Last weekend, I finished reading The Master Guide to Drawing Anime: How to Draw Original Characters from Simple Templates. I didn’t find the book particularly helpful in terms of actually teaching the technical aspects of drawing. However, it had tons of great artwork to browse through. So, I decided to give one of its “templates” a shot.

Over the course of the last five days, including today, I sketched, inked, and colored the following drawing. I remembered to snap a few pics throughout the process, which are presented in reverse-chronological order (sorry for the varying lighting):

The tools I used were:

• Ticonderoga HB (#2) pencils.
• Prismacolor Premier coloring pencils.
• Prismacolor Premier illustration markers.
• Brisk Learner white gel pens.

I had fun with this one. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to use my charcoal pencils for shading it, but I ended up testing my coloring skills in the end.

I haven’t seriously colored anything since high school, maybe college. Either way, it’s been a while. I think this turned out well for my jump back into it. There are some blending techniques I wanted to try, such as using baby oil or alcohol, but I didn’t have the materials on hand. So, I stuck with pencil and stump blending.

Five days was a lot to dedicate to a drawing, but I picked up several useful techniques during the process. Figuring out how to draw and ink the fence was my proudest accomplishment.