Today I’d like to share with you a video of a 2-hour drawing I did of a Gnoll Spear-thrower. The video demonstrations was done as part of a Twitch stream with a live chat asking questions as we went along.

The character is concept art for the game Fanstratics, which is still in development. This video begins after the clean line drawing and shows the process I take when going from clean line drawing, to finished tight drawing.

In the above series of images, you can see how the character developed from the initial ink thumbnail, to clean line drawing, to final tight drawing. This is essentially how I create all of my designs. I feel like that middle stage really helps in trying to figure out what everything actually is that I scribbled in during the thumbnail stage. Sometimes I don’t know what on earth I was thinking when I scribbled some sections. I feel like an ancient mystics trying to derive meaning and predict the future based on how the bird bones landed.  What could this squiggles here possibly mean? A bountiful harvest? A plague? Certain death?

Whatever the divination tells you, it is better to do it during a middle stage like this, rather than working and reworking dozens of times on the tight drawing where it becomes a laborious, time-consuming mess.  

I hope you enjoy the video! It is from a Twitch stream at the end of November, so there is a lot of Q&A about the art industry, tools, techniques mixed into the chaos. If you’d like to join us for a future stream, you can follow the channel here: https://twitch.tv/justingerardillustration We stream every Wednesday and Saturday, 5PM EST.