Hello everyone, I am Byron from Canada and I like to draw zombies. I was drawing some zombies in a Twitch livestream today and during the stream I was informed that Ozzy Osbourne passed away.
What world shocking news for some. Even me, not the biggest fan of any celebrities, felt a sense of shock and sadness. Ozzy was a legend in a lot of ways, first and foremost his music but also his non stop determination to be himself as hard as he could. No one else like him.
So upon hearing the news I switched up my focus and started to paint a zombie portrait of him. It was spur of the moment non stop start to finish portrait. I'll upload it to my youtube channel soon.
Most of my portraits begin with a vague sense of the head and what goes inside. I focused on his eyes and nose, then his mouth. Marking where the main features are and the hard shadows that they create, which brings me to step two
Once I'm happy with how the eyes and nose are placed I start to thicken up and really carve into the page to get those heavy black shadows. This is also where I define the bottom part of the face. The mouth and chin.
When I started I grabbed the first cool image of Ozzy that popped up on google. I didn't look close, I thought he was holding a joint in his mouth. As I started to draw I thought about that and looked closer to see it was a cross. That made a lot more sense. Next up it's time to add the colour.
It always amazes me just how much a bit of colour adds instant depth to a drawing. Here I'm just blocking in chunks of colour to define the hair and skin tone. This was pretty basic step, but it's time to add the blood and start to cover up my technical errors ;)
It's just that simple. Add Blood.
The eyes don't look right? Add blood. Mouth jacked up? Add blood. Nose completely missing? Just add blood.
Why? Because it's a zombie and it's supposed to look wrong. Adding blood just emphasizes that fact in a way that tricks the brain into thinking "It's wrong, but it's supposed to be wrong so that's okay
Now is the time to really dig into the shadows. I learned a long time ago not to paint with black, especially to define shaded areas. It can really muddy your art. I know I draw with ink, and sometimes it smears, but the paint is different. Use blue and thank me later.
I know I just said don't use black paint, but after some consideration I went with it. Hard core black all over.
Once i started on black I just couldn't stop. So first I went and used more blue paint to define Ozzys hair and black paint to contain it all.
I also started to add a few details with the get pens, such as wrinkle highlights and rings around the eyes.
And here's where I start to finalize the image by using a white gelly roll pen. I like the sakura gelly roll brand pens a lot. They give a nice bright pop to the zombies.
After the gellyroll pens the painting is 99% complete. This is when I digitize it and do some small photoshop edits to darken and enhance the colours to give you the final image below.
From start to finish it took about 35 minutes to draw and paint in the Twitch livestream. Another 5 or so minutes to edit in photoshop and my first ever painting of Ozzy Osbourne is complete. Not bad for a fast livestreamed painting.
Thanks for reading.
Rest in Peace o Prince of Darkness.
