Greetings, friends!

It's been a while, hasn't it? I know, I've been away but this place has been in my mind all the time. I just, retreated from life alltogether I guess. I wasn't in a good place, mentally. The depression I've been fighting with most of my life finally caught up with me. I've been thinking about making a personal post about that, but it can wait. For now, what's important is; I'm coming back to life. Back to drawing. And I'm here to share my latest creation; this cute platypus!

It's generally different from what I usually do myself. I don't consider myself good at simple drawings or cell-shading, that's why I'm more comfortable with Photoshop than Illustrator when drawing. But this was what I needed to do this time.

It was a request from one of my programmer friends. He asked for a simple, cartoon-styled drawing of a platypus and that's what I came up with! Those animals are so silly and cute. It was a fun experience and sort of a nice experiment for me too.

Progress

At first, it was a sketch like this. I wasn't really sure how to draw the animal, but my friend who requested the picture was completely fine with this simple sketch, so I went on with it and put up a lineart.

I'm not fond of digital lineart. Traditional, I really enjoy doing and I like the results too. But a digital lineart has always been a hassle to me. This was no exception, but was a necessary step.

After the lineart, came the base colors. I especially added some gradient tones to make it more lively. The beak and the body are on seperate layers. I locked them and put a multiply layer on with a clipping mask to make the first shadows. Putting half of it's face in shadow would look more correct, but we needed the face to be bright, so I just skipped keeping it dark there.

One shadow layer didn't feel enough for me, so I added a second, deeper shadow, with another multiply layer on top.

Then, we needed light on this little fellow. Just as I put up the shadows, I made new layers on top, turned them to the overlay setting, and slapped on the light, also as two pieces.

Now, the eyes... I didn't want them to be empty. Maybe putting on some white shine would be enough, but I couldn't help slapping some colored irises too.

And just like that, it was done! I pretty much just "winged it" with this drawing. It's been a long, long while since I did some chell shaded drawings, As much as I prefer my painting style, I guess I missed this working style too.

Here are the final layers. I kept everything separate, in case we needed to adjust colors. Pretty neat, huh? I can't do this with paintings. I just slap on the colors wherever I catch, hahaha. Maybe I should be more careful with the painting style as well.

I streamed on my Twitch page while drawing this too! Streaming is exhausting to me, but it also keeps me entertained and motivated. I plan to do more! If you wanna come over and say hi, or watch the video recordings of the streams, I'm on this link! We often talk in Turkish, but I'm okay with switching to English as needed.

That's it! I hope you enjoyed the post and liked the picture as much as I did. I'm still struggling to be active, not only here but generally in life too. Thank for supporting me, it means a lot.

See you on the next one!