Hello steemians!
Another week, another Design a character contest hosted by @w0olf. It's always fun to participate contest and each week it's more and more fun. The competition is hard as well :)
This time it's all about drawing style, and we could pick from these three:
- Gravity Falls cartoonish style
- Marko Djurdjevic modern and I would say nice digital style
- Max Ernst and his surrealist style
I've decided to go for option #1 - Gravity Falls cartoon style and here is my finished image:

The characters
I was inspired by the movie Tucker and Dale vs. Evil which I saw again this weekend. It's a fun movie and I wanted to create my two own silly characters that are professional vampire hunters. So here are Dave and Leo.
Dave is older and crazier. He uses magically enchanted shotgun that fires sharpened wooden spikes at vampires. It's his preferred weapon and he uses nothing else. His preference is shooting from point blank range and he never runs out of ammo. Enchantment makes sure that the gun will not fire at anyone else except a vampire (to prevent accidental shootings).
Leo is the warrior of the group. Hi uses his grandfather's wood chopping two handed axe and enchanted sword which he found in the dumpster behind s-mart. Unfortunately for him the only enchantment his sword possesses is that it shines faintly in the dark. He believes it's magical and refuses to use any other weapon. So far he was never proved wrong.
They are vampire hunters and their adventures take them to many places. They have seen many vampires and lived to tell the tale.
The process
I started, as always with a piece of blank paper and decided to sketch the characters.
I've made multiple characters and was trying to pick the ones I like the most. I've also made more than one pass while sketching them initially. There are at least 3 passes on most of the sketches.
Hard pencil lines and rough shape. Then more defined shape with that same pencil and lastly I used softer pencil to make them more visible. Finally I did the lines with 0.5 technical pencil and HB lead.
When I was happy, I decided to go over it with my 0.2 fine liner.
I picked one image and outlined/inked the outlines. With practice it becomes more easy. And the trick to it is to turn the paper/block around so that you can draw the lines that are cleaner with ease.
When that was done I've erased the pencil lines and was ready to add some color.
I've added some colors below the image to see how they would look and decided to color the characters.
I hope you like them :)
Have fun and keep steemin!
@zneeke