vector screen

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

Let’s start creating a new file by going to File > New (Command/Ctrl + N).

In Preset select International Paper and in Size, A4.

Now we have a brand new canvas.

Let’s choose a middle tone for that background in order to make easier to work with lights and shadows. I like this “chocolate”.

Now fill the canvas.

The first step is to draw the shape of the bust. For this we are going to the pencil tool.

Select a hard circular pencil shape, 100% opacity, 1% spacing. Select Transfer and apply opacity jitter with pen pressure.

Now click (D) to set the main color to black, imagine where the head is going to be and drop a big black dot there to start the silhouette.

Start drawing the shape as shown below.

And here we have the basic shape of the body and the hood

To create the face, create a shape similar to the image below with the brush tool.

Keep drawing as shown.

Now we will start painting the facial forms. With a transparent brush, start painting as shown below.

Now, leave a bit of space from the middle of the bottom of the oval and start a stroke going down to have a lovely nose.

For the cheek do as you see here, having in mind that you are drawing those forms under the eyeball hole

Same thing for the jaw and chin, just try to keep the vision of an old woman in your mind and imagine it flaccid.

Time to add some facial forms. It’s much more easy to start detailing elements if you can see them in your mind so a good start is to sketch the basic expression lines. This is the first approach to the feelings the drawing will communicate, try to feel the same you want to draw at this point, feel sad if you want to draw sadness and feel angry if you want to draw rage, this way you are calling the visual memories you have in mind about non verbal communication and expressiveness. For this step we will still use the same pencil tool (more or less 85% of the work was done with that tool). Set it at size 10, be sure to have the skin tone as background color and black as main color. Use the black color over the head and the skin color for the outside head elements as the hair. To change from main to secondary color use the key (X). First we are going to draw the hair, flowing down from the middle of the head. Follow the red arrows direction.

Now let’s focus on the nose.

Mouth side wrinkles are very important to say that she is old and have a flaccid facial skin, also adds a lot of expression.

For the old lady’s mouth we need a lipless and toothless mouth that communicates the sensation of the skin directly over the skull bone. A tooth or two may add visual tension and details. Don’t worry if it’s not accurate now, you will perfect it later.

Set brush size to 50 and click (x) to go back to the skin tone color and draw a "V" a bit rotated over her eyebrows as you can see in the image, in order to show the facial muscles and give more tension to the expression. Also with brush size 100 draw a soft line over the nose.

With the eye dropper tool, sample the background color. Then select the pencil tool and using a size of 100 place a dot in the eyes to create the pupils.

Now let’s work on her hands. Set your brush size to 600 pixels and place a dot where you think the apple will go.

Using the same color you used for the skin tone, sketch out her hands.

Now we will develop the facial forms a bit more. We will start with the eyes. Grab the pencil tool and vary the size between 5 and 35. The small lines are for expression, the bigger lines are for middle tones and highlights.

Keep drawing the wrinkles as shown.

Now start working on the brow.

Now start work on the nose.

Paint in the mouth hole and draw a basic lip in black, to form a basic wrinkly over the mouth. Also draw the cheekbone.

Repeat the same steps on the chin below.

Continue to add detail to the jaw.

Now start to frame in her face by drawing some basic lines for her hair.

Now add some horizontal lines as shown below to start sketching in some wrinkles on her forehead.

Now start work on her eyes. To emphasize them a bit, I dotted her eyes with the background color to darken them up a bit. I then applied three highlights from different light sources. As you can see, it gives the illusion of a skull in her eye to add a bit of symbolism.

Not all parts of the body are the same color. Now we will gently paint over different areas to apply some color. Do this very gently. We are painting in a normal layer. A color mode is not applied.

Continue adding color as shown below.

To finish this step just add a bit of desaturated clear blue to the borders of the face.

Advancing your artwork in a balanced way is important. In this piece, there are two focal points. The eyes and the hand with the apple. While we will add a lot of detail later, it is important to keep the sketch updated to the level of the rest of the face. Add in some more details to the hand and fingers. You can also drop a black dot in the upper area of the apple so it starts looking a bit less like a ball and more like an apple.

Create a new layer and use the texture brush to add some detail to the hood.

Use the lines below to paint in the wrinkes of the cloak.

Now use the eye dropper tool to select the clearest and darkest skin tone colors to paint in light and shadow hairs. Use random colors and sizes.

Try to paint them looking as natural and irregular as possible following this scheme. A good tip is to make some strands lay over others looking as strand groups.

Now with brush size between 30 and 15 (as you prefer) paint softly with the “shadow skin” color drawing a half transparent line following this pattern to make it look as a shadow of the hair over the face.

Again with the body, get the background color again with the eyedropper tool (I) and follow these arrows to get the shoulders.

In a new layer, with the “shadow of face” color we previously used, now paint the chest black empty area this way

Try to imagine where the borders of the hood and the long hair (that we will paint later) are over the chest, more or less as you see here.

Paint it following different lines to have a base for future clothes’ wrinkles, and do it changing brush size as much as you need to feel comfortable. More or less I painted it this way.

Now that we have the structure for our face laid out, we will now try to add in some detail to make the left witch look like the one on the right.

The blue areas designate highlights.

The red areas designate shadow.

The illustration below will explain what is shown as shadow and highlight.

Feel free to add in some warts as shown. To paint them just drop a dark dot on her face and then paint over it with a clear skin tone.

The boring part of this kind of works is always the same… "INFINITE WRINKLES". Now we have to detail more the ones we sketched before. The way is always the same, get the previous colors used, you know, clear and dark skin tones, is time to work again in lights and shadows but in small parts, not in general areas. Let’s start with the upper area, draw few horizontal big lines from left to right as you see in the image, always between the hair areas and keep a clear space between them, now add some smaller irregular diagonal lines behind the biggest ones, more softly and carefully, do it with the shadow skin tone color and separate them with the clear skin tone color.

This ones are pretty easy, just follow the lines you see in the drawing, from up going down with lines a bit circular that turns to inside, to the center of the face, never outside, except the ones of the down lip, that are the opposite thing, going from inside to outside.

As the previous one this is very easy, just follow the lines of the example image and try to make them a bit irregular, nnt always parallel, try to paint them fluid and looking organic.

Eyebrows are always the same, more or less. The hair always follows the same dynamic but it’s always hard to draw an eyebrow that looks natural, no matter if you want a beautiful or an ugly eyebrow as in this case. Start to draw from the center of the face going outside hair by hair. Draw the hairs going from up to down and always have in mind that those hairs have a different position in each part that you will have to learn. The ones more centered usually are more separated than the rest (well it happens with both extremes of the eyebrow). Few hairs after this they are more or less in straight line from up to down and soon they twist to go each time more and more from up/side to down/center. Paint them with the brush "1" in size 1 or 2, as you wish with pure black ink to generate contrast between the white head hair and the black eyebrows.

When ended they shall look this way.

Time to paint the long hair. Half of the process will be done with single brush strokes going fluidly from up to down.

But before to do that we will develop a “hair base” quickly, so we are going to create a hair brush. So let’s start creating a new file by going to File > New (Command/Ctrl + N).

In Preset don’t pay attention to the parameters, does not matter much for this step.

Now we have again a white canvas to work over.

Choose again the pencil tool and be sure tou have BLACK as main color (this is important if we want a full opacity brush).

The pencil brush should be a rounded hard brush with no activated dynamics, as you may see here.

Draw 5 separated black dots as you see in the image.

Select a rectangle around the dots as you see in the image.

Go to menu EDIT and click on DEFINE BRUSH PRESET.

Call it “hairbrush” and click OK.

The new brush will be available among the rest of your brushes, select it and if you try a stroke it have to look as this.

Go to Brush window (f5) and activate TRANSFER, choosing PEN PRESSURE as control of opacity jitter

In BRUSH TIP SHAPE modify the spacing to 1% and rotate 90º up left (as you see in the drawing) the angle.

Activate SHAPE DYNAMICS. In SIZE JITTER choose as control PEN PRESSURE and in ANGLE JITTER choose as control DIRECTION.

In BRUSH PRESETS window save it clicking on CREATE NEW BRUSH button, later give it a name (I called it 3 in the provided brushes) and click OK.

The strokes of this new brush should look as the ones of the right side of this image.

As in previous steps get the clear skin tone color with the eyedropper tool and with the new brush IN BRUSH TOOL MODE (This is important, not using the pencil tool, this have to be smooth and the only way is using the brush tool) paint few irregular strokes as you see in the image over the black area we previously left empty for the hair.

Try to follow more or less this wave of lines for the hair.

Now we are going to paint few single hairs to make it look more random and natural so we have to modify the parameters of our first brush. Choose the brush 1 and in BRUSH MENU (f5) activate the SHAPE DYNAMICS with PEN PRESSURE as control of SIZE JITTER

Following the previous steps wave forms paint random single hairs, try to do them as long as possible

Now, with the same brush, we are going to paint small “crazy” hairs, paint them all short and twisty as the red arrows of the image but press hard those are not soft hairs.