How to draw Nozomi

At our halfway point also a look at our fabulous mascot - Nozomi.

Ever wondered how long it takes for Nozomi to come to life?

Hours, many hours. Our little mascot might be small and cute, but creating a decent colour picture is quite long-winded. Couple of reasons for this, mainly I haven't drawn in a while and I've never been great at colour pictures. Pencils are my friends. :)

I do have the correct art supplies buried somewhere, but once scanned, those images lose the 'wow' factor (you can see all the lines and mistakes). So the alternative is colour them in with an art program. I used a free one called Artweaver, it has layers - layers are very useful.

To begin with I did a sketch of Nozomi, traced it with black biro and then cleaned it. This is scanned and imported into the program. The image duplicated into various layers (16 this time) and then each part of the picture is coloured in separately.

First the skin, kimono, hair, etc... all on separate layers (that way you don't have to start again if you mess up). From there shadows and texture are added and I'm forever going back to tidy bits up.

Once the Nozomi is finished, in comes the background. I used to draw these as well but because we are on such a tight schedule I've imported a picture, faded it and added faint butterfly wings (Nozomi ♥ wings) and then traced Nozomi back in. All of this with a click of my mouse. >.<

Finally you merge the layers, save and add text. And we're done... total time – about 4-5 hours.

You can see all the steps here (minus all the tidying):