In order to level out my thoughts for this one, I considered what kind of mythological creatures that I've seen recently to get inspiration. For this I looked at what books I've read, what movies I've seen, what kind of art that I viewed recently. In January, I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with a few others and I kinda enjoyed it. I don't think I need to toot my own horn, but I thought the dwarves were awesome. So I thought to myself, dwarves have been in mythology since forever in Tolkien's mythology and in Germanic mythology, so I thought that would be a good way to start it.
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To begin, I started with a rough drawing of a head and sculpted out how it would look. Dwarves usually are very hardy, strong and live in mountains but short and have rather long lives. I drew the head to be somewhat old, but have strong characteristics like a strong chin and a round bald head. I later added in his nose, heavy eyebrows, flat lips, the old ears with big earlobes and baggy eyes to flesh out his face. Then came the beard, that's where I was having the most fun. Filling out all of the hairs on the chin face and how they would rearrange was very free-flowing, lust letting the strokes take shape. Lastly, I added some embellishments to his ear by adding an earring, bushy eyebrows and a few scars for decoration. When I scanned it, I changed it to grayscale since all of it was done via blue drawing pencil. Light blue doesn't really show that well when scanned in.
After doing the rough, I went to the next stage and started to clean up the original. Here I erased the chin and jawline to the dwarf and continued to flesh out the hairs on the body. When you see someone with a full beard, it hides his jawline with all of that hair, unless the hair is very fine. However, for this dwarf, he has a thick, long and almost bushy beard to stand out with. In the left hand corner, I tried to write 'dwarf' in Tolkien's dwarf language, but please excuse me Tolkien fans for my negligence for keeping up with his lore and proper dwarf language.
With the clean-up done, I went on to tracing him. I taped a page of tracing paper over him and started to drawing him out with ball-point pen. I always felt more comfortable doing ink drawing with ball-point pen since it doesn't cut into thin paper and I would like that I don't ruin the original drawing with a blot if ink. With that in mind, I added a few more embellishments to the dwarf, like wrinkles and moles to his skin. Seeing that he has a scar on his right eye, I made his right eye blind and white with the left one normal to give him a cold unusual look. Now my dwarf is done!
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