In this instructional video Ryan Maloney walks viewers through drawing the character Gobblechuck from start to finish. He begins by emphasizing the importance of underlying structure—using simple shapes like circles, ovals, and lines—to create a recognizable blueprint before adding any detail. Maloney then explains how the way you hold the pencil and move your arm, shoulder, wrist, and fingers influences the looseness or precision of the sketch, recommending big shoulder‑driven strokes for initial forms and wrist‑driven strokes for finer work. He demonstrates step‑by‑step placement of the head, body, pads, feathers, facial guidelines, beak (inspired by classic Ninja Turtle designs), jersey, hockey stick, gloves, helmet, and skates, constantly alternating between adding structural anchors and inserting small, fun details (eyebrows, pupils, chipped teeth, feather texture, tape on the stick). Throughout, he encourages experimentation, repeated practice, and personalizing elements such as eyebrow shape or pupil placement to give the character personality. The video concludes with a recap of the hand‑movement hierarchy, the shape‑first workflow, and a reminder to sign the finished drawing, positioning the tutorial as both a technical guide and a motivational push for artists to develop their own style through structured practice.
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Welcome to Drawing Seems Wild. Today we're going to be drawing Gobblechuck. Grab something to draw with. I'm using pencils and paper and let's get started. Before we dive in, let's look at the character and talk about structure. Every drawing has structure underneath, which is shapes combined together that lay the foundation for the drawing. Now, I'm sure you're incredibly impatient like me and you want a perfect drawing right now, but if you learn how to put shapes and structures together, it's gonna lay the blueprint for a much better drawing that is instantly recognizable by anybody that looks at it. Okay, sorry, I lied. I know I keep saying we're gonna jump right into this drawing, but there's one more thing I need to talk about that's also incredibly boring, is the way you hold your pen and you move your hand, your arm, and your wrist. When I first start out drawing, I use big swooping motions and I lock my wrist. I don't bend my wrist to create detail. I'm using sweeping motions in my shoulder and my hand. This allows me to be relaxed and just lay down shapes without worrying about things being too perfect. Okay, finally we are ready to begin drawing. So remember, this is just like practice. You can mess up. It's about repetition and getting a little bit better every single time. So let's draw some structure points. The first thing I'm going to do is draw a circle on my page. This is going to be Gobblechuck's head. Now the bottom of his body is sort of a straight line across, maybe with a little bit of an arc. Now let's draw the big arc of his feathers in the back behind his head. So notice how this structure, you can almost start to see the character in place. If we just dove right in and started drawing the eyes, you wouldn't really know what was going on. And his body, that's another simple circle. And his pads, they're sort of like tilted ovals. His pads are made of bread, Thanksgiving bread, and you can just draw them in by drawing a very thin oval tilted in. Now we're getting into a little bit more of a detail, so I'm going to anchor my hand and I'm going to use a little bit more of my wrist and my fingers to draw Gobblechuck's wings. Now, here's some structure points on the face. I'm going to keep it simple for this video. There are a lot of people that go into tons of detail on YouTube about the structure of a face, but I always draw a circle and I draw a vertical line through it and a horizontal line through it. So we sort of have a plus sign in the middle of it. Now, Gobblechuck's mouth is sort of a sideways oval, but I'm going to arc the top and the bottom. Now let's put in the jersey lines. This is, this is going to mark where we start to see Gobblechuck's wings. Notice how I'm not really putting too many details in here. I'm just putting in circles, shapes, anything that can give me an idea of where the details are going to go. When you build the structure this way, it'll give your character a lot more personality when it has the structure underneath, and then you can really go wild with the details on top of it. So the hockey stick is, is going to be like a, a rotated L, and then we're just going to extend the lines to give it some thickness. So just think of it like you're drawing a really thick L at the bottom of his pads. Now his hand is going to be grabbing the stick, and this is where there's a little bit more detail. So you're gonna notice I lock my hand in with the bottom of my palm, and then I'm using my fingers and my wrist to draw more precise lines. Along the way of drawing the structure, I like to treat myself and let myself put in small details that I probably shouldn't jump ahead to, but they make the process a lot more fun for me. And when I see those details come into place, it makes me want to build up more structure to get some more details. Once you have the structure in place, you can start to pick the points of the drawing that you either want to draw the most or you want to draw the least. I really wanted to draw the beak. Now the shape of this beak is inspired by the original Ninja Turtles from a long time ago, the original character designs. I used to draw the snouts of the Ninja Turtles when I was a kid and always remember the arcs of their cheek and the arcs of their mouths and it it makes their way into my drawings today. And as you go, these structure lines can start to be erased to make way for your little details. So now I'm working on dropping in the eye, which is a— it's basically a full circle, but you're not going to see it because it's behind the cheeks. You could draw a full circle in like a light sketched line, but I've done this so many times, I know where it falls. If you want to do a light sketch line, that's fine, and then you can erase the bottom part of it. Eyelids and eyebrows and the pupils add so much personality to drawings. When I place my pupils in, notice that I place them a little bit more inside of the face than outside. They're not directly center. So it almost looks like, you know, they could be cross-eyed if they went in any more. I find that this gives the characters a wild sort of crazy kooky look. So figure out a place you want to place your pupils. That can give your drawing a lot of personality and character. This is a very complicated video and drawing, so at this point it's okay to feel totally lost. What you can do is make this drawing all your own. You have the structure points down. Now it's up to you to just experiment where all these pieces go. Because as I get into the details, these are things that I've practiced for years and years. So if you're brand new to this, you may want to take some time and create 10 of these drawings and just play around with different eyebrow shapes or different pupil placements or mouth shapes. Here's a look at how I do my eyebrows. Notice that I have the eyebrow shape overlapping the eyelids. So this gives your drawing a little bit more personality rather than drawing simple arcs for the eyebrows. When I'm drawing, the thoughts that are going in my head, I'm envisioning that this character is alive standing in the room with me and I'm looking at all the details in his face. So I'm thinking, how would the eyebrow wrap around his eye? How would the helmet fit on his head? What angle is the helmet at? What parts of the helmet would I see if he's looking up or looking down? So for the helmet, I'm going to draw an arc at the top of the head and I'm going to put a little nub at the top, sort of like a hockey helmet, as the ridges that run from the front to the back. Gobblechuck's teeth come from the idea that he's been taking shots on goal for years, so his teeth are gonna be all knocked out and completely jagged. So before you even make the line to draw your teeth, you can think about the life of that character, what they've been through, and then draw that element based on, on what your— some of those thoughts are. I love putting chips in teeth. That's one of the things I'm doing with all the Seems Wild characters is making their teeth look worn out like crazy chomping animals. Let's draw his gobbler. This you can't get wrong either. I'm not even looking at a reference photo for it. So you can either do a big loop or you can do 3 dangly gobblers, whatever works best for you. Now I'm starting to delete some— I said delete like I'm on a computer. I'm starting to erase some sketch lines to make way for the details. And it also lets me see the shapes that pop out, like his bread pads. So I'm going to put the logo of his jersey in here. I'm going to put some holes in his glove. I'm going to draw the lines on his jersey. Now we're getting into the details of the feathers. When— whenever there's feathers or fur, you can just put little lines that imply what, what that texture is. In Gobblechuck's arms, they're not completely feathered out, but I can just put a few swooping lines to let you know that there's probably some big fluffy feathers that are probably worn out and been hit with too many hockey pucks. When it comes to the details, that's just about having fun and thinking about what would make somebody smile. I always find that when people look at my drawings, they always point out the little details, but it takes the structure and it takes a very clear drawing to get to the point where somebody can look at your drawing and sort of get lost and notice all the details. Now I'm going to go in and add some tape on the hockey stick. These are just a few simple lines and then one jagged edge where the tape would connect. I'm making up where the holes in the helmet go. This is sort of my own helmet, so I'm not referencing any photos, and this is going to be custom to Gobblechuck. I'm going to draw some tall rectangles for the ice skate shapes. Or for the blades on the ice skating— for the blades on the ice skates. And then these lines are going to go backwards in space. They're going to have some perspective on them so it looks like they have some depth. The feathers are going to have several layers. Both with a similar shape, that half oval with an arc on the bottom. And I'm going to divide up each layer of the feathers to have their own vertical feathers that are stretching out. And the front layer of feathers, I'm going to do these half circles around the top of each feather to separate them from the back layer of feathers. I'm going in and adding some details to the outside of the feathers, the edges. And the fun part is putting the holes in the feathers. This is where all the hockey pucks were shot through. See, I'm using smaller motions with my fingers and my wrists instead of the big swooping motions that we did at the beginning of the video. All these details are just icing on the cake. I love this part of the drawing. You You worked for it building up the structure, so now it's just time to have fun. And you'll know when a drawing is done. You'll sort of have a gut feeling that you've pushed a drawing as far as it can go and it's time to move on to the next phase or onto a new drawing. But sometimes the thing that sets a good drawing apart from another is the extra detail and time that you put into it. So push it as far as you can take it. As I'm approaching the end of this drawing, I just want to recap what we learned in this video. At the beginning, we talked about how to hold the pencil, how to start off with sketch lines using your shoulder and your elbow, and then moving into— when you move into more detail, using your wrist and your fingers to move the pencil. And remember, when you start off with a drawing, start off with simple shapes and sketch lines and then build up your detail on top of that. It's the combination of the structure underneath and the details that are going to give your character a ton of personality. So I'm all done with this drawing. Once you're done, make sure you sign it. You can give it away to somebody. And thanks a lot for watching Drawing Seems Wild. Make sure you check out the other 5 videos where I draw characters from the other sports. Wait.
