Sketchbook 1 - Beer Label Study

I was looking for a study that I could do with limited values, and ended up finding one while drinking a beer. The beer label featured a warewolf silohuetted against the moon. I peeled it off the bottle and stuck it in my sketchbook.

Before I drew this digitally in Procreate, I decided to also take the time to do a thumbnail sketch in my sketchbook. I haven’t done thumbnail sketches before, so I thought that this might be a good subject for trying that out.

For the most part, I’m pretty happy with the results. I was mainly going for trying to understand value, and making an image with limited values and shape. Looking at my study and the original side by side, it’s interesting to see how much more detail the beer label has for it’s warewolf by adding in another value to shape the snout, tongue, and shoulder.

I think something to be cognisent of for future studies would also be texture. I mainly wanted to explore value, so I didn’t bother texturing the shadow of the moon. I just put down a value for the shadows, and then enhanced them by adding a layer of color burn on top.

This was also my first experience using color dodge to create lighting. I like the increased contrast between the bright portion of the moon and my silohutted warewolf, but I want to be careful to not form a habit of always resorting to color dodge for lighting.