How to draw fantasy art - a rough artists guide

Fantasy art is a rather personal subject for me and one I can teach to those who want to learn or see how this type of stuff is created from start to finish, there are lots of books on this type of subject and quite possible you may own a few of them, I sure do, that's why I want to do my own how to guide based on fantasy art.

First off, I wanted to start with the basics as you do in anything, the underlying basics are what everything else is built upon, so if you get this area right from the start you will be off to a great start in your drawing activities.

Starting off in sketching loosely and not knowing properly what you are going to do next is and sometimes can be a daunting task, but if you work with what you imagine you want on the paper and begin to draw lines and shapes, like in the diagram below you will begin to start at the basic level of idea creation.

Any type of drawing is an evolution of one pencil mark to the next, your scribbles have to make that leap to look like something you meant to draw and you will develop further, imagine your beginning drawing as a sculpture that you are shaping and creating by adding lines of gradual progression.

No piece of art that starts out is perfect and is going to remain perfect, it all depends on what path you take in your drawing, you yourself decide what your drawing will end up looking like, so you want to build up some good creative steam by brainstorming ideas and sketches together on the page, maybe draw lots of seperate ideas on a piece of A3 paper and see what you can come up with, I do this quite often and it works quite well.

And I'm talking about parts of faces and heads and arms, then that will be followed by weapons, armour and other ideas all bouncing off one another on the paper.

See the examples below

Monsters and creatures are only limited by your own imagination, so really go for it here as this should all be fun or you won't be here reading all this, right!??

See the thumbnails below and see examples of some creatures and monsters I created in under an hour of quick sketching madness, see how they all look different.

When drawing creatures and other types of monsters try to over exaggerate almost everything as this can work to your advantage and you can achieve some good results this way.

There are currently a wide variety of monsters and mythical creatures to get your inspiration from, obviously some of the best remembered are the ones in film as they are creatively realised to be realistic and invoke some reaction from the viewer and it's this that you need to capture and add to your own monster drawings.

Ancient greek myths also translate many a good monster or beast for you to be inspired by, again in film I draw alot of inspiration from old classics such as Jason And The Argonauts, Clash Of The Titans, I myself use to love the old Sinbad films and the work of Ray Harryhausen and his stop motion animation that really was before the digital age of CGI.

Some of the best monsters that are now household names are:

• Dracula/Vampires
• Werewolves
• Mummies/Zombies
• Dragons
• Frankenstein
• Aliens
• Predator

Those are just some examples of creatures and monsters that are well recognized in films and it's these areas that create more imagination for the artist to explore in his or her work.

Thinking of fantasy worlds and the settings of fantasy worlds you can come up with some great ideas, make a list of all of your favourite fantasy world creatures and elements that you like, these can be sorted into a quick list of words and phrases like wizard, castles of death,army of darkness etc.

This helps you generate ideas on top of your pencil sketches, but don't feel restricted to just this idea of creating new ideas, try to keep your eyes and ears open to the world as this is a source of inspiration all the time for artists as they create ideas based on reality situations and settings.