My Illustration Process 2: Working with Chibis

I've always found chibis so adorable, and yesterday, I finally had enough determination to draw one seriously. I used to doodle chibis on my notebook, but to work from start to finish digitally? Never. 

In case some of you aren't aware, the word "chibi" (ちび) is slang for "short person" or "small child" in Japanese. It's being widely used in the world of manga and anime, and I'm not complaining. Chibis are incredibly "kawaii" (カワイイ) or cute.


My Process

As usual, I start with a rough line sketch of what I want to draw. Sometimes, if I'm feeling up to it, I'll stop there and just clean up some lines, add shadows, and then highlights.

I turn down that layer's opacity and start doing some lineart. I never use black for some reason, as I think it decreases the softness of the overall picture. Used dark brown for this one.

After that comes one of my favorite parts - laying down the base colors, adding shadows, highlights, and other elements to make my amateur art look legit. Haha.

I tend to do the eyes early on, mostly because once I love how the eyes looks, it'll motivate me to finish the rest. Haha. Was planning to go for a soft purple, but pink got in the way.

From there, it's just filling in the rest of her clothing, adding shadows and highlights, getting dizzy with what patterns would go together, fixing the saturation and hue of some colors, and adding a background.

My favorite area for this drawing was the hair. From sketching to filling them in, they're my most awaited part of the whole drawing - until it came to adding depth to them. I SUCK at doing hair, but the way hers turned out made my cry a little bit inside. Who knew I could do something like that with hair?

It took me a little less than 2.5 hours to finish everything, and by the end, I felt so accomplished. I felt proud to have created something really cute for my first ever Chibi drawing, and I am now incredibly excited to draw more! The best part about this was that I used a different coloring technique. It went on for a bit longer than I'm used to, but if my art always turns out like this - light, cute, airy - then I'm perfectly fine with that.

Below is a GIF of the whole process.

Although I'm not what you can call an "expert" in this field *yet*, I'd love to share what I love doing. Any suggestions? What If I created a Skillshare account and started an online class that way? Would anyone subscribe? Haha.

Anyway, thanks for dropping by!