I know this illustration is very difficult for a beginner but nevertheless in this tutorial I’ll show you some tricks and useful techniques in rendering realistic fabrics. If you haven’t seen my trailer inspired by Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies, watch it here!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZQrpYEGG9U

FACE

I’m completely filling in his face with burnt sienna by leaving out only the eyes. And as I always say you got to be bold with coloring at first before you go on with elaborating the details. The first step is going to be the rendering of the shadows in his face. As about how to shade and render a face, I’ll make a separate tutorial dealing only with this topic.

The best part of water colours is that they dry transparent, so you can apply several layers of the paint and by doing this you can change hue of the colour. You can’t just use only one tone when rendering human skin. Every human has a variety of tones in the skin- there is brown, yellow, red, purple, green and many more. Once the drawing is dry I’m going to use colour pencils to finish up the details and add the highlights on the skin with an ivory tone.

ARM BRACERS

Thorin wears fingerless gloves with decorative leather arm bracers on top. The easiest way to render them is to first build up all dark and light areas and then use a well sharpened pencil or a very thin brush to elaborate the ornaments of the design. The leather of the bracers is stiff and hard therefore it has a shine to it. So I’m going to apply several coats of grey until I get a high contrast between shadows and highlights. This is going to give me that polished effect of the leather. As the light hits his arms from the top right, the brightest area on the bracers is directing to the top. I’m going on with the ornaments using a sharp black pencil. Pay attention to the direction of light, the upper edges of the ornaments are casting shadows while the lower edges reflect the light.

COAT

Thorin wears a sleeveless, black or dark brown leather coat with heavy brown fur trim along the neckline down the front and around the hem.  Compared to the arm bracers, the leather of the coat is soft and therefore rather dull. I’m using a warm brownish grey for the base and black for the shadows. If you want you can use light colored pencils to go over and add some more highlights but don’t overdraw it. The trick with the fur is to apply the color on wet paper or the other way around like shown here. Apply some color here and there, spray clean water over it and let the color run in all directions. If you can’t wait for the drawing to dry, a blow dryer comes handy if you want to save some time. I’ll show you how to render the fur in a minute, but now I’m going to illustrate the tunic and scale armor Thorin wears underneath.

TUNIC

Thorin’s tunic is made out of a heavy deep blue velvet fabric. It’s very easy to illustrate, just need the actual color of the fabric and pure black to add shadows. As about the armor  it  is made of small metal diamond shaped scales  attached to a thick fabric probably leather or suede that protects him in battle.

FUR

To finish up the fur I’ll have to give the fabric a little bit more dimension and depth by adding more shadows.  Then I’m going to use sharpened color pencils in black, grey and ivory to render individual hairs and a milky gel pen to add highlights. Remember that the hair is mostly darker in the roots and lighter at the end. As you can see I work in layers from the bottom up. I started with the face as it’s covered partly by his hair and fur, then I rendered the tunic covered by the fur of the coat and I’ll finish the drawing with illustrating his hair falling on his shoulders covering the fur.

THE ORCRIST

The Orcrist is very simple. Just remember that metal is best illustrated by using high contrasts in the shading and pure white for the light reflections. I’m using different shades of grey to render the sword and white to emphasize all sharp edges.

HAIR

When you draw hair do not use individual lines to illustrate every single hair. That will look fake and unnatural. The Hair falls in strands. I’m lying on a base of black color and use the brush to work out individual strands where needed. Then use a white pencil and a milky gel pen to add few highlights and strands of white hair. That’s it!

As always, thank you so much for reading, watching and sharing so generously. Tell me more about your favorite fantasy movie in the comments below!