After reviewing The Art of Brave book last week, several of the sketches and artwork have been stuck in my mind ever since. One of those sketches that I wasn’t able to stop thinking about (by the amazing Pixar artist Matt Nolte) was of one of the bear cubs. The sketch Matt did gave the cub so much life and was so beautifully sketched that I wanted to try and recreate it for my own collection – just because!
For my last few sketches I used the Paper app for iPad, but this time I wanted to get more of a true pencil look, so I sketched this one up with the amazing iPad app called Sketchbook Pro which I also used to create this digital workup of Wall-E. Also, for all of my iPad sketches, I have used the Wacom Bamboo Stylus.
As with other art, sometimes you get it down right away and other times you have to look back at what you started and say, “that isn’t so good”. That happened to me in this sketch, I drew the bear on the left first, but by the time I had finished the middle and right-hand bear, the head of the leftmost bear wasn’t quite right. So, I did the scary thing and erased the head of the bear and hoped I could re-draw it at least as good as the previous time. Whew, it turned out better than before — I had a blast creating it, and thanks again to Matt Nolte for the inspiration.
You can see that in Matt’s original sketch he has a lot more pencil smudging to give the bears more of their darker tone. I chose to not do as many of the smudges because although you can recreate this look using Sketchbook Pro, I just don’t think it looks as good as with an actual pencil. Obviously, you can also see other differences between the drawings since I wasn’t attempting to trace the drawing – I just wanted to recreate it, but give it some of my own flair.
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If you’d like to see more amazing sketches like this, be sure to get The Art of Brave book – it’s jammed full of this amazing art.
