Fantasy Chibi References

I have done a couple Chibi pose Reference posts like How to draw Chibi 1 and 2, but today I tried a few fantasy creatures.
I was fiddling around with a new fairy chibi character and these new chibi reference sheets were born!

 I love faeries! All types, but the cute, sassy, trouble-making ones are my favorites.

And a page for centaurs! ... Because I totally know how to draw horses. Not. Okay, somewhat.

Drawing from a photo: Wrinkles

Drawing from references is hard- especially when you're NOT trying to make it look like the picture. If you're drawing manga you aren't drawing a portrait, you're drawing a caricature.
So let's get down to my approach of drawing clothes in a manga style from actual pictures, be it from a family album, a Teen prom magazine, or- in this case- yourself in a bathroom mirror. How else can I get the pose I want without any friends?? xD

Yours truly in my most favored (and worn) jacket--->










In this first pencil sketch, I drew ALL the little wrinklies. The sketch looks messy because there's just too much for the brain to take in. It's chaos trying to jot down all the lines. Not even organized chaos, just chaos.

Here I used my dip pen (quill pen, ink pen, what have you) to highlight the most prominent wrinkles.
It's this trick of choosing only the lines that really matter that will make the transition from photo to manga-illustration.
Pick find the biggest wrinkles, where the clothes are experiencing the most strain.
I go into depth on this principle one of my other posts From Manga to Chibi and even go into the crazy cat analogy. ;)

The finished product looks much crisper than the sketch and still represents the picture, now manga style.

Here are two more photo-manga comparisons:

Fat lines for heavy sweater material, and thin, sharp ones for the tank top.

Ink dip pen doodling

My mom bought me a dip pen for Christmas! :D
I've been doing a couple of exercises (from this book) to train myself to it, but for the most part I'm too impatient and have done a lot of free hand stuff and that has helped me gain control too. ;)

 I also have a red, nook-sized sketch book to carry around with me. It's paper is a little rough, not the best for ink, but it's easy to carry around and I can now doodle when I'm bored.

 This manga page is just a random collage I threw together after I had done a lot of pages like the spread from my red sketch book. I hadn't done any people with the pen before. I like where I put the black (for the big black blocks I used a brush pen to avoid wasting ink).

I inked these two girls yesterday. Using the dip pen is different than my regular technical pen or round pen, but it's so much cooler. I can control the line width without switching pens and there isn't any gradient ever, it's plain, comic-sans black. And I love it! I can't wait to use up my bottle of ink and have a legitimate reason to buy several more!