Let’s Create a Happy Chibi Reindeer
We’re in December already! How’d that happen so fast? No matter, let’s get in some easy holiday creativity by drawing and painting a little Chibi reindeer.
Materials
The materials and supplies that I used for this process are as follows:
Apple iPad Pro 12.9"
Apple Pencil 2
Procreate
Adobe Fresco ~ For the vector work.
You can use other programs and even traditional supplies to achieve a similar result.
Sketch
Begin your sketch by marking down the simple shapes of the head, body, legs, ears and antlers of our little happy reindeer.
If you’re following this using pencil and paper, try not to press too hard on the page so you can build up the sketching bit by bit.
For my sketch, I used Procreate on my iPad with an Apple Pencil 2. You can follow along with other programs and tablets too such as, an Android tablet and Sketchbook.
Don’t be afraid to re-do part or all of your drawing, this is how we learn to draw the shapes better.
Ink and Colour
The lineart and colouring of my illustration were done in Adobe Fresco but you can continue using Procreate or your chosen program. I chose Adobe Fresco so that I could create a scalable vector graphic for products - I’ll cover this another time.
When inking your illustration, make sure you use different line thicknesses so that the image doesn’t look flat.
If you use an iPad with an Apple Pencil, you can press harder to create line variation.
If you are inking traditionally, start off with a smaller lining pen and gradually get thicker in places - remember you can add lines but taking them away is a lot harder.
After inking our illustration, it’s time to choose our swatches for the flat colours.
For the body of my reindeer I used a dark beige(Hex: #C69C90) colour and for the accents(under the tail, fur in the ears, neck and dots on the back) I used a similar, lighter colour(HEX: #E6B4A5) to make them stand out.
The hooves are a dark brown(Hex: #644B44) and I chose a light yellow(Hex: #FFEBCA) for the antlers.
The shadows(Hex: #584498) layer is the only layer I needed to change the blending mode for. Set the layer to “Multiply” and change the opacity to around 10%.
The last thing to do is to create a slim oval under the reindeer that will be his little shadow. The settings are the same as the shadow layer of the reindeer.
And there we have it. A happy little Chibi reindeer that you can print off and put on your wall. Hope you enjoyed drawing a Chibi reindeer look out for other Chibi characters in the near future!
You can get this design on a mug, t-shirt and other products in the shop. This design is limited to the holiday season.
Have a great day,
Charmaine x
