You may be have seen me on our series Draw-Off.

I feel like the human characters are gonna be hard.

- There's human characters?

- [Kyra] Today, I'm gonna be drawing the

same drawing in three different mediums.

I'm gonna be drawing Tom Nook,

the cute Tanooki landlord from Animal Crossing.

(funky music)

So, the pose that I chose for Tom Nook is just, you know,

simple little one, him sittin' down, holdin' a bag of bells,

somethin' cute.

Tom Nook is a super fun character to draw, he's adorable.

It makes me sad that, like, everyone makes fun of him

nowadays and everyone's like,

"Ugh, he's just after my money.

"He doesn't care about me."

but I don't know, he's, I think he's a good boy.

He's just, he's doing his job.

And I'm going to do a super light sketch.

Don't want it to show through too much,

with the colored pencils.

I'm a little more familiar drawing with colored pencils,

because I used to use them a lot in college.

I like the textures that you can get with colored pencils,

its pretty cool looking,

especially when you scan it in to your computer.

Its pretty cool.

Probably the biggest area of color

is where I'm gonna start.

I don't know, you can start wherever you want.

Something that I forgot about, colored pencils,

is it's like a workout to do,

it's just like this constantly,

scribble, scribble, scribble,

until you fill in the space.

Like it gives you like a hand cramp doing it.

You can see me struggle as I go on.

I definitely get slower.

So what's nice about colored pencils is

you can do blending with them.

So for his ears and nose I'm going to take

a darker brown and blend it in, into a nice gradient.

What's also cool about colored pencils is

you can almost like, run the lighter color

over the darker one to get it into a more

smooth fluid, shading.

And for those lovely blue eyes,

I'm going to shade them too,

I was really looking forward to that part,

you want to make them pop.

For areas that are colored white,

it helps to add some like very subtle

light blue, or purple shading just

to add a bit of, dimension to it.

I'm also trying something that I

haven't really tried before,

because my hues are limited here.

I'm going to use a black to try shading things,

to just bring out those dark shadows a bit more.

And actually it worked out pretty well.

I messed up, you can see I messed up.

I wasn't thinking at all and

straight up colored yellow over where his

white sleeve is supposed to be.

So tried to fix it a bit with white.

But accidents happen, you just gotta power through it.

And there he is, Tom Nook in colored pencil.

This is my real house here, digital drawing.

So we're gonna be drawing in photoshop.

Digital drawing is what I do,

for a living nowadays.

Everything is mostly digital with animation.

You know, still the same principals,

as traditional drawing but now you have an undo button.

Again, same pose for Tom Nook,

but this time, we have a lot more liberty with the

sketch because it's on a layer.

We can just turn down the opacity,

instead of having to worry about like

erasing or making sure that the

lines are very light so that they don't bleed.

So I'm using the clean as a whistle brush,

from the kyle's mega pack, in photoshop.

And I'm gonna use a relatively thick line

with, wanna make it look a bit cartoony.

And instead of using that harsh, crisp, black.

I went for a, kind of greenish, dark gray.

I don't know, it gives like a, it's easier on the eyes.

It's like softer.

What's nice about digital is you can

really zoom in and just, get in there,

and put all those little, those details,

that you normally probably wouldn't

be able to get real clear in traditional,

because you're not good at planning like I am.

A technique that I like to do with

a lot of my cartoony drawings,

is that I make like the general outline,

pretty like thick and consistent.

But for things like the cuffs of the pants,

and the shirt and all the little details,

like inside the body.

Went for like a smaller brush.

Because I don't know, it gives like a

nice hierarchy of line width and shapes.

It also provides a lot of negative space,

which is really important when you draw cartoons.

Like you have to think about the way that

the shapes are laying against each other so

that they are readable for the audience.

You're seeing me redraw things multiple times,

and hit that undo button, again,

just the process of getting things how I like them.

Inking usually takes the longest for me,

because I'm like, I got to get these lines right,

before I commit to the color.

What's nice about digital coloring,

is you have access to like,

literally every color ever.

What I like to do is, I like to open up

the hue and saturation sliders and play with it a bit,

to try to get it to a, different hues.

See what I like, see what works.

So for the gradients on the nose and the ears.

I switched to an airbrush brush,

so that way we can just like,

gently cascade into the base color,

and you can see me struggle with the

trying to maintain a good balance of

negative space with the eye mask.

I don't want to touch the side of his head too much.

Went for like a nice muted soft sea foam green color

for the eyes.

Then I'm going to add a bit of like a,

like an aqua green blue for the shading in the eyes.

Something I also recommend if you

plan to use colors that are not strictly

like black and white.

For whites, I'm going for a lighter,

off yellowy, off green color.

Its very subtle but it adds world of difference.

It makes it less severe.

I didn't want to go of any intense shading in this,

just like a, pretty mild cartoon,

cell shaded look.

For the pinks of his ears,

I just wanted to make sure that they stood out,

against the brown.

Because if you make them too similar and hue

to the brown underneath it, it gets lost.

And here he is.

Digital Tom Nook.

Definitely the easiest for me to do,

again the most familiar with it.

It's the one that I work in, most frequently.

So the watercolors that I'm using are like,

really cheap.

I don't really use traditional media as much nowadays.

Because animation is more of digital medium currently.

But you know what, we gotta work with what we got.

So I usually start off with a

really, really, rough sketch.

Super light, because when we do the water colors,

we don't want it to blend through.

Also the paper I'm using is cold pressed watercolor paper.

Really good paper, highly recommend it.

So I got my pallette here,

and I'm going to start mixing that classic milk brown.

I'm gonna add some white and probably orange

or something to get that warm light pastel color.

You're gonna watch as I make tons of mistakes,

and struggle.

Because no matter how old you are,

and how many years of artistic experience you have,

you're always going to make mistakes.

I am a, living proof of that.

I usually don't use a lot of water,

because I'm afraid of it running all over the canvas,

and seeping into areas where I don't want it to go.

So I'm going to start by filling in all of the

biggest spaces that need color,

so the brown of Tom Nook,

and I'm going to make sure not to go over

the spots where I know I'm going to use a different color.

Especially if the colors lighter than the color

I happen to be using.

Watercolors are not as forgiving in terms of,

being able to go over them.

Because if you get a dark color into a very light color,

its going to be real hard to try to get that light color,

to look consistent again.

So like I said, because these tools are super cheap.

It looks pretty streaky,

but it's okay because any lightness,

we can fix by letting the water colors dry,

and then go over them with a darker color.

I'm personally of the opinion that you don't need

the most expensive, most high quality art tools

in order to make good art.

Like if you have a desire to draw,

you're gonna find a way to do it,

regardless of whether or not you have the proper tools.

Oh yes, you can see how I already messed up.

I forgot to leave the ears, uncolored.

So I had to use the pink over the dark brown,

which you can see, the dark brown through that pink.

But you know what, we're just gonna keep layering it up.

We kinda got a cool shadow effect,

with that dark brown.

So I don't know, happy accident.

Despite the fact that I'm a little stressed,

at how this isn't coming out exactly how I like it to.

Watercolors are really relaxing.

Because I clearly was not satisfied,

with just the watercolor, alone.

I decided to take an ink pen,

and ink all around the drawing,

think of it as like that nice tied together,

cartoony look.

I don't know, I think it's just make it pop a bit more,

looks a bit more satisfying in my eyes.

And there we go, watercolor Tom Nook.

Honestly, for all the struggle that I was going through

while painting this, and just the

unsatisfaction at the streakyness,

it came out pretty good.

You can look at a drawing forever and ever,

and be like this is stupid, I hate this.

But then you take a break from it,

or just look at the full picture,

and you're like.

You know what, I did it, it's okay, I can draw.

It's okay.

Thank you so much for watching.

Again, I really hope that this shows that,

no matter what artistic medium you work in,

you can make the art that you want to.

You should just do it, because it makes you happy.