Step-By-Step: Dovahkiin Fahliil

While I said that I tend to only document my school projects, I decided to do a "study" of this one as well. Mainly because I think marker is a highly misunderstood medium, and I think Prismacolors get a lot of unjust hate for not being Copics. Throughout my use of them, I've discovered a lot of tricks, like how the chisel end is awesome and pressure is really important.

But that's going off-track. While this won't be a tutorial by any means, I hope it gives a slightly more shaped view of markers, or at least how I tackled this project.

Warning: I changed my mind on things as I went along and also had a few spaz-out sessions, so following this step-by-step is probably not a wise idea.

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Self-explanatory. For the inks, I've heavily inked up the right and did a bit of a lighter inking for the figure on the left. The upper left is left in pencil because I knew I wanted to just do marker on them to leave them slightly out of focus in the end.

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Left: I laid down the "lights", as in, the light source color and reflected light. Don't hold me to these terms, this is stylistically what I do for marker pieces. The colors are Deco Yellow and Blue Slate.

Right: I decided to put down my shades before doing the base colors. I frist put down 30% Warm Grey, following by 10% Warm Grey to transition in better. After those, I used 40% and 60% Warm Grey for the more detailed shadows.

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1.) Pale Peach for the skin tone.

2.) More detail work with the Warm Greys already used.

3.) Colored in the chainmail with 20% Cool Grey (there IS a difference!) as the base color. 50% Cool Grey used to shade that on the lighter slide, 80% on the darker slide. I went over the shades with 40% to blend them in.

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4.) The character has scars, they are etched in with Cinnamon Toast. The cloth is Cerulean Blue. The leather underneath and the subsequent strap are Dark Brown.

5.) Shaded the blue cloth with 60% Cool Grey, along with shading the leather with Mocha Dark.

6.) The eye was done with a bunch of Cool Greys, ranging from 20 to 80%.

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7.) 40% Warm Grey for a base hair color. Also the earrings are colored in, using various Cool Greys.

8/9.) This is basically how I color hair. I pretty much used every shade of Warm Grey from 40 onward, primarily 60, 70, 80%; then Warm Black for the really dark spots.