Little Bo Peep

I drew this study from the main promo image of Little Bo Peep from Toy Story 4.

When I saw her character design, I was super inspired to work on a costume and thought doing a full sketch ahead of time would help me plan it out. But then I started having so much fun working on the drawing, I ended up rendering it to the best of my ability.

I’ve been feeling like I hit a wall really quickly on digital drawing. It’s really difficult to get past the feeling of not being able to meet my expectations. This was a great piece for me to really work through a lot of that. I think I redrew her nose thirty times!

First I did my rough sketch. I actually learned a lot during this step. I’ve been not really feeling the connection between my hand and my monitor while sketching for a while, so forcing myself to get through it here really helped me make progress.

This was my first digital sketch where I felt like I’ve finally caught up with my paper drawing ability

Then I refined the line-work. This still wouldn’t be clean enough for final line-work, but it was good enough for me to understand how to color it in.

Next up flat colors!

I put every region into its own layer, so that I could use clipping masks when I started shading.

I thought the flat colors looked really cool with the linework layer hidden.

I started shading in the parts I was most comfortable with. I was already pretty happy with it here.

And a few more hours of shading!

I mostly used the hard-round and soft-round brushes. A lot of beginner art advice I’ve seen suggests that is best to avoid getting confused by all the options or over-reliant on finding the exact right brush.

Hard-round for defined shapes and soft-round for blending took me really far, but I did use some cool texture brushes on the pants and the hair-bow.

One of the last things I did was add the reflections.

And I thought my costume turned out nicely too!