How To Draw A Fairy

Drawing a fairy is a magical thing, from when I was a kid I would see the fantasy art paintings of many great fantasy artists of fairies and this was inspiring for me, of course there was old fashioned fairies dressed in the long dresses of the time which was fine, but I always tried to concentrate on the fairies face and then the gestures of the fairy in flight.

Of course as a child I leaned more towards drawing monsters and dragons and sword wielding warriors, but occasionally I like venturing into drawing something unexpected and something that my mum might just like for a change, of course now I'm in my 30s and no longer live with my mum, but I've decided to try my hand at drawing different things and this is it, a fairy.

Typically when I start to draw a fairy I often need a few quick sketch attempts to get the figure right and to make it look at least like a fairy. I like drawing my fairies with long curly hair and almost child like, because when I draw and draw a women's figure I tend to make the boobs too large and then the bum looks like a ducks arse, so I found that if I tone it down the best fairies emerge on the paper.

The following photo slides is the Fairy I have had a go at drawing, what I did to get these sketches was to draw the complete fairy you see right at the end and then back track using my trusty lightbox to break down the parts of drawing a fairy, and the first sketch starts off with a very basic figure sketch that doesn't have to look perfect, it is more about deciding on a pose or a figure positioning.

The second sketch is about developing the figure more and seeing what she might be wearing, obviously a dress of some sort, but I've marked in the hems of the dress for some kind of floral design, almost like flowers have been sown on her dress.

The third sketch, I pretty much refined all the details and finished the figure and added the long curly hair which was always a way in which I see fairies when I think of drawing them now and you can see I started to draw the flower designs at the hems of the dress and arms and neck line too.

The fourth sketch is obviously the final inked drawing were I've added some extra details to the fairy such as eyes and more details on the curly hair and of course the wings which are minimal really, because this fairy drawing I would like to add to it later by testing out some experimental filters on the wings and the texture of the fairies dress using Photoshop.

So try and take what you see from the drawing process and apply it to your own fairy drawings, drawing fairies is cool again, even though I still like to draw horror stuff..