Tag: Gamora

Exploring Shadows and Highlights in a Side View Portrait

Side view sketch drawing by Ralph Contreras

Quick Sketch with a Focus on Light and Dark

Here’s my latest sketchbook entry. I decided to draw a side-view portrait. I found a photo of Zoe Saldaña in her iconic Gamora makeup as my reference, although I didn’t focus too much on capturing her likeness or the details of the character. Instead, I wanted to experiment with shadows and highlights, emphasizing the play of light on the subject matter.

For this sketch, I took a different approach by incorporating more dark shading than I typically do. I’ve had success with using shadows in some of my recent drawings. So I wanted to create go deeper and bring out the contrast between the light and dark areas. It was a quick drawing session, lasting about 5 minutes, I used a 0.7 HB Pentel mechanical pencil for the drawing.

Although the resemblance to Zoe Saldaña or Gamora may not be immediately recognizable, I’m very happy with how the overall sketch drawing turned out. It served as a valuable exercise in exploring different shading techniques and capturing the subject with shadows.

Guardians of the Galaxy Art: Gamora Color Pencil Head Sketch

Gamora Color Pencil Drawing by Ralph Contreras

Color Pencil Sketch Portrait of Gamora

As a fan of Marvel Comics, I was thrilled when Guardians of the Galaxy hit the big screen and became a huge success. Gamora, one of the members of the Guardians, has become an even more well-known and popular character because of the movie.

So, for fun this afternoon, I decided to do a colored pencil head sketch drawing of her. I used Prisma color pencils and grid paper to help me keep my proportions accurate. By overlaying different tones of green, I was able to add variation to the shadows and highlights, while using yellow around the eyes to make her more accurate to the comic book version. Even with the grids, the eyes turned out a little crooked, but I’m still happy with the end result.