How Do I Draw Sidon

[Imade ID: A meme of Tyler, The Creator, where he's subtitled, speaking into a mic, saying "So that was a fucking lie." underneath a screen cap of a portion of the last post on this Patreon, which reads "We're late, but better late than never! I promise May will come to you IN May." End ID] 

Life got a little derailed for me this month in far less fun ways than Tears of the Kingdom releasing. Life's messy, and we just have to do our best to make it through that with kindness and support for one another. 

So what have I brought you today? Several pages of studying. 

I was deeply unhappy with my previous Sidon drawings. I needed to look at him, take some quick notes to determine what was failing in the depiction, and go back to the drawing board to understand him. A lot of people tend to draw Sidon with a human man's physique and then just slap on the fins, and there's nothing wrong with this. I adore that styling. It's clean, it's adaptive, it reads as Sidon. But to stretch Sidon to a more monstrous place, I needed to understand the foundation of his design as a jumping off point. 

I started with Sidon's face, where I feel I struggled the most in initially drawing him. In an effort to really rip this lad apart (lovingly), I altered a ripped 3D model of him at several points.

The 3D model I used comes from ninetalescommander on DeviantArt. I took it to Zbrush, peeled off his parts, and took screenshots to study from.

A lot of my studying of Sidon fixated around proportioning, making sure I understood where different lines sat so that if and when I altered them, I'd be doing so with knowledge of the original purpose. Sidon's framing fins are there to offer a weight and frame to the sides of his head as he doesn't have ears, as well as offer the effect hair might have. His legs are short to offer a long, fluid physique through his torso. His neck is slender to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders. And so on and so on. 

I touch just a little bit on his shape language as well. Shape language is what so frequently defines character, and you'll find an explanation and examination in my notes on page three (page 5 if you're counting each half of the spreads as a page). 

Note that I'm not touching on color, because we ain't painting this bad boy. Not yet, at least. 

After studying, I gathered some inspiration. 

Inspiration, for me, usually spreads far beyond what I've captured on this page. If I'm honest with you, my inspo board for Sidon is much, much bigger, but it'd be overwhelming and too much to break down, especially when that inspo is sometimes as simple as a singular line or instance of texture. So on this spread of inspiration, I tried to capture big, heavily applicable items. The spread is largely centric to Sidon's more decorative elements, areas I really needed to pull some outside visuals from. How was I going to handle his shoulders? His hips? His gills? I needed to gather inspiration for those things in particular. 

And the final spread is some preliminary sketching and exploration. This page isn't about being pretty by any means. It's ugly and it's scratchy and it's an attempt to capture my thoughts as I figure this big shark out. 

Have I ever mentioned that while I love sharks, they terrify me! Looking at references of sharks? Horrifying. Very difficult. 

These pages are chock full of notes, a thing I generally do in my sketchbooks, and I hope they offer some insight to my process and how I learn as I work. Please feel free to pick over the pages, zoom in, ask any questions you might have.

Over the next few days I'll move into sketching some pieces of Sidon and Link, and will return with those for you lovely people. Studying like this did a lot to inspire me and keep me focused as I've struggled through some external goings on. 

I hope you're all doing well, staying safe, and enjoying any small pleasures that you can.