Welcome back to Draw with Brian.
In this episode, we finish the “King & Knight Shouting” illustration from Derrick and Max’s Beach Adventure. This is the final pass — refining colors, cleaning up layers, and locking in the background.
Sometimes the last 10% of a drawing is where the real decisions happen. Let’s wrap this one up.
Transcript
Hey everyone, I’m Brian. Welcome to Draw with Brian.
We’re picking back up with the King and Knight Shouting illustration. Last time we were working on the coloring, and basically we had the background and Derrick left to finish. This illustration is for my next children’s book, Derrick and Max’s Beach Adventure, as it’s currently titled.
But I had an idea.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but let’s give it a shot. If it winds up being a bad idea, we’ll just undo it. You know those cartoons where characters get mad and their faces turn red? Real people can turn red when they’re angry too. So I thought — they obviously look angry already, mouths open, shouting — what if we pushed that further? What if we made their faces red?
Let’s try it.
Maybe more orange-red… darker… even darker.
Huh. That’s not quite what I expected.
What if instead of their whole faces turning red, just the eyes were red? I’m not sure.
You know what? I think that might be overdoing it. Maybe they’re expressive enough as they are.
Let’s move on to Derrick.
Now here’s something I’m noticing — he’s not perfectly centered between the two of them. Should we move him? We could transform the layer and shift him slightly. But honestly, he’s not that far off. It’s probably just the pointiness of his chin making it feel that way.
Let’s leave well enough alone.
Alright, time to finish coloring Derrick.
For his eyes, I don’t usually use the fill tool. I draw them in with the pen so you get those little points of light. In real life, eyes catch light like that, and I like that effect.
There we go.
Now under Derrick’s neck, there’s a little bit of shadow — that’s actually a nod to Peanuts, which often had that small shadow under the characters’ chins.
Let’s fill in his skin.
Ah — looks like I accidentally did his arm in gray earlier. Not what we meant to do. Let’s clean that up.
Much better.
Now, color consistency.
Did I save Derrick’s armor colors? Of course not. That’s always frustrating.
Let’s use the eyedropper tool and sample from the other characters. It actually looks like I used the same armor colors for Derrick and the bad knights. How lazy of me.
Well… consistency isn’t a bad thing. Let’s keep it that way.
We’ll fill in the primary armor color, then the secondary.
Zoom in for the tiny details. Probably need a very small brush for that.
There we go.
Perfection is the enemy of done — I actually have that hanging on my office wall. Which is probably why this book has taken as long as it has.
Still, once I see a mistake, I have a hard time leaving it. Especially if it’s white bleeding through somewhere it shouldn’t.
Alright. Clean that up. Fix the lines. Fill again.
Now for the background.
We didn’t create a background layer earlier, so let’s do that now.
This scene is inside a castle. Derrick had that dramatic red and yellow gradient in his background earlier, but here I think we’ll just go with a neutral castle wall.
Let’s try gray.
Yes, it’s a lot of gray — but it pushes the focus onto the characters. And since we’re zoomed in this close, we wouldn’t really see the sky or the ground anyway. Just the wall behind them.
We could draw in big stone blocks, but I don’t think we need that level of detail here. The gray works.
Let’s zoom out.
I like to zoom in and out a lot while working — checking how it looks up close and from a distance. That helps me decide if something feels right.
You know what? I think that works.
Let’s call this one done.
Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for drawing along if you were following along at home. If you liked this, please consider liking, maybe even subscribing. And if you’d like to see more about my art and my books, you can check out my website at bdcrowell.com.
Until next time — stay well.
Missed the earlier stages of this illustration? You can catch previous episodes in the Draw with Brian series.
To learn more about my books and artwork, visit bdcrowell.com.
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