Goddess Images to Draw Easy With Long Dresses

Process

How to Draw — A GOD! by George O'Connor

Or in this case, a Goddess. Specifically, we'll be drawing a picture of Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare, and also the star of the second book in the Olympians series, Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess.

Here's the first step. I quickly, with a light pencil, draw a stick figure of Athena in the approximate position and pose I want her to be in—holding a spear, ready to leap into battle against Gigantes or Titans or some sort of fearsome foe. I know we've all seen something like this before—the stick figure drawing—and if you're anything like I used to be when I was a kid, you figure this is a step that you can easily skip. WRONGO!

Here's why this step is so important:

1. It helps you to measure out her proportions, and make sure everything fits together right. It's not easy, for instance, to make sure that both hands grab the spear correctly, and also join up to her shoulders in the right way. Go ahead and try drawing two hands grabbing a spear without drawing a stick figure outline first—it's tricky, I tells ya.
2. Say that we would be drawing this picture of Athena for a graphic novel. Not only would I be drawing her this one time, but also I would literally be drawing her 100's of times throughout the book! I want her to look like the same character every time I draw her, and figuring out what basic shapes make up her figure is a helpful way to insure that consistency. I, personally, have drawn Athena over 70 million times (give or take a few), and I still do this, every time.

As you can see, I made up the body of Athena with some circles, lines and a few other basic shapes. Once that's done we move on to step 2…

With the same LIGHT pencil as before, I make a second pass over my stick figure from step 1. It's helpful to think of the stick figure as Athena's skeleton—and now I'm adding muscles, skin and everything else that makes up a person (or Goddess) to it. I haven't added that much detail yet—notice, that while she has a nose, Athena does not yet have eyes or a mouth. Also, even though she will be wearing a long skirt in the final drawing, I've drawn her legs in completely. This is to make sure I haven't made any mistakes in her pose and proportions. It's very easy, when drawing someone that is completely covered by clothing, to mess up the body underneath.

This way, I won't.

Also notice that I've given a few, slight traces of what Athena will be wearing—her helmet, skirt, her sleeves. Don't worry that you can see through her clothes at this point—we'll be erasing all this pencil eventually anyway. Remember, that's why we're using a LIGHT pencil.

Now that I'm happy with how Athena was posed, I go in and do some final pencils. Now she has eyes and a mouth, as well as hair, toes, fingernails, and all the elements of her outfit are well defined. I've also gone in and colored in quickly the parts of Athena that I will want to be colored black in the final drawing. I also broke out a ruler to make sure that Athena's spear was nice and straight. Don't be afraid to spend a little time on this step, and to redraw anything that might look a little funny.

Now we erase the whole thing. WAIT—Not YET! First, we look at our beautiful, finished drawing (in LIGHT pencil, remember) and decide, yeah, we like this drawing. Then we take some ink and trace over ONLY THE LINES WE REALLY, REALLY LIKE. What do I mean by this? Well, take a look at the finished pencil drawing from step 3, you will notice that there are many extra lines outlining Athena's body, and we can still see through her clothes and helmet. So, with our ink, we only trace over the lines WE WANT TO SEE in the final drawing. We don't want Athena to have a see-through helmet.

As for what you should use to ink your drawing, there are a lot of options. You can use a ballpoint pen, or a thin marker. I use a type of pen that's called a cro-quill, or dip pen. It's one of those pens you see in old-timey movies, where it's basically a stick with a metal point on it that you actually have to dip into a bottle of ink. I like drawing with this very much, but it's not easy at first, so if you're just starting out, you might want to practice with some normal pens at first. At this point, I should mention that don't be discouraged if your drawing doesn't look quite right just yet. It takes a lot of practice! When you've drawn Athena 400 Trillion times like I have, you'll draw her as well as I do. Heck, you'll draw her even better.

After you finish inking Athena, go take a break and read for a little while, or maybe draw some more pictures in pencil. We want to give the ink time to dry properly, because now, FINALLY, we're going to erase all the pencil lines from our drawing. Only the dried ink lines will remain. If you used a DARK pencil, even though I kept reminding you to use a LIGHT one, you might be sad at this point, because dark pencil lines are very, very hard to erase. If you didn't wait long enough for the ink to dry, you might also be sad, because the eraser can smear the wet ink. Try erasing a small area that's not as important first, like maybe the corner of her cape, to test if the ink has dried enough.

This step, in fancy-comic-book-artist language, is called "spotting the blacks", but you might just call it "coloring in the dark areas". If you go back and look at my drawing for step 4, you might notice that I have drawn little 'x's in some of the areas that are now colored black (like her armor, for instance). This more fancy-comic-book-artist stuff, basically a little reminder to myself that I will want to color in those areas black later. You probably will want to switch the pen you used to ink the drawing in step 4 to something fatter, like maybe a big black marker or something, or else it will take you all day to color this in. When I'm inking with a dip pen, I normally use a small paintbrush to "spot my blacks", or I will even fill the black parts in on my computer, after I've scanned my drawing into it.

Now the final step—we add color. I mentioned scanning before—a scanner is a device that basically takes a picture of your drawing and makes it into a file for your computer. Then I use a program called Photoshop to color in my drawing, until it looks like what we have here. Photoshop and scanners, like dip pens, are pretty complicated stuff, so you may just want to color your drawing in with some markers, colored pencils or crayons. Anyway is good, even leaving it black and white.
So now you have a finished drawing of your own Athena! Remember; don't be discouraged if your drawing doesn't look just quite right this first time. It takes a lot of practice, and each and every time you draw you'll get better! I should know—I've drawn Athena over 7000 gazillionbillion times, and I'm still learning!

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Writing the story of a god by George O'Connor

The following is a brief description of the process I used (and continue to use) in the creation of each book in the Olympians series.

Step 1: Read

The first and most basic step is to read, read, read. And when I'm done with that, I read some more.

Very early on in the whole process of making Olympians I decided that I didn't want to rely on any modern retellings of the Greek Myths. As much as possible, I wanted to go back to ancient Greek and Roman texts to inform my own versions of these stories. That meant a lot of research, but that was okay—researching stories about gods and monsters is about the most exciting thing you'll ever be asked to study.

The big plan is to make twelve books, one for each Olympian god. So while I read and read and read, I made a list of which stories I most wanted to retell (because there are literally thousands of different Greek myths, and a series that told every single one would have to be hundreds of books long, not just a dozen). Then I further broke the list down, figuring out which myth would best be told in which book. Sometimes it was obvious—The War of the Titans would have to be told in Zeus's book, for example—and other times it was less so— which book would be best to tell the Trojan War in, for instance? With it all sorted this out, I keep a copy of this list on both my computer's desktop and in my sketchbook at all times.

If you're interested, elsewhere on this site there is a list of some of the wonderful books and websites I used to write the stories in Olympians.

Step 2: Doodle

Then I start filling my aforementioned sketchbook with hundreds of drawings of the myths I want to tell in each book. At this point I'm not very worried about the story yet, I just want to draw the key scenes of a myth in a multitude of ways. This gives me a lot of option in how I tell the story later, when I try to assemble these drawings in to a coherent comics page. While I'm doodling, I'm also coming up with the designs of the characters and settings in the story. A lot of what I draw at this stage doesn't end up in the book as intended, but is still useful in a lot of ways. I may draw a really cool pose of, oh, let's say Ares, that doesn't work in the story I intended it in, but I may be able to rework that same basic drawing into an awesome shot of Achilles later.

I should also mention that at this stage I actually begin the "writing" of the book, that is, the script. You'll notice little words and chicken scratch all over the pages. Sometimes I write out entire sequences, word for word, other times just little notations. As a writer who is also an illustrator, I find it easiest to do both simultaneously.

Step 3: Thumbnail

Let me tell you something. For me, this is without a doubt, the most difficult part of the whole process, by far. Thumbnails are little tiny rough sketches of what the final comics page will look like. (I'm not sure why they're called thumbnails—I'm guessing it's because they're so small). Basically, I take a look at all the hundreds of doodles I've done and figure out the best way to put them all together to tell a story. Each book in Olympians has about 66 pages of comics story in them, and to help fit everything in that space, I will make a little color-coded map of how many pages each part of the story will take. It can be very easy for me to go too long otherwise.
Consider this: Not only does each page of comics have to make sense as a story, it additionally has to look good as a piece of art. Each panel has to work as a composition, and the every page is made up of a bunch of panels that also have to work together as a composition. There are so many things to do and keep in mind at the thumbnailing stage that it's no wonder I sometimes fall asleep at my drafting table. My brain uses up so many calories I become exhausted!

Step 4: Dummy

A dummy is the term for a fake book that you put together to get an idea of what your final book will look like. As you can see from my thumbnails above, nobody on Earth would be able to make sense of those insane little drawings, myself included. Quickly, before I forget what the heck it is I drew anyway, I blow my thumbnails up into rough drawings of what the final book will look like.

This dummy, filled with the rough draft of my book, will serve as the blueprint for the finished book. I like to sit with this for a few days and "read" through it, to make sure everything works and makes sense.

I should mention here that I don't always do such finished looking dummies as I show here. This is an excerpt from the dummy for Book 1 of Olympians, Zeus: King of the Gods, which I did up really fancy since, as the first book of a proposed series, I had to use this dummy to convince my publishers to buy the series. Normally, I would just do this in pencil.

Step 5: Script

Now that my "blueprint" is in order, I go back through my various notes and bits of writing to construct the actual script of my book. I'm actually cheating a little by making this its own section; as I mentioned earlier, the process of writing and drawing are extremely intertwined for me. By the time I sit down to actually type up my script, the whole book is almost completely written. Still, this is when I fine-tune it, clean up some things, add some things, and drop out some stuff completely (I tend to overwrite). Then I send the script off to my editors, who smooth over my odd ramblings and bizarre wordings further.

Step 6: Draw

Now the hard work's over, and the fun stuff begins. Drawing is the easy breezy part of this whole enterprise for me. I go over the steps in making a drawing elsewhere on the site, but first I loosely sketch the page out in pencil. Having drawn all this stuff before, from the doodle to dummy phase, I'm normally pretty warmed up and this stage is very quick. Once it's roughly penciled in, I go over it in ink, where, truth to tell, I do a lot of my real drawing—the pencils are just for layouts. I normally am able to draw two full pages a day, and up to four when I'm under a tight deadline.

Secret tip: work bigger than the eventual print size. When you shrink your work down, all your mistakes shrink too, and you end up looking like a better artist than you actually are.

Step 7: Scan

Then I take my big ol' drawing and scan it into my computer. To get briefly technical, First Second (the publisher of Olympians) likes for all of the original black and white artwork to be scanned in at 1200 dpi, which means 1200 dots per inch. That's a lot of dots! It means these are some very big computer files, and that they capture every detail of the page, including dust. I normally spend a little bit of time in Photoshop correcting all my smudges and mistakes at this point. This is also the stage where I add the actual panel borders to the page. If you were to see an original page of Olympians artwork, there are no black panel borders.

Step 8: Word bubbles

I'm happy to report that I've streamlined this step out of my whole process. Remember a second ago when I said there are no panel borders on my original artwork? Well, for all of Zeus: King of the Gods, and the first 15 pages or so of Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess, there are no word bubbles either.
How come? Well, for starters, I thought the original pages looked better without them (not that anyone but myself, my family and friends get to see them that way). Secondly, I liked to have the opportunity to change the script as late as in the process as I could (this despite the fact, at this stage, I may change one or two words, tops). Finally, my publisher likes to not have the words directly on the original art because it makes it easier for the book to be published in another language. Say, for example, that a publisher in France wants to publish Zeus in French. It's much easier for them to put in the French words if they don't have to erase the English from all of my art first. We keep the words on a separate computer file, which is added to the book when we print. Easy!

So now I draw the empty word balloons on the art as I go. It saves a lot of time. It helps me to integrate the balloons into the composition better, and I don't have to waste time drawing things in the background that will just be covered up by balloons anyway. Before, after I drew the whole, entire book, I would have to go back when I was finished, and, on a separate piece of paper, draw in every single word balloon, and where it was supposed to go on the page. It was the most horrible terrible thing ever, and I hated every millisecond of it. I'm so glad I don't do that anymore.

Oh, and I almost forgot! In order to make sure the word balloons were all the right size, I had to hand-letter the entire book in each of those word balloons. Then, because we used computer lettering (to better be able to extract it for foreign language editions), I would erase it all! ARRGH! The torture!!

Step 9: Color

Back to the fun stuff! Using the aforementioned Photoshop program, I color in all the black and white artwork for the book. This would take a while, all while sitting in front of a computer, but it's very rewarding to see the whole book come together. Not much to say about this step because it's mostly very technical, and, really, I'm just glad that I don't do Step 8 anymore.

Step 10:

The-send-it-all-off-to-the-publisher-and-take-a-two-week-nap phase! This is my favorite!

The wizards at First Second take everything, put it together all nicely, and many moons later I receive a beautiful finished book. I don't have any children, but I imagine this is the closest thing I could feel to being a father. Then many moons after that, the books are available to be purchased at all finer bookstores and comic shops.

And that, my friends, is how you write a god's story.

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Source: https://olympiansrule.com/process/

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