I recently came across a certain person’s Instagram and loved their drawings so much that I had to do a little #DrawThisInYourStyle action. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to draw 4+ different drawings so I decided to make myself suffer and put them all in one piece. I’ve only ever attempted doing a piece with four characters once before and it was awful. So I started out by gathering some really nice looking poses on Pinterest.

The most important part about gathering poses like this is knowing your ability to draw them. So poses look really good but have such unclear silhouettes that it’s difficult to deconstruct them. That was almost an issue with the third pose here.

I then made an approximation of what the structure of the poses were. I could’ve traced this part, but I didn’t want to stick closely to the original proportions. The only thing this stage was for was making sure the scale and placement of each body was good.

After that, I redraw those janky approximations with more exaggerated posing and proportions fitting my style. I also took the time to adjust things that made the poses look strange, like hip tilts facing the wrong direction.

After getting the bodies drawn came the easy part, which was just making the characters look like Zedrig’s OCs. I more or less just copied what they were wearing with minor adjustments.

Next was the final linework; which may seem redundant, because it is. I don’t usually intend my first pass drawing something (in this case, the clothing and faces) to be the final pass. But sometimes the lines are clean enough that they don’t warrant a final lineart layer. But I did so for two reasons here: 1) I crossed over and erased lines throughout the piece, and the erase job isn’t the best. 2) I wanted to be absolutely sure that this turned out as best as it possible could.

So I picked a “black” colour, which ended up being surprising similar to the one I usually use, and got to tracing over my sketch lines with a corrected brush tool. I also fill in any portions that will be completely when I start colouring.

Some would say that I was done at this point, and normally I would too. I don’t usually do a top of shading. However, this piece felt like it was really missing a lot not having the shading there.

The shadows were still minimal, but I feel like it brought the drawing to life. I’m sure there were more places I could’ve added shadows, but I’ll leave it how it is.