Create Your Own Angel Drawing!

Angels have been with us since forever. For that reason, an angel drawing is a form of expressing what we believe about these holy messengers. Follow along in this lesson on how to draw angels so you can make your own!

Depending on your source, angels can manifest themselves into specific forms. The most common accepted form is of a human being with wings, a halo, and clothed in loose white cloth.

How you want to elaborate on this particular genre is up to you. What I want to illustrate is that an angel drawing is a subject that allows you be just creative.

For this lesson, I am planning on a feminine figure. However, you can do a masculine figure if you wish. The type of cloth is entire up to you as well as any other personal preferences.

As well, depending on the class and type, there may be instances of multiple pairs of wings or eyes. You do what is interesting for you!

1. Gesture drawing and form

Like all drawings, start your angel drawing with a good gesture sketch on a separate layer in you digital canvas.

The point of this step is to get things ready with proportions and specific details. I have opted for just a single pair of oversized wings. You can make it smaller if you so wish.

I've also included gesture sketches of the cloth dress I am planning. This will help me get a blurry image of what I want to do and how the clothing will fit on the body.

Keep in mind that this is just a rough gesture sketch of proportions. As you continue to add more details in, you will discover that the proportions may deviate from this sketch just slightly.

This is normal since you are experimenting with a lot of different possible poses to try out.

2. Adding details

Here is where you start adding details to your composition. You have a few choices in this one that involves altering your canvas size.

You can change the canvas size to a larger format before you work on the details or do it midway when you discover that some details are hard to paint on a smaller canvas.

You should being drawing details of the head. That way, you will know just how much space you need to work with. Not only that, you are setting up the basic measuring unit for your entire composition using the head.

Now is also the time to think about your primary light source direction.

As you continue to refine your initial gesture sketch, make sure to start looking at lighting and shadows from the key light.

Switch to a larger brush and begin keying in some shadow elements that will be used later to help you determine how the light will hit your angel.

3. Smudging and repainting

Now that you have the primary details done, your next step is to organize how you want to start painting and refining those details.

This is a chance to divide your compositions into different layers. Personally, I am working with just two layers. That is, I duplicated my sketch and deleted the character on one layer while deleting the wings on the other layer.

That way, the wings and the angel are separate from one another.

You may decide to split up your characters even further by having one layer for her body and one layer for her clothing. Do what is best for your work flow of your angel drawing.

As you start painting in the details, the smudge tool will help you out the most here. For soft parts, just smudge as normal. However, for details like the wings, I opted to use the smudge tool with 100% opacity.

Doing so will violently pull the colors in the direction of where I am drawing. This way, you will get good definition on each feathered layers of the wings. You can do this with the clothing as well.

Remember to switch back to your digital art brush if you need to glaze over a particular section for signifying light and shadows.

Use a smaller brush if you need to add in additional details like cloth wrinkles, hair strands, feathers, and musculature. Smudge it into place if necessary.

4. Final details

Depending on how you have painted and smudged your angel layers, you will need to patch up any unnecessary 'holes' in your angel.

What you can do to fill out those holes is to create a layer underneath your angel layer and then paint it with a strong white color using the brush at 100% opacity.

From there, merge your angel layers with this extra layer. This will guarantee that the transparency of your angel shape will be at 100% all around.

Remember, I had two layers: one for the character and one for the wings. I will continue to keep both of these layers separate as I make sure that there are no holes in both these layers.

Once you have confirmed that your objects have no holes in it, preserve the transparency of these layers. You will be glazing over the entire angel with where the light source will hit.

Switch to different layers if you have multiple sections of the angel.

You can also choose to do a background if you wish by starting a layer right underneath your angel. Start grouping up your angel into a folder so you can keep track of all the layers.

Once you are done with your background, do one final over paint on a new layer. This layer should be positioned at the very top. You will use this layer to link any color discrepancies with the background and your angel.

When you're dong, give yourself a pat on the back as you have just finished an angel drawing in your digital art program!

I hope you enjoy this simple lesson on how to draw an angel and look forward to your drawing submission on this website!

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