Hello everyone! Nabaa here from @whimsical.doodles with a little penguin illustration!

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll notice I don’t do a lot of character drawings (if any, haha!) so this was a fun new learning experience for me too! I quite like how it turned out so I’d say it’s pretty beginner-friendly! 

Materials needed: 

• Archer and Olive Sketchbook or A5 Dotted Journal
• Gouache Paints
• Gelly Roll Pens 
• White Gelly Roll Pen
• Black pen
• Pencil and Eraser

The first thing you want to do is sketch on your penguin using a pencil. To do this, check out how I draw penguins using this printable here!

Once you’ve pencilled on your drawing, start colouring in the background! You can do this any way you’d like - watercolour, pencils, markers, or crayons even! The main bit is to simply have fun while doing it!

I used gouache here since I am still new to the medium and I’m always looking for different ways to try it out.

For this illustration, we’re going to use three shades of blue. I started with the lightest and painted around my penguin outline and filled in about ⅓ of the page. While the paint is still wet, you want to add on your second shade above it. 

Using a CLEAN wet brush, slowly start blending your 2 colours together. Keep blending until you’re happy with how it looks. 

Repeat with your third and final colour. Paint and blend until it forms a nice gradient background like the image below:

P.S. go check out @hayleyremdeart’s Instagram page. She has so many videos showing how she blends Gouache colours together!

Next, start outlining your penguin. Go over the body as well as the arms, before filling in the entire body area. 

Colour in the nose using yellow and add two oval eyes!

With it being winter and all, I decided to give our little penguin some cozy winter accessories! I drew on a winter hat and a little scarf. To colour these in, I used the Sakura Gelly rolls - they’re super vibrant and easy to control! I used the white Gelly Roll for the little details.

Note - I’d suggest drawing on your accessories such as the hat and scarf BEFORE colouring in the penguin. This way you don’t have to colour over any black areas as I did. 

To finish off the illustration, I used faux lettering to write “hello winter”. You could, of course, write anything you’d like or simply move onto the final step!

To do the faux lettering, check out the tutorial by Adrienne from @studio80design here.

And finally, add in some snowflakes! I drew a few large flakes while drawing on smaller specks in the background. If you'd like to learn how to draw snowflakes, here's a great tutorial!

And there you go! As always, if you recreate this, tag me @whimsical.doodles because I would absolutely love to see!