Draw Jack Skellington – Halloween Special

If you prefer to read, here is the transcript:

Hello and welcome to a very special Halloween episode of Proko. My name is Stan Prokopenko and for this Halloween episode I decided to draw Jack Skellington. He’s very easy yet very fun to draw. So, let’s have some fun.

I’ll start by warming up with some sketches of various expressions. We can do a worried Jack Skellington. Or an angry Jack Skellington. The muscles around the brow ridge will pinch inward and down. And I’ll give him a bit of a snarl. Let’s try one more. I’ll make him happy this time.

and I’ll open the mouth a little to show some excitement.
add the teeth

Jacks got a really fancy bow tie, shaped like a bat with it’s wings out.

At first I thought the lines along his lips was stitching, but after looking at some closeups form the movie, I think it’s actually cracking, not stitching. The cracking on the lips is important to get his likeness. Without it he kinda looks like a simple smiley face.

Ok, so this one looks good.

His basic shape is a sphere, so he will be shaded like one. The core shadow will wrap around the sphere at the planes that are perpendicular to the light source. The eye socket pushes this core shadow out slightly, so I’ll make that adjustment.

I’ll shade in the shadows, starting with the eye sockets. And then the shadow on the side of the head, neck, and inside the mouth.

I think it’d be better to add some light on the top of his bottom lips to make it more clear that his mouth is open.

He’s facing slightly to the left. So in order to add some thickness to the bone between the eye sockets, I need to show a side plane on the left side. So, I’ll outline the actual holes, and fill them in black.

Clean up the nose and darken the mouth.

I still need to add some value to the bow tie, which is stripped.

Clean up the core shadow
and just for fun lets add some rim light from the right side

Add some more details with halftone values. I think about the planes which face directly at the light, and as they turn away, I’ll gradate towards a halftone.

Add some light planes on the indentations of the cracking.

Finally I’ll clean up some edges and add details.

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