Ever wanted to draw Star Wars characters and vehicles just like the professional comic book artists? In this step-by-step series, Star Wars artists and illustrators show you how to draw some of the most beloved characters in the saga.
Star Wars illustrator Brent Woodside explains with these easy-to-follow steps on how to draw a battle between Jedi Master Yoda and a gang of battle droids.
Steps 1-5 are to be drawn lightly with a pencil. No pen, no dark lines. Finished lines and details will come at the end.
Step One:
Before you start drawing find a good reference to get ideas. Clone Wars Director Dave Filoni does a good job covering the little details with his sketches. Notice how Yoda's skin and lightsaber change color in different lighting environments. His skin is always a more yellow green compared to the more blue green of his lightsaber blade.
Step Two:
I decided I wanted an action-packed scene with Yoda fighting battle droids. For the location I wanted something interesting and unique, so I started sketching. I never came up with a background I liked all that much so I used one I had previously doodled in my sketch book. Keeping a sketch book of characters in poses and environments rendered using perspective is a really good idea. I suggest using it everyday; you will improve your drawing skills and give yourself a valuable resource to fall back on when you are stumped for ideas.
Step Three:
Cut up your sketches and move them around to see where you'd like to arrange characters in the scene.
Step Four:
If you are familiar with the concept of perspective them you will recognize the 3-D red box in the center of the droid. The box shows you how to use perspective to make your battle droid fit into 3-D space. The black lines that follow the contours of the box to the above line are perspective lines, and the above line is the horizon line.
Step Five:
In this step I do the basic rendering of the droids and Yoda. I broke it down further into six smaller steps to make it easier to follow.
A - From the sketch, I look for the basic shapes of the characters and use the blue lines as perspective approximations. Line 1 shows the angle of the length of the head and line 2 shows the angle of the width of the head. Line 3 shows the angle of the length of the body and line 4 shows the angle of the width. Line 5 shows the angle of the hips. These lines may seem confusing at first, but they will help your drawings a lot.
B - Simple rectangles in the approximate shape of the arms are added next. Make sure they correspond with the look of your sketch. For Yoda, start adding the most obvious traits like his ears and short stubby little arms.
C - If you have a battle droid action figure it will be very handy for the rest of this piece. Look for major parts then break them down into simple shapes, like the cylinders at the shoulder and hips. Add Yoda's little hands and feet and start defining where his facial features will line up.
D - Continue adding details from all the reference you can gather like the geometric shapes that make up the battle droids arms and the way Yoda's cloak wrinkles when he is moving.
E - Here the figures really start to come alive. I added the arc of the lightsaber and separated the droids forearm. Here you also see Yoda's face detail take shape, the forehead bumps and the bags under the eyes are important features to add. On the droids refine the details even more.
F - After some erasing and redrawing of the finer details I use this as my finished line drawing. Notice how the basic shapes from A are still there.
Step Six:
Next add the lines to the background, or pencil in the background. Use the original sketch as reference and start adding in details.
Step Seven:
Perspective will also affect the background in a major way. As an example the blue line is the horizon line and the red lines are the perspective lines. See how all the parts line up with the perspective lines? In the middle ground I start adding extra characters; the wide angle of the piece requires it.
Step Eight:
I make sure there is a clear foreground, middle ground, and background as I work on the details. Foreground: red, middle ground: blue and background: green. When people look at pictures this is something they subconsciously look for. If the different layers of the picture are not clear it will cause a general unease about the picture, even if the person viewing it cannot say for sure what the problem is.
Step Nine:
At this point it would be handy to have a battle droid action figure again. The different angles and details would be hard to find online. I add in a blaster and arm to the closest battle droid and finish off the details of all characters involved. This is my finished pencil rendering, next comes the colors.
Step Ten:
Next I added the basic colors. It is important thing to keep in mind which colors are going to work well together, and create focus on the central part of the piece. I decide to stay away from deep reds and blue greens so the blaster bolts and lightsaber will be more profound.
Step Eleven:
After applying my base colors I decide on which direction the light source is coming from. I lighten and darken according to how light would hit the shapes of the drawing. Yoda's head is a good example it is oblong so light would hit it in the same way it would hit a football. If you have trouble with this concept, go into a mostly dark room with a flashlight. If you have some Clone Wars action figures then set them up and shine the flashlight from the appropriate direction. If no figures are available, you can use a ball, some boxes and such. Just think of the most basic shapes of the characters in the picture.
Step Twelve:
These steps show how you build colors using the technique from Step 11.
Step Thirteen:
The colors of the painting are significantly built up at this point. However, if you look closely you can still see the original blobs used to map out the lighter areas from Step 12. A wide angle picture like this one has to use all of its space or it might as well be cropped down to a more manageable size.
Step Fourteen:
I decided the distant background could have lots added and it would tell a much better story. Because of the incredible concept art of Ryan Church I opt to make this location Cato Neimoidia. I penciled in things that would be appropriate for that location, such as Neimoidians, crowded sky lanes, bridge cites and more battle droids.
Step Fifteen:
I painted the bridge cities into the background first. It was important to keep them from being too dark, otherwise they would have caused confusion and blended into the bridge's pylons on the middle ground. The haze helps direct your focus back to the vibrantly dark colored Yoda, by taking away from the vibrancy and darkness of other objects in the picture. I added even more droids in the distant background. Because they are so far off I skipped the penciling stage and just blobbed them out with paint. I put multiple lines of traffic in the distant background that partially follow the angle of Yoda's descent. I built up the blur effect of Yoda's movement by painting stokes of similar colors to his cloak and shades of blue.
