Well after almost 3 years I'm finally gonna do what I said I was thinking about doing
Should thank
@caspyartist for finally motivating me enough to go through with it haha.
Since Ducky was brought up I'm gonna start with her, plus she's typically one of the more challenging ones to draw anyways. So for this sketch I decided on wanting Ducky to be kinda scared while slightly turning around, so I'll try and show the steps of how I go about doing it. Bipedal characters like Ducky and Chomper I generally always start the same way, with 2 circles overlapping each other.
The top one is the chest and the bottom one is the stomach. The line going down both of them is how I want the center of her body to be facing, with them contouring around to show that it's a round shape. This helps with the placement of the feet and arms, which will be sketched next.
The legs and arms are roughly placed on either sides of the center line. I kinda rushed ahead here, but the limbs can be drawn by placing different sized ovals. I've just basically haven't drawn the overlapping parts where the joints are. Also added some lines where the neck is going to go and an oval for the head, with the lines going around it in two coordinate directions to show where it's pointing and if it's tilted. Basically the intersection of these two lines shows what direction the nose points. As for the tail, I basically just extended the bottom circle outwards in a sorta wavy, triangular shape. After this, I sketch over the lines I want to keep and press harder to create darker lines.
I also add a bit more detail in as well, such as the line separating the belly from the light green colour, as well as her feet, the marks for her knees, and her shoulders. Next, I clean up the body by erasing all the lighter lines as well as try to draw her hands haha. Still not an expert on drawing hands so I can't really give much tips there. I just try and do what I can
And with that the body is basically done! Now the hard part (especially for Ducky), drawing the face. With the oval split into 4 quadrants, I usually start with placing the the eye down near the back of the quadrant that is most visible as it generally can be drawn with a flat almost side perspective of most characters. Basically just half an oval with the bottom part concave inwards to show where the cheeks are, with the eyebrow part mirroring the eye and extended upwards. Once that is down, I start drawing her nose, with the top of it peaking right on the vertical line. I mostly just wing it but it starts around where the eyebrow stops and goes down slightly below her one eye drawn. Probably not a hard fast rule for her but it did end up that way in this drawing. Once the nose is in place, the cheek on the side closest to the viewer can be extended downwards from the eye, and the top of her mouth can be sketched out in front of her nose. Afterwards, I drew a curved oval for her crest behind her eye, and another small half oval near the bottom and behind her eye for the ear. Draw a line in the middle of the ear and have it curve around in a circular shape below the cheek drawing to get the bottom part of the face setup. Now, around the same height of the other eye (since the head is level in this case), draw a partially concealed oval on the other side of the nose for the eye on the far side, along with the eyebrow above. I also included a small circle underneath the far eye to give a little part of her far cheek to show to give the face a bit more depth to it. Once done you would get something like drawn below.
Whew, that was a lot of explaining. Now to work on the expression, which can be modified mainly by two things, the eyes and the mouth. Since I want her to be scared, I start by giving her sad eyes, which can be thought of the opposite angle of mad eyes. That means the back of the eyes are cut off lower then the front part of the eye and angled upwards (make sure to mirror the opposite eye so they're both consistent with each other!). Next is the mouth. For this part I decided on having it open, with the major difference in expression being at the connection between the upper and lower jaw: in general happy emotions curl upwards, negative emotions curl downwards (but maybe not always the case). I already have the upper jaw drawn, which are the 3 circle shapes that are passed her nose, so all that's left to do is to draw the part towards the cheek curl downwards, and to make an oval shape out and around to complete the lower jaw.
NOTE: Make sure that the lower jaw is always smaller than the upper jaw, otherwise it will look really weird (unless the character has that trait of course, but Ducky, and most characters, do not). Draw another larger and concentric oval to the lower part of the mouth and extend it to the lower part of the cheek to complete the lower jaw and face! Oh! Also maybe include a line to show the tongue as well. She's not screaming so it doesn't need to be extended out or anything. Now the face should be looking more complete.
All that's really left is to add in some more detail such as the pupils and eye lashes. Since she is turning around, I want the eye to be in the far right corner. The pupil is also slightly smaller than usual to help show she is more scared. Draw a concentric oval for the iris, and another, smaller circle in the pupil for the eye reflection and that eye is done. Add the same to the farther eye, only smaller. A note here to be careful how the eye reflections are placed in both eyes. It can easily make the character look crossed eyed and goofy and is something you might need to play around with to get right. Eyelashes are easy as they're just 3 curved lines at the top of the eyes. This is also a good time to trace over the final lines you want to keep on the face.
With that the drawing is pretty much finished! From here I just did a bit of cleaning up by erasing any rough lines that I don't want to keep, along with shading in the pupil. Here's the final result.
Overall it turned out pretty good for a quick sketch of a random pose. Hopefully on a high level this helps anyone that might want to try tackling drawing Ducky. She's a hard one to get looking right. Let me know if I didn't cover enough detail or went too fast with the steps in between each image. I wasn't sure how many pictures I should take, but it could've easily been 20+ of them with all of the smaller steps.
Conversely, let me know how you draw Ducky if you do things differently. Maybe we can get a conversation going on this with sharing tips!
