Narwhaallll

Hey all, I have some Narwhal WIP sketches, and a bit of an artist ramble for those interested in such things.

Drawing a narwhal is kinda hard. The first few sketches of the head and trying to figure out how to draw a narwhal for the first time was a bit frustrating at first, believe it or not ;)

so the first full body WIP was the first successful sketch so I cleaned it up a bit. I was happy enough with it, and had intentions to use that for the full rendered piece. However, I never really loved the sketch, it just was *satisfactory*. So I took today to try out drawing the 2nd piece, the one where she’s leaning against the ice. There’re still tweaks to make, but I’m way, way happier with it. I think it has more personality & appeal, and give more chances for interesting details such as water reflection, wet skin, ice, etc. So, some notes:

If you’re not feeling a sketch, it’s often worth it to try again from scratch rather than endlessly tweaking it or just shrugging it off & trying to finish it anyway even if you’re not that thrilled with the sketch. The sketch/thumbnail is the foundation of your entire piece. Rendering/good line work can’t completely compensate for that.

That extra time you put in starting over potentially saves you hours of endless tweaking in later stages where it’s much harder, if not impossible/not worth it, to try and fix these issues down the line.

You can still reuse a sketch for more casual stuff or just share as is, it doesn’t have to go to waste if you don’t want it to! I think the fullbody sketch is really cute, it just wasn’t what I wanted for this piece. Frankly in this case I just feel like full body pieces are less interesting than a close up cropped character.

Welp, that’s it. If you read this thank you! :P keep on being amazing, and happy new year!

PS If you like my art rambles feel free to let me know, and I’ll include them more often with these WIPs! if Not I will shush 🤐