Last week I made a new Life Update post, and in it I showed a brief glimpse of a portrait I was working on for a school assignment. Well I’m happy to report that as of this morning, it’s officially done! WOOHOO!
As the tagline for this blog very clearly states, I don’t draw “real people.” There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest one is honestly because I’m far from a professional artist. There’s no guarantee that my portrait of you would turn out properly. And even if it did, you may not like what you would look like on paper. It’s just easier for your self-esteem and my stress level to nix all portrait requests in the bud before they even start stacking up.
Plus, the characters that I do draw are ones that I have made up. They can complain all they want about how they look, but nobody’s feelings get hurt.
Win-win.
But for this assignment I broke my own rule. I discovered that I needed a header of some sort for the website I’m making for my Interactive Design class. I didn’t really know what to draw, and all of my landscapes were turning out pretty garbage-y.
Then it hit me.
Ever since “Loser” and “Bae Bae” were released a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot more about BIGBANG than usual. It makes sense. This is their first time working together in three years, and they’re coming out with some fun and amazing new music. Plus, according to an article I read earlier today, the group might be appearing on Running Man again. The only thing that would make me more excited than I already am would be if I were able to see them live in concert sometime.
(So a U.S. tour would really be awesome, hint-hint nudge-nudge)
Anyway.
With all of that awesomeness happening and the deadline for the project hanging lower over my head, I decided to break the no-drawing-real-people rule I’ve had for almost seven or eight years.
So, without further rambling, allow me to present the process for my digital portrait of one of BIGBANG’s vocalists, Kang Dae Sung.
As with all of my art, I started out with the basic sketch. I use a light pencil tool in various colors so I can really see what I’m doing. Turquoise is usually for the body/skin, dark blue for the face, and dark red for the hair. I try to keep my sketches very clean and detailed so the inking process goes as smoothly as possible.
For this portrait, I was also trying to get as realistic as I could, particularly in regards to Kang Dae Sung’s facial expression. He has a wonderful kind of smile that really makes a bad day feel a lot better. I really wanted to capture that in this portrait, so I spent an obnoxious amount of time studying my reference photo so I could get it just right. Obviously his smile is a lot better in person (no, I don’t know that from personal experience), but I’m really happy with how well this turned out nonetheless.
Then it’s on to inking! I use a G-Pen tool in the darkest black possible and ink with a lot of small, quick strokes. A classmate informed me that my inking process looks really mind-numbing, but once you’ve practiced a lot it’s not so hard. If anything, it can be rather soothing work. I also took this opportunity to try out a new inking method that I saw on YouTube, which worked wonderfully.
After I finished inking, I deleted the sketch layers and it was on to–
COLORING!
If inking is soothing, then coloring is like Heaven. I kid you not, digital coloring is my preferred way to de-stress. If I was any good at writing lyrics, I could probably write a song about coloring being my favorite thing.
I always color the skin first so I can match all of the other colors to it. Finding the right shade for skin is a little difficult, but once you find it (and save it to your palette, ’cause nobody got time to try and find that again) the real fun begins. For all of my coloring, I use the India Ink brush tool and sometimes an airbrush for shadows and lowlights.
Then on to his clothes and hair. The color for his hair isn’t actually straight-up black because the reference photo I was using showed a very dark brown-black. It took a while to find the right shade and I had to go a lot darker than I originally thought I would, but it looked great once I found it.
Finally, there was only one thing left to do…
After all, what’s a KPop idol if he doesn’t have a splash of color in his hair?
Besides sketching the face, these highlights took the longest to do. Part of the issue was finding the right shade of blonde-ish to match the reference photo. Part of the issue was my brush just being stupid. The last part was because I was hurrying a little because I had an Old Testament History final in twenty minutes. It’s not the best and I may go back and redo those highlights so they’re not so BAM IN YOUR FACE, but I’m still really happy with how this turned out.
Honestly, I was more than a little scared that this portrait would end up really awful and completely unrecognizable because I haven’t drawn a “real person” in almost ten years. But I took my time, listened to a lot of KPop, tried to ignore the strange looks that people gave me when they glanced at my screen while I was in the library, and I think it all paid off in the end.
So, there you go. A (very super concise) how-to-draw Kang Dae Sung tutorial-ish-thing. I hope you guys like it, and maybe one day I’ll see if I can maybe do an even better job. And maybe drawing “real people” isn’t as bad as I originally thought.
God bless!
– Chrisi –
Something by Chrisi 