MOST CHALLENGING EPISODE Drawing your MALE OCs Ep22

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another episode of Drawing Your OCs, which is the series where you guys send in your characters and then I pick two to draw. For information on how you can have a chance for your character to be drawn in a future episode, please read the description down below because I always have a step-by-step guide of how you can enter in for these episodes. Before we actually get into the video, I just wanted to announce something on here, which is that I'm hosting a Draw This In Your Style event on my Instagram. It's in celebration of 25,000 Instagram followers and I just drew this like really simplistic elf girl portrait and I thought that would be like the perfect thing for you guys to redraw in your own style, so make sure you use hashtag JennaDrawing25k and I will be showcasing all of the entries in a future video, so you basically have until the end of this month roughly and that's when I'll probably get all the entries together and make a video out of them. Anyway, let's get into the OCs of this episode. The first character is Oakley Unknown and they come from at Inkbird on Instagram. So the story of Oakley is Oakley is a peculiar creature as he has no family. Because of having no family, he thought it would Clever, right? He simply woke up in the forest clutching a scroll. This scroll had his name written on it and a map of the forest. This scroll would help him explore the forest and collect items to gain strength. Whenever Oakley gets sad or depressed, his skin gets less saturated and when he's excited, it gets a bright tone. He's only nine but is willing to do whatever it takes to survive and of course have fun. And I saw Oakley's design and I thought he looked so adorable. I absolutely love his little outfit and all the little details that Inkbird put around Oakley, like showing the different items he has. It kind of reminds me of when you do like a meet the artist and you show what you carry in your bag and stuff like that. It was just really nice. It made Oakley feel slightly more real in a way because all of those little items around him showing what he'd carry around. But yeah, I absolutely love his outfit and then the cardboard sword, which is why I really wanted to challenge myself and make sure I included the cardboard sword in this drawing. So I would say the pose I did was very much out of my comfort zone. Not to mention, I don't know why, I don't know how I've gone this long through the video without mentioning this yet, but this is an all male episode of Drawing Your OCs and if you've followed this channel for a while, you know that I like to stick to just drawing girls and that is something that I'm trying to break out of. I'm trying to break out of stiff poses, headshots and stuff like that. So I'm trying to do more difficult poses and of course trying to draw more guys. And in this episode, I drew two male characters and Oakley, this first character I'm drawing, is a quite young character so I even challenged myself to do two different ages. But yeah, I absolutely love that little cardboard sword and then I thought it would be a great idea to have him kind of looking at us and then add these kind of leaves in the foreground, just as like a foreground element, because then it would add a little bit more depth to the drawing. And it's kind of like we're the perspective of maybe... this is gonna sound so stupid when I say it, but like we're the perspective of maybe like a bug on the ground and we're a bug that's about to be hit by a cardboard sword. I don't know, in my head it made sense but now that I've said it, it kind of does sound a bit far-fetched. But hopefully you guys understand what I mean and what I was going for with this. But yeah, I had a lot of fun drawing Oakley. It is quite hard for me to draw different ages but I think I did a pretty good job of making him look like a child and I'm really proud of those clothing folds, that shading I did, because that's something I've struggled with for a long time. I think I really ought to do some like clove studies. Clove studies? Clothing studies? Because I'm really bad at drawing folds and clothes in general and obviously the only way to get better at things is to practice at them. Oh yeah, and then I just had that little compass necklace around his neck and then the little bag at the side. All these little details which were just really nice and really added to the character design. That is something I will say, if you want to enter in characters for these kind of episodes, it's always nice to have all these little details that kind of make a character feel more alive and more developed. Obviously don't over detail a character because then it will be too difficult to draw them every single time because you have to do a million details. I've actually done that before. I've made that mistake where I've drawn a character once, given them like an absolutely elaborate dress with so many ornate details that I can't even possibly recreate it every single time I draw that character and yeah, it's just not fun. It's to have a more simplistic design. Anyway, on to the next character. The next character, with this character I was like, you know what? I absolutely love his design. This character comes from Leah aka at Lird.lord on Instagram and at Lirdlord on Twitter and this is the OC Zet and they did say in the email he is on the more edgy indulgent side but those are the best kind of characters sometimes and I just saw his design and I was like, oh my god, he looks like he's gonna be so much fun to draw and also very challenging and very different to what I normally draw. Now, there is a bit of a story behind the pose. As you can tell, once again, I really challenged myself on this pose. It's very different to the normal kind of stuff I draw so yeah, this whole episode has just been me really pushing myself out of my comfort zone and trying to make myself do pieces that are way better. So for this, I found this pose of Tom Hiddleston. I think he's holding a lightsaber. I don't know where this picture came from. I think I found it on Pinterest or something but I found this pose of Tom Hiddleston and in the reference image of Zet, there was this kind of like lightning rod kind of thing and I was like, wow, that weapon is really cool so I really want to draw Zet holding it and this reference of Tom Hiddleston was really a really helpful reference of how to hold a lightsaber or something in a really fluid way so I was using it but then I realised I couldn't see his hands very well at all so I went up to my mum and I was like, mum, is there any way you can grab a broom and hold it like in this way so I can get a reference picture and luckily my mum said yes. Love my mum. She was just like, sure. She didn't even really question it and then she did the pose for me and that kind of helped me get the hands down. Now I will say, even in the very end, I really like the front arm and the front hand but the back arm and the back hand, even at the very end, I wouldn't say it was entirely perfect. It still looked a tiny bit off but I think you guys can let me off the hook on that one just considering the difficulty of this pose and the fact that I even attempted it. I'm not going to get it right straight away but I'm still very proud of this piece and when you see it at the very end, I would actually say this might be one of my new favourite drawings, maybe like my best drawing I've ever done, which is actually quite extreme to say but anyone else that I showed it to was like, wow, this is very different to what you normally draw and I really like it. Even though it wasn't the normal kind of indulgent fairy princess drawing that I normally like to do, it was challenging and fun as well, like really fun in its own way and it made me think, you know what, why don't I draw things like this more often? So yeah, I absolutely love Zet's design. I've just realised I've gone this far without even telling you his story. I'm so sorry. Right, Zet's story. Sorry, I'm going on, I'm rambling. I've not made a video in a long time. So this is Zet. He is set in an intergalactic sci-fi world and grew up in a human-dominated area. He doesn't think much of his ability to seemingly randomly shape his body into the most absurd forms at first. Must just be a puberty thing, right? But as he notices that no, not everyone went through that phase, he flees the planet at a young age in fear of being shunned by the conservative human colony or worse. In his new home, a chaotic and crime-riddled planet, he struggles to make ends meet and finally gives in to doing shady business himself, doing everything a customer wants him to, as long as it brings him money or some hint to the origin of his condition. And obviously, wow, that is just an amazing story from the get-go. I'm already really intrigued in Zet and his kind of story. I saw the drawings of him and I thought, wow, he looks so like moody and like mysterious. And I absolutely, I just realised I need to explain what I'm doing right now because there was a point where I just gave up on the back arm and I just kind of made him extend his arm upwards like he's in the middle of a dance or something. But I showed it to a couple people for criticism and they said no, just keep to the original pose. If you have his arm like flinging backwards like that, it looks like he's either dancing or he shouldn't be holding his other hand the way he is, unless that other hand is there. I hope that made sense. Anyway, I really loved Zet's design and I actually did this one grayscale to colour, so I painted it all in black and white just to make sure I got all the values right. I haven't done this in a long time, I used to do this all the time where I would do my paintings in black and white and then go over them in colour afterwards. And the reason I used to do this is, like I said, just making sure you get a really good balance of darks and lights. But then I kind of stopped doing it because I did struggle to do it quite a bit because sometimes it can look quite grey and washed out when you add the colour in afterwards. But it's been a while since I've done a grayscale kind of to colour piece and I wanted to give it another go and I'm actually really glad I did use this method for this drawing because I think it helped me a lot with the tonal range and making sure all the colours were right at the very end. And yeah, I'm really, really proud of this piece. It's still not entirely perfect but I think this marks like a step forward and an improvement in terms of movement and pose and it makes me want to do maybe some more extreme poses to really challenge myself. If any of you guys have any ideas of like a kind of pose that would be really difficult but would look really good if I managed to pull it off, please leave some suggestions down below. And the final thing I wanted to address is just to talk a little bit about where I've been. I've realised I've been gone for like, I think it's been over a month now. It's been quite a while. It was a mixture of different things. First of all, I did go on vacation for three weeks with my family. We went to Florida for three weeks, which I will talk about a bit more in a future video because American art supply stores are just so much better than the ones we get in England. And yeah, that's a video in itself. But other than that, I really just kind of needed to take a break from YouTube. It was getting a bit too much for me doing so many drawings every week. And also, I have way more negative comments than I used to and I don't think I'm a very strong person. So they do really get to me sometimes and I just needed to take a step away, take a little break, not draw so much and force myself to draw so much. And yeah, I am now back feeling more refreshed than ever. Sorry if I sound a little bit rusty because it has been a while since I've made a video. But anyway, I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. I found both of these characters so fun to draw. Make sure you follow at Inkbird on Instagram and at Lirdlord on Twitter or on Instagram. And I will see you guys in my next video. Bye guys!