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Description

With the announcement that Roger Craig Smith is apparently sticking around for just a bit longer as the voice of Sonic (as well as that Sonic Central event that occurred last Thursday), here’s a new drawing of Sonic I made last Wednesday night. Funny how I spend an entire month last February on a giant slew of Sonic fanart for ThankYouRoger, only for Roger to come back around over three months later. I chose something so simple by design because my friend furikatsuma just recently got Autodesk SketchBook, and I decided that I wanted to tell him and everyone else here how my drawings are typically made, since I’m sure a lot of you are curious about that. The tools I often use include:
- Technical pen (always used for outlines and shading, the latter of which I’ll come back to).
- Hard eraser (self-explanatory).
- Fill (the paint bucket tool, also self-explanatory; usually I go with Solid Fill, but I have also used the Linear and Radial fills before [for some eyes and some backgrounds, respectively).
- The layers at the right of the screen (I start out with rough line work, as a lot of artists often do, and then I add an extra layer on top of that to draw far more accurate and better looking line work [I, of course, do this by lowering the opacity, which is how I also do shading {25 percent for shading in characters & objects and 50 percent for their shadows, usually]; I also add one extra layer for every color I use [i.e. one layer is all blue, one layer is all red]; due to this, my drawings of Sonic as a character are usually 7 separate layers [8 if I draw and color in the belt buckle parts of his shoes] unless I give him a special outfit).
- Selection (the paint bucket tool is always used in combination with this, after I click the magic wand option and set the tolerance to either 200 [if I’m coloring inside the closed lines] or 100 [when I select the outlines and want to change it to a different color]; I also use this method when I want to draw or erase within an area and not have it cross over to another area or even cut off a part of a layer that overlaps an area I don’t want it to, which is how that orange-ish bit of land got made).
- Transform (mostly for the nudge tool [the circle D-Pad] when I want a very specific position for a layer; I also use this for flipping and rotating, and when the outline ends up a lot smaller than I want it to be, I repeat the process described in the layer section of these tools for better line work, like that left hand of Sonic’s).
- And last but not least, a tool that’s not even in SketchBook: the Camera Roll in my photos app (after saving this drawing into my Photo Gallery, I cropped it into a square; I don’t do this for every drawing, but when I do, I typically crop it down and every now and then add some special effects to it in an app like BeFunky, such as the old-school punk-looking Viewfinder 2 filter used in my SubMachine Gun-3000 concert poster [though, in that case, I drew the band in a separate canvas and added that filter before importing it to a much taller canvas with all of the other details I added like the setlist and all of the logos, which I commonly get from either Wikipedia or even Logopedia; I will say, though, that if you do use the crop tool, make sure you import the completed drawing into Sketchbook, save it to your camera roll without change, and release THAT version on Deviant Art, because the site will read it as a JPG file and the colors will end up looking washed out).

And that’s how this Sonic drawing got made. There’s loads of other tools in Autodesk Sketchbook, some of which I also use on special occasions like Chalk Pastel, Flow Airbrush, Charcoal Blend, Dotted 3, Symmertry, Smudge Pen, and especially Text (my font is normally Kefa, but I also go to various font websites like Font Meme if there’s a special type of font I want to type something into and save it to my photo gallery to later import into my drawing), just to name a few, but I wanted to keep it simple here for anyone starting out with this brilliant program, to which I say you absolutely should if you’re ever thinking about getting into making digital art, and for free, no less! Of course, there are several other artists out there who use this app and can give a lot more advanced tips on how to use it, I’m just listing off what I have used in both this and my past couple drawings for the beginners out there before looking to those artists for more advanced stuff (which I may do myself later on). This is also the first drawing I’m releasing after moving out of my previous household (which belongs to three-year-long roommates of ours) as my mom, brother, and I all move into the house of my dad and his now-wife who he married last August after spending the previous ten years as boyfriend-girlfriend.

Sonic the Hedgehog is owned by Sega and Sonic Team.

Related drawings (14 of my best examples of Sketchbook tool usage, in order of release dates):

Sega Vs. Capcom
Stuart Little
Rubber Hose Sonic and Gumball
Roger Rabbit (2020 drawing)
Mae and Gumball: Fake Happy
Critical Arts
Cheerleading Penball 2: Gumball Is Amazing
SMG-3000: Make It Stop (September’s Children)
SMG-3000: Louie (So Long and Goodnight)
SMG-3000: Light High
Retsuko ft. Bloody Bunny/Fliqpy: Raining Blood! (Warning: A whole lotta blood!)
Did You Ever Really Exist?
SMG-3000: GHOSTMODERNism
The Fantastic Land of Tyson Hesse!

Description

With the announcement that Roger Craig Smith is apparently sticking around for just a bit longer as the voice of Sonic (as well as that Sonic Central event that occurred last Thursday), here’s a new drawing of Sonic I made last Wednesday night. Funny how I spend an entire month last February on a giant slew of Sonic fanart for ThankYouRoger, only for Roger to come back around over three months later. I chose something so simple by design because my friend furikatsuma just recently got Autodesk SketchBook, and I decided that I wanted to tell him and everyone else here how my drawings are typically made, since I’m sure a lot of you are curious about that. The tools I often use include:
- Technical pen (always used for outlines and shading, the latter of which I’ll come back to).
- Hard eraser (self-explanatory).
- Fill (the paint bucket tool, also self-explanatory; usually I go with Solid Fill, but I have also used the Linear and Radial fills before [for some eyes and some backgrounds, respectively).
- The layers at the right of the screen (I start out with rough line work, as a lot of artists often do, and then I add an extra layer on top of that to draw far more accurate and better looking line work [I, of course, do this by lowering the opacity, which is how I also do shading {25 percent for shading in characters & objects and 50 percent for their shadows, usually]; I also add one extra layer for every color I use [i.e. one layer is all blue, one layer is all red]; due to this, my drawings of Sonic as a character are usually 7 separate layers [8 if I draw and color in the belt buckle parts of his shoes] unless I give him a special outfit).
- Selection (the paint bucket tool is always used in combination with this, after I click the magic wand option and set the tolerance to either 200 [if I’m coloring inside the closed lines] or 100 [when I select the outlines and want to change it to a different color]; I also use this method when I want to draw or erase within an area and not have it cross over to another area or even cut off a part of a layer that overlaps an area I don’t want it to, which is how that orange-ish bit of land got made).
- Transform (mostly for the nudge tool [the circle D-Pad] when I want a very specific position for a layer; I also use this for flipping and rotating, and when the outline ends up a lot smaller than I want it to be, I repeat the process described in the layer section of these tools for better line work, like that left hand of Sonic’s).
- And last but not least, a tool that’s not even in SketchBook: the Camera Roll in my photos app (after saving this drawing into my Photo Gallery, I cropped it into a square; I don’t do this for every drawing, but when I do, I typically crop it down and every now and then add some special effects to it in an app like BeFunky, such as the old-school punk-looking Viewfinder 2 filter used in my SubMachine Gun-3000 concert poster [though, in that case, I drew the band in a separate canvas and added that filter before importing it to a much taller canvas with all of the other details I added like the setlist and all of the logos, which I commonly get from either Wikipedia or even Logopedia; I will say, though, that if you do use the crop tool, make sure you import the completed drawing into Sketchbook, save it to your camera roll without change, and release THAT version on Deviant Art, because the site will read it as a JPG file and the colors will end up looking washed out).

And that’s how this Sonic drawing got made. There’s loads of other tools in Autodesk Sketchbook, some of which I also use on special occasions like Chalk Pastel, Flow Airbrush, Charcoal Blend, Dotted 3, Symmertry, Smudge Pen, and especially Text (my font is normally Kefa, but I also go to various font websites like Font Meme if there’s a special type of font I want to type something into and save it to my photo gallery to later import into my drawing), just to name a few, but I wanted to keep it simple here for anyone starting out with this brilliant program, to which I say you absolutely should if you’re ever thinking about getting into making digital art, and for free, no less! Of course, there are several other artists out there who use this app and can give a lot more advanced tips on how to use it, I’m just listing off what I have used in both this and my past couple drawings for the beginners out there before looking to those artists for more advanced stuff (which I may do myself later on). This is also the first drawing I’m releasing after moving out of my previous household (which belongs to three-year-long roommates of ours) as my mom, brother, and I all move into the house of my dad and his now-wife who he married last August after spending the previous ten years as boyfriend-girlfriend.

Sonic the Hedgehog is owned by Sega and Sonic Team.

Related drawings (14 of my best examples of Sketchbook tool usage, in order of release dates):

Sega Vs. Capcom
Stuart Little
Rubber Hose Sonic and Gumball
Roger Rabbit (2020 drawing)
Mae and Gumball: Fake Happy
Critical Arts
Cheerleading Penball 2: Gumball Is Amazing
SMG-3000: Make It Stop (September’s Children)
SMG-3000: Louie (So Long and Goodnight)
SMG-3000: Light High
Retsuko ft. Bloody Bunny/Fliqpy: Raining Blood! (Warning: A whole lotta blood!)
Did You Ever Really Exist?
SMG-3000: GHOSTMODERNism
The Fantastic Land of Tyson Hesse!