I’ve been attempting as of late to learn the art of sketching/drawing people. Well, more particularly, females. My problem with this is I’m not classically trained in this art and know none of the little tricks to get the human anatomy correct. I also prefer to take a surreal approach to a lot of my ‘human’ pieces as well, which also brings up more issues in my attempts in this. So, in this particular attempt I tried a different approach than I normally do. I went online, found a sketch that I liked and with no tracing involved, re-sketched the original piece. I foresee a few problems with me learning this way however, if I learn by imitation, I will never be able to get my own style or be able to draw without having something to go by. I suppose once I master this a bit better, I can attack that problem when I get to it. But at any rate, below you will see the original piece as well as my sketched rendition.

Original Sketch

My Sketch

After this step, I then traced a cleaner sketch with a Sharpie and scanned it into my computer making some minor edits in Photoshop.  Here is the end product of that step.

Photoshop Edit

I then took it into Illustrator and did a ‘Live Trace’ and did some more tinkering with the line-work to make it smoother and more shapely, and to end this project, gave her some color.  I’m hoping one of these days, I’ll be able to master this!  Until then, here is the final product as well as how I got to it.

Final Product

I plan to do some more process work like this in future to keep my chops up, and hopefully, each one will improve until I reach my end goal, which is to draw the female figure with my own style as well as drawing it without having to use something to start from.  Enjoy.