Ryan Maloney draws a wild horse playing flag football in Procreate, showing his full workflow from rough sketches to colored final art. He sketches 3-5 iterations before committing to clean lines, uses photo references without tracing, and emphasizes 1% daily improvement over perfection. He thickens outer lines for weight, adds signature dot shading, then colors on a duplicated ink layer.
Chapters
In this video, I'm going to be drawing a horse playing football. I'm following my handy checklist here to design or to keep track of all the characters that I'm drawing for this series. This is going to be for a t-shirt or clothing line. You might see the name in here, but I'm not going to announce it until the product is out there on the market. So first thing I'm going to do is duplicate one of my canvases that I already have set up. Just have the DPI in there is 300 and the canvas size is good to go. So I don't want to recreate the wheel. I'm going to pinch all these layers together if I can get it. It takes me a while sometimes. There, I got it. And I'm cleaning off the layers and I'm working on the concept sketch. So all these characters are going to be wild animal-themed characters playing a sport. You saw the categories in my checklist. This one is going to be a horse running with a football. I'm using the Studio Pen in Procreate on the iPad. Now, this sketch came together pretty quickly, but usually it takes me 3 to 5 tries to get it right. I never dive into perfect— try to get those perfect lines right away. I'll always start off with a rough sketch and then do another rough sketch finding my lines on top of that and sort of work my way up until I'm ready for those clean studio lines. Here I'm adding a little structure and dimension to the snout. I'm always looking to improve the depth of my drawings and structure. You can sort of fall into habits and keep recreating the same drawing over and over. So I'm always asking myself, what can I improve? What can I try a little bit differently every drawing? Not too much, just by about 1% per drawing. I'm constantly referencing photos in Google. I don't want to trace or make it exactly like a photo, but I'll bounce back and forth between Google and try to memorize it and then go over and draw it. And actually not getting it right or not getting it— not making it a perfect reference will sometimes create an interesting drawing. If you haven't yet, follow me on Instagram. @RYMALONEY and I'm on TikTok. I do shorter drawing videos, some videos showing where I make my graphic novels, music videos, and my TikTok handle is @maloneyart. M-A-L-O-N-E-Y-A-R-T. So right now I'm on my third sketch layer, still working up to get that confidence to do the smooth lines. I'm starting to see, you know, the character's personality and things I'm really going to focus on. I always do big smiles. I feel like a good look for a boys brand is a big smile with eyebrows scrunched down. So a lot of these characters are going to have that same look. It gives them a similar personality. So this is going to be a flag football player, not a— not like a professional football player with pads on. Now I'm diving into my smooth studio lines. Studio pen lines. Sorry. There you saw that I drew through the line to get a smooth line. I didn't draw, stop, and then draw another angle of the line. I drew through it and then erased it. That's one technique I do to, to get these really smooth lines. Although I'm constantly chasing smooth lines, I don't think mine are perfect by any means. And actually, one thing to give you confidence if you're not getting the perfect line, go and analyze your favorite artists with really smooth lines. And you'll see when you really zoom in, they're not perfect at all. So, I mean, there are artists out there that have them, they get those super, super smooth lines that take their time in Illustrator and vectorize everything and turn all corners with a pen tool. But to me, I'm all about speed and producing a lot of stuff. So the Studio Pen in Procreate is, is amazing to me. When I sit down to do these drawings, I really don't have much of an idea of what I'm going to draw. I, I like to say that I just let my pen hit the page and start drawing. I find that if I sit down at the same time every single day without missing a day, everything improves. Your ideas flow, your drawing flows, your skills improve. If you just push it 1% every single day, I really don't believe in the whole wait till the idea strikes and then start working. You gotta work every day at the same time and then the ideas come to you. If you're looking to do a lot of drawings at once, sort of in this series, I'm doing all these sporting animal characters. It really helps to create, even if it's a fake brand name, come up with a brand name that pulls all these characters together and it'll help you start to visualize other types of characters that you can do in that series. Even if you don't turn it into anything, it still gives you a lot of volume in, in a certain series that you can share on your website or on your social and get a lot of attention through volume. And through quantity rather than one perfect drawing. I'd rather— I'd rather make 100 really good drawings than 3 absolutely perfect drawings. I always add these little chips to the teeth, especially for this series. I think it gives it a little extra character. So these are my studio lines. Before I color. I'm going to go around and make the outside of the lines, the bottom of the shapes. I'm going to make them a little bit thicker. This will add some volume and energy throughout the drawing. There's little details you can see like these shading lines, and I'll draw a line and then dot it out. These are sort of just, I wouldn't say my signature style, but little elements I like to add to make these different, to make them a little bit more wild. You know, people are always trying to make the perfect line, but I put these dots in here to sort of remind myself that these things Don't need to be perfect. Before I do my color, I like to go in and add these shadows and add as many details as I can without overdoing it. You'll see me recording my TikTok videos. I just do little highlights of the drawings with my phone. So for the color, I'm always duplicating my inked line layer, and then the layer below that is where I drop all my colors. And in Procreate, you can just drag and drop colors, which is huge time-saving feature. Starting to add some darker colors, but I'm also going to go in and create shadows using a new layer, black color, and then turn down that opacity. Enjoy the reveal. Thanks for watching.
