Hello everyone and welcome to another incredible tutorial from the Drawing Factory, this time you will learn how to draw Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out by Pixar Studios.
Sadness is one of the five emotions controlling Riley Andersen’s mind. She lives in her brain and works with the other Emotions.
For this tutorial, I used the drawing software SketchBook Pro and a drawing tablet.
You can see where I started with my drawing and the reference image I used for this tutorial.
As always take a good look at the reference image and try to see if you can visually simplify it into easier forms.
For example in this case I fit the whole character into an elongated rectangle.
So the first thing you should be doing is to draw a rectangle, diving it along it midline and using that as a reference start to fill it with other elements, for example, the position and shape of the head.
Be very careful at this stage in positioning these elements so that during your drawings you will be able to use them to position the other elements using these as spatial signposts.
At this point, I suggest you try to establish where the scarf around Sadness’s neck is and the line where her jumper ends. See I have signed these two important lines with two arrows in the drawing.
Right, are you feeling you are learning how to draw Sadness? I hope so. Very loosely now draw the legs and the arms.
Notice how the tip of her hands ends up almost on top of her cardigan’s bottom line, so it’s easy to position them.
The legs are short and pointy and end somehow within the rectangle we drew before.
Add in the hair, I mean just loosely the shape of the heir and again notice how on both sides of her face, the hair ends at the same height. I have drawn a line to show it to you.
Also while drawing the hair try to follow the curvature of the head, that’s what that arrow is there for.
Now, before moving on and tackling the face and the face elements it’s time to clean up your drawing just a bit. Erase unwonted lines except for the midline on Sadness’s face.
Before moving on draw a horizontal line approximately one-third up her face. I know, do your best here!
That line is really important because it will allow you to draw the eyes. While positioning the eyes on Sadness’s face be careful and make sure they are at the same distance from the midline. Also use the midline to position the eyebrows, nose and mouth.
Do your best here by looking at the reference image to position the face elements as closely as possible to their original position. Again, do your best here and do not worry if you make a mistake just erase and do it again until you are happy with the result.
Once you are done you can safely delete all construction lines including those on Sadness’s face.
Learning how to draw Sadness, moving on!
Now, drawing the iris and pupils is critical to give Sadness her expression so try to do your best, she is looking up and slightly on her left but mostly up.
To finish up the face now you can draw the hugely sized eyeglasses she is wearing. They are perfect circles so you can use a compass or any other tool to make them perfectly round. However, to make them a bit more interesting we will add in the next step a bit of thickness to them, particularly on the sides.
Before moving on to colouring it’s important you are absolutely happy with the drawing so far. So I took a little bit of time to tweak my drawing as well.
I made her eyeglasses thicker at the sides and overall tweaked her appearance making her a tiny bit smaller and slimmer and getting her legs slightly closer to each other.
Finally, I made sure I deleted all unwanted construction lines. The next step is colouring Sadness, let’s get to it!
The first thing you want to do is to use flat colours to fill the main colour areas of the drawing.
Now if you are using traditional technique this is where this tutorial might be a bit less useful to you. If you are using digital drawing instead you can keep following along because what I am going to say you can replicate pretty much in any drawing software out there.
Choose your ‘base’ colour carefully and get on filling the entire drawing until it looks similar to mine.
After that’s been taken care of it is time to add shadow. Arm yourself with a soft airbrush tool with opacity set to lowish, maybe around 20% and start building up shadows on the figure.
In this particular rendering the light comes from the left (of the figure) so all the shadows are going to be on the right of the figure. Don’t rush this step, take your time and build the shadows slowly adding layers over layers of a darker base colour.
For example on the face use a darker blue and on the cardigan a darker grey.
When shadows are laid down you can start laying down the light. The process is similar to the previous one however in this case you add a lighter version of the base colour.
Using a soft airbrush with low opacity, build the light areas slowly to create a smooth effect and to be seamless with the colour underneath.
We are almost there!
I’ll leave the finishing touch to you. If you followed so far you ended up with a nice rendering of Sadness, however, to lift the drawing even more I added a bit of texture to the cardigan and hair and some very bright highlights to accentuate her arms and eyes.
And there you have it! A glorious drawing of Sadness from the Pixar Movie Inside Out! I hope this tutorial helped you learn how to draw Sadness!
How did your drawing turn out? Did you find it difficult? Easy? Let me know in the comment section below! Foe this week is all from me and I’ll see you all next week with another drawing tutorial!
