How to Draw a Fairy, Fairies
1
Start out by picking your pencils. I chose 2H and H pencils for light shading/lines, an HB pencil for sketching, and a B pencil for dark shading/lines.
2
Start out by getting a basic sketch of the fairy's body. Use the guidelines if you need them.
3
Once you have your body sketched in go ahead and sketch in the wings.
4
Go ahead and sketch in the face and hair. Use a photo reference for the things that you are unsure of. I used reference photos mainly for the body and a bit for the hair.
5
Develop the head a little more and start sketching in the clothes.
6
Start lightly shading in with an HB pencil. So detail needed yet.
7
Lightly sketch in the wing patterns. You can make them as simple or as complex as you want them to be. I kept mine fairly simple.
8
Now roughly shade in your background. I used an HB pencil and a cloth for this.
9
Now start adding details from top to bottom. Rely on the H and 2H pencils for the skin and the B and H pencils for the hair.
10
Make your way down the torso. You want to shade everything as well as you can for now. You can go over your shading again in later steps.
11
Shade in the rest of the body. Try to make the outlines as crisp as possible.
12
Now, use an HB pencil to roughly fill in your wing patterns. Don't press down too hard on the paper!
13
Get a cloth, blending stump, or paper towel and lightly blend over the wings.
14
Erase the patterns out of your wings. Also erase the outline of the wings and erase some "sparks" around the wings. If you mess up on this step just repeat the previous step and try again.
15
Start adding details to the wings and background. I worked from bottom to top here. Basically just draw tiny circles around the wings and draw in a bit of texture on the wings themselves. This takes a lot of patience but it will be worth it.
16
Draw in the rest of the drawing and go back over your shading and details. I hope this tutorial was fun for all of you, it certainly taught me that I need to work on my anatomy so look out for some how to draw anatomy tutorials soon!
