the tip of the pencil, I'm holding it further back. And I'm keeping my pencil tipped over a little bit so I'm using more of the side of the lead. This gives me a broader pencil stroke and that combined with light pressure helps me to create a very even base layer. Once that base layer is down I start to plot in the fur with the darker brown pencil. I'm looking for the darker shapes that I can see in the reference photograph and I'm paying close attention to the direction and the flow of the fur. Which basically means that I'm starting to plot in the structure of the fur and the bow structure of the face. Whilst you can put a base layer down on drafting film you don't always need it and in fact sometimes it can be a little bit more of a hindrance. Because it takes up that valuable tooth that we're going to need. So as I move to the ear I skip the base layer completely and I work straight onto the film with the darker pencils. Knowing that this area is going to be really quite dark so I don't need a light base layer in there. Once the darker shapes are in place I blend lightly with a mid-tone grey to smooth the transitions between the light and dark areas. Blending on drafting film is actually quite easy as long as the layers that you have put down previously were applied with a really light pressure. When you apply a layer of colour pencil onto drafting film the pigment sits on the surface. It sits on the top of the tooth which means that as you add your blending layer you can push the previous layers around. You can smooth them out and you can create some really lovely seamless transitions from one area to another. Just as I would if I was drawing on any surface whether that be hot pressed paper or pastel mat. I build the fur by alternating the layers between the light and the dark values. Once I've added the darker layers I'll come back in with lighter brown grey tones. Mixing the colours directly on the film until I get as close as possible to that reference photograph. To give the face some depth and some structure I add darker values towards the outer edges closer to the ear. This helps describe the face curving backwards towards and behind the ears and suggests a roundness to the face. I want to avoid harsh edges between these shapes so I soften the transitions with a light grey pencil. Gently blending from one area to another until I have that soft seamless edge. So because drafting film doesn't have much tooth you can reach a point in the drawing quite quickly where you can't add any more pencil. This is where the surface has become saturated with pigment it may become shiny and you can't get any more layers down. This happens quite quickly with drafting film but it isn't a problem because it's very easy to take an eraser and remove out some of that pigment from the drafting film to release up those layers so you can start again with your pencils. The eraser is really good for drawing in shapes and textures into the fur which is what I'm doing here. I'm using a Tombow Mono Zero eraser and you can see that I'm using it to bring in some lighter shapes within the fur. You can see that the eraser is lifting the pigment cleanly off the film. There's no staining, there's no residue and you can get incredibly crisp edges when you use an eraser in this way. It allows you to add pigment, remove it and then go back in and add more again so you can build volume into your fur. You don't always need to erase back to the raw film either. Every time you pass the eraser over the drafting film over your work it just goes back one or two layers at a time. It doesn't take everything off in one go. You can remove just a few layers if you want to or you can go all the way back to that raw film depending on what a particular area needs. Once I've added in more volume with the eraser, one of the final stages of the fur is to smooth everything out. Because that pencil sits on the surface of the film, smoothing out at this stage is quite easy. Once I've smoothed out those shapes and made the areas and the shapes look soft, I'll bring in a few final strands and textures into the fur and to do that I'm using a slice tool. I'm using a manual pen cutter from the slice tool range but you could use a craft knife and it would do exactly the same. And then finally, once I've added those little bits of textures and finer details, I use a sharp black pencil quite sparingly to reinforce those key values and just refine those shapes. And I keep repeating that process until I'm happy that I've got that volume in the fur that I'm looking for. The ear is really quite dark so there's not really a need for me to go in with a base layer in the ear. I could go in with a base layer but because, again, I've not got much tooth and I'm going to want to make this ear quite dark, it makes more sense for me to just go straight in with the dark pencil, plotting the direction and the flow of the long fur. You'll notice that the pencil here has got quite thick, quite wide lines and that's because even though my pencil is sharp, it's got a flat angled what I like to call a chisel tip on the end of the pencil. And if you followed my tutorials over on Patreon or you've seen my other videos here on YouTube, you'll know that I talk about the chisel tip on the end of the pencil quite a lot. It's a really useful shape to have on the end of the pencil. It has a wider side to give you a nice flat, even coverage when you're looking for an even base layer, for instance. And then you can just turn it, tip it on its side and you can pick up some finer details with the sharp point on the edge of it. At this stage, as I'm drawing in this wavy fur, I'm not aiming for perfection. I'm just identifying the larger shapes and making an educated guess based on what I can see in the reference photograph. I tip that pencil slightly onto its side again, holding the pencil a little bit further back from the tip, which prevents heavy pressure. And that, again, is going to make the blending easier for me later on, because I've applied the structure of those waves with a really light layer and by light layer, I mean light pressure. At this point, the ear looks very sketchy, but that's absolutely fine. I'm not going to get anything close to where I want to be within the first layer. Just like before, I alternate between the dark and the light layers. So I'm using a lighter grey pencil to blend that initial darker layer. I come back to refine the waves and curls with the darker pencil and then soften across and down each wave and curl so that they don't look like spaghetti. I want them to look as natural as possible. Again, I'm using the Mono Zero eraser to draw waves and curls in slightly different directions than the previous layers. And that helps to create a natural flow of the curls and the waves of the ear overall and creates believable volume. The erased areas are then tidied and blended, just like any other first section. It's at this point in this particular drawing that I decide to move on to the nose and the rest of the dog. But I realise as I'm drawing the nose that the ear still needed more work. So I went back using the same steps, the light, the darks, blend, refine until it reached that natural looking state that I was looking for. So from the ear, I move on to the nose and just like I would with the eye, I start the nose by working around the outline with a dark brown pencil and filling in the dark nostrils. I want to avoid heavy outlines, so sometimes just a few dashes or a few broken lines are enough to establish the shapes that I actually need in an area. Just above the nostrils is the tipping point where the nose curves away from the light. So above that line, the values are going to be lighter as the light catches the top of the nose. And below that line, as the nose curves around the shape of the face, the values are going to be darker. But even within the darkest areas of the nose, there are still subtle highlights, for instance, along the edges of the nostrils. And these small highlights are really essential for defining and describing the shape of the nose. On the top of the nose, I use a darker blue and some grey tones, carefully preserving little highlights here and there. And the texture of the nose to make sure that it looks shiny and dimensional. When I get to the neck, I work in a very similar way to the ear. I apply a dark pencil as the first layer, using my pencil in a very relaxed way again with those broad pencil strokes, and adding the pencil in a very sketchy way so that I can start to think about the flow, the direction and some of the darker shapes that I'm going to need in this area. Just as before, I then go back in and smooth the texture. I'm using a dark blue grey pencil here to smooth out some of those dark shapes, because at the minute I can still see quite a bit of texture coming through those dark areas. And from there, then I'll bring in the oak colour, the peachy colour and those lighter greys to create that natural mix of colours that I'm looking for. Once I've put the colours in and mixed colours on the page, I come back to that Mono Zero eraser again, and that helps to build another layer of volume by removing some of that pigment back off the drawing. At this stage, the areas that I've removed are quite a bright white. They look like the raw paper, and I want to soften that so that the curls don't look very stark or unnatural. So I use some of my darker pencils to tint and refine those curls. And then finally, I'll add a few whiskers with the slice tool or a craft knife and the drawing is complete. And here we are. Here's my finished drawing of a spring spaniel. So I really hope this video has been useful. I hope I've been able to share some tips, some techniques and just my general process for drawing realistic looking animals on drafting film that you'll be able to transfer into your own animal art. The complete tutorial is over on my Patreon channel now. The tutorials in real time, step by step and includes a name of the pencil colour that I'm using and the brand of the pencil that I'm using on the screen at all times. So if you want to follow along with the full tutorial, I'll leave a link to that in the description. I look forward to welcoming you over to my Patreon if you want to give that a go. But that's it for this video. If you've got any questions, then feel free to leave them in the comments. I'm really happy to help in any way that I can. And if you've enjoyed the video, again, leave me a comment and let me know because that's useful feedback for me too. But that's it for now. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.