Drawing Attila the Hun

Today, I will be showing my process for drawing Attila the Hun — a drawing requested by a good friend of mine.

To start off with, I rendered out the contour lines for the figure. I decided to take the East-Asian approach to Attila, as there is a theory that the Huns originated somewhere in eastern Asia. Other than that, however, not much is known about the Huns. They were almost entirely erased by the Romans. Their language has been forgotten, save for a few words that seem similar to those in the Mongolian, Turkish, or the Altaic languages (which sucks for me, because I love linguistics and ancient languages). So, I had to take some liberties with this portrayal.

Again, I stress that this step is the most important when completing the image. No amount of shading is going to help save a bad base.

After laying out the basic framework for the drawing, the rest is actually fairly easy. In this step, I filled in the face. I wanted to get it done first, because it will end up being the focal point of the drawing.

I then finished the hair and started on the fluffy rim of his helm. Sorry about the white bar cutting through the hat — I think my scanner messed up. The hair was actually fairly easy to fill in. Though, I learned during the framing stage that the bangs had to remain high on his forehead. If I went lower with the hair, it would have looked like he had a woman’s haircut. It also helped to keep the “square” corners (the very edges above his ears) of his upper forehead revealed. Ultimately, I wish I had been able to make the hairs a bit thinner.

In this step, I completed the hat. The fluffy part of the hat was actually much easier than I thought it would be.  Other than that, the conical shape extending upward was fairly easy to fill in.

And then I moved down to the wrap of fabric around his neck, as well as the quilted pad of armor on his chest. Perhaps, by now, you’re seeing what I mean by the framing step being the most important; I haven’t done much in the following steps other than shade. That shading has been almost entirely reliant upon those lines I set up earlier. The only other thing that went into the shading was a basic understanding of how light tends to illuminate the face — those triangular regions of lighting falling from the upper cheeks to around the nose, for instance.

I also added a bit of stubble.

Finally, I filled in the shoulders with fur. I was originally going to make this a wrinkled fabric, but realized that my shading more readily resembled fur. I liked the change and thus kept it. And that’s it. A few hours of drawing — most of it spent in the framing stage — and we have this. For the final image, I cleaned off those dots of material around the head and played a bit with the contrast.

That contrast bump makes it look a bit more like it does in real life — I’ve noticed that the scanner tends to brighten the images I draw. I think I might have pushed this contrast a bit too far in Sepulchre, though. I was more cautious with this image, though, and feel that my restraint paid off.

I hope to see you in the next post!

Not much of a conqueror, eh?
That looks a bit more like a knit cap.