The Stages of Stink-A-Rella

For my little cartooning class I broke down how I approach a drawing, using my character Stink-A-Rella.


First I outline the basic shapes and pose. I always draw the hands before the arms because I feel hands are so very expressive - they're often as important as the head/face. Arms are easy after that, you just connect the hands to the shoulders!


I then trace over the good parts of the pose, sometimes raising the head a bit or lowering other parts - tracing makes it easy to line things up and also eliminates the need to erase all the early scribbles. I can at this point also change things like the hand positions, and add accessories, costume elements etc.

The next step is more clean-up. Refining the lines and adding more detail.


If I were to finalize this I would probably ink the outline and color in photoshop, but this shows the "final" pencil sketch with "color" details/areas of contrast.

Click here to see a nifty GIF showing all the steps together.