Hello guys, my name is Bob Calluso and I am a French man that loves French fries. I work as an industrial engineer in a small company here Japan. And yeah, I've also been able to get married and have some children here in Japan as well. Well to tell you, I already fell in love with this country that is why I'm planning to stay longer here. By the way, I do draw as a past time and today I'll share you some of my wisdom about drawing, more about rendering to be exact.

Rendering is a term used for coloring or putting a drawing into colors, its either monochromatic, sepia or full colored it doesn't matter as long the process is from line art(well not line art all the time) to rendered (colored or gray toned).

I saw this contest this past week from Hive account@erodedthoughts' blog and the guy invited me to join. The guy is kind of cool, he welcomed me in the chat room two weeks before when I was new and he kind of pushed me to stay to Steemit and do blogs seriously. Well, I plan to, but for now, I'll just do posts maybe once or twice a week. I kind of just fooled around with my first entry, this time, I planned to made something at least more decent. I took pictures of the piece I did while its being done in process. Everything here is shown in process to show more emphasis on how its done. I hope its useful though.

How did Bob did it?

First, I visualized what I wanted to draw for this entry. I didn't really want to do a direct approach for my second entry like what I did last time. Last time, I just drew this orc with pen and ink and posted it without anything to talk about it much. That is just lazy, I know!

When I got what I wanted into my mind, I then decided to make a samurai with an oni mask. I don't know if I'll get disqualified cause of this subject choice of mine, but I doubt it, as far as I know, Hive account@erodedthoughts did his contests for fun, so I think he will understand.

I smudged some graphite around the eye with my finger as you can see below.

I softened the graphite with a kneaded eraser. just in case you don't know what is a kneaded eraser, that is the clay like yellow thing in the picture below.
I then darkened the corner of the eye to show an impression of depth in the drawing. This way, I can convey a burrow in the mask.
See here more of how that technique can be used. I used it to show dimensions on the lips and the nose.

I then took a sharper darker pencil which is 5B and dashed some stroke around the eye socket to make some crack like effects around the eye socket. You can probably use pencil grades from 3B to 6B for this crack effects, just make sure to sharpen the pencil really good so it doesn't smudge on the paper.
When you render a drawing with graphite pencils, it is important to know the difference in values of the gray specially if you're doing realism for your art. At this case, this isn't really realism so this is okay.

When you render with a pencil, the tip of the pencil shouldn't be sharp if that said grade is to be used for large areas. If the pencil tip is too pointy, break the tip and scratch the graphite on a piece of scratch paper until the tip goes round in shape.
The hand pressure in rendering shouldn't be hard. Just stick the graphite on the paper and move it with the lightest you can. By doing so, blending with a finger would be easier since the paper isn't dented with the force that you applied while rendering.

Here, I used a mechanical pencil with grade 2B in it's graphite for the small details for the nose and the other small details. As far as I know, 2B is the darkest grade of graphites for mechanical pencils.
鬼(oni) in Japanese is literally demon if looked in the dictionary. But since languages have so many vagueness into them, for no reason, orcs and ogres can be translated also as 鬼(oni).

To tell you, the war club that the orcs and the ogres bring in Japanese is called 鬼 棒 (onibou) which literally means devil stick. It's kind of weird if you're in a foreign point of view of how the word is translated.


If you want to hear more about that word 鬼 棒 (onibou) you can do some google with it. Oh, I remember, that word is also been used to describe the two main characters in the anime Haikyu. Chekc that anime out, its a good watch.
I'm almost done here. Here, I started to draw a hand holding a katana to make the drawing more interesting.

I wanted to draw an 鬼 棒 (onibou) but ended up with a katana cause I suck at drawing 鬼 棒 (onibou). :D
Another misconception with the katana and the samurai is that some people mix them or probably just call the sword as samurai. To be exact here, the one that holds the katana is the samurai. Yeah, the samurai is the human and the katana is the weapon.
And there you have it, a complete drawing for Hive account@erodedthoughts' contest. Did you liked it?

How was it? Did this drawing made you smile?
Hope so...

Everything here is mine except for the video, just wanted to share it. This is the new music video of my most favorite Japanese Band, Scandalイスカンダル!!!!