How to Draw Tattoo style Mushrooms and crystals from scratch

1. Mushrooms and Crystals Intro: In this course, I will show you how to draw a mushroom with crystals from scratch without needing references. I will show you each step to take to create your own mushroom and crystal design. 2. Drawing the Mushroom: Before we get started, I would like to explain that you can draw your mushrooms in any shape or size. For the base, I draw an oval shape. It can be round, wobbly, or narrow. I draw another oval for where the stem will go and draw the mushroom head coming out from around the oval. Starting with the design, I'm drawing the main oval for the underside of the mushroom head. And the inner oval for where the mushroom's stem attaches. I then draw a basic curve for the mushroom head on top and draw the stem coming out from the sides of the inner oval. The stem should be slightly thinner where it connects to the mushroom and thicker at the base. You can curve it like I did, or keep it straight depending on the style you want to achieve. For this design, I'm adding a smaller mushroom coming out from behind the big one. Once you are done adding the main shapes, you can alter them to make them more unique. I'm adding wobbles to the main oval so it looks more organic and also adding some dents to the side of the mushroom heads to give them a different shape. Here you can also decide if you want to straighten the stem or curve it more. It's all up to personal preference. Once you are happy, you can add the skirt to the stem. The skirt will taper out a bit from the stem and is a part that curves around the mushroom stem. I'm drawing a curve at the bottom and drawing lines to show that it's going around the back of the stem. Now you can also adjust the shape to make it more organic by adding some waves or tears in the skirt. I also draw some directional lines up to show the texture of the skirt. To draw the gills of the mushroom, draw curved lines coming from the stem going to the edge. You can keep the lines smooth or add some texture to these lines. I will be adding some bumps to each to stylize it. Now we can draw a rim around the mushroom edge, which will also help as a guide for the edge highlight. When we get to shading. I prefer drawing small flat ovals for the spots on the mushroom cap. This is optional because a lot of mushrooms don't have spots. I also tried to draw these spots organic and not perfectly round, with some being bigger and some smaller. I'm adding some lines following the direction of the stem to add texture and help as guides for shading. 3. Drawing the Crystals: The best way to draw crystals is to understand the shapes. For the top point of the crystal, I try to use these three shapes. A triangle which has three edges, a kite which has four edges, and a pentagon which has five edges. When trying to figure out where to place the edges for the body of the crystals; any of the top shapes that have corners pointing down will have a line going down making an edge, as well as the sides of the crystal. When planning the crystals, sketch them in where you want them and approximate thickness. I'm using the crystals to frame the mushrooms, drawing one on each side with one in the middle. Now, you can add the shapes for the top of the crystal. For the first one, I'm starting with a kite shape and connecting two triangle shapes to it on each side. Try add variance to the shapes when drawing, making some thicker, thinner or wider, so they aren't too symmetrical. When you are done drawing the top of the crystals, you can add the edges for the body. Once the main crystals are in place, you can add more to the foreground and background of the design. For this design, I added one shorter one in the front and another filling more space in the back. I also added a small one to the side of the one crystal for variance. Once you are done placing all the crystals, you can draw the bottom connecting some of the corners to each other with straight lines. You will have to mess around a bit here to see what will work best. Once you are done with the crystals, you can add leaves, grass, or more mushrooms to fill up some spaces in the background as needed. When you are happy with this design, you can draw the final lines in with a marker or darker pencil. In this design, I'm going over most of the lines except for the texture and highlight guidelines. 4. Shading: We can now start shading. I start by choosing where the light spot is going to be on the mushroom cap so I can start shading the darker areas around it. I'm using the paper stump to smudge the pencil for smoother shading. I'm then adding a darker layer closer to the edges. Moving on to the mushroom gills, I'm shading darker beneath each line, fading it downward. To add details to the skirt, you can extend some of the lines upward or add some finer lines in-between. There will also be a shadow beneath it to show it's hanging above the stem. I add a small shadow along the sides of the stem. One side will be darker than the other depending on where you want the light source to be. There will also be more shadows at the base of the stem behind the crystals. When shading the stem, I'm following the directional lines I've made earlier to make ridges, to give it some texture. But this is optional. When shading the crystals, I like making the outer edges a bit darker. I add a gradient shadow to each facet. To shade the facets; I choose an edge or corner that will be the dark area and fade it to the light area. Some facets can be darker than others and the gradient can start on varying edges. To let the design breathe, I leave a highlight on some of the edges. 5. Highlights and Contrast: The final step that makes a big difference is adding some highlights and contrast to the design. I erase some lines on the crystals to indicate light reflections. This will help the image look less flat. After that, I go in and darken some shadows with a darker pencil. Here you will darken parts that are too similar to give the image some contrast and depth. And that's how I draw mushrooms and crystals from scratch. I hope this video helped you. Please share your drawings with us so we can see how you did.