Pistol Drawing Process. One of 'em at least.

I have a process I use to draw weapons for production.

This particular project started as just a fun side practice thing. I had all these silly margin squiggle sketches that I had compiled from various notebooks over the years and I thought it would be fun to do something constructive with them.

This is a real world AR pistol that I chose as having good hand placement. I used this to help unify the scale of the drawings.

This sad little thing was the first step, getting my squiggle up to the right size, doing what i need to scale and proportion it so that it fits my format. Looks silly now I know.

I've worked with real world mechanical parts my whole life, and I use that to transition from squiggle to something that could actually be built in 3d. Also, I love old science fiction, so this has distinct retro feel already.

I'm using layers here to my advantage. I've masked this off so that i can see the shape of the weapon more clearly, but also so that I have a masked area to draw into.

Some quick shading as an under layer to my work. At every step of the way, if I see something that is confusing or doesn't feel like it will model well, I make tweaks. It's all layers.

Started blocking in some texture/color.

I often multiply the texture/color over the initial black and white shading pass to reinforce the shape feel.

To me, nothing says retro like an old school hammertone paint finish. Used for power tools and old electrical components.

And because I was going for RAY GUN, I wanted some element that would light up, so I grabbed some ref of glass insulators and modified it into position. I go back and forth between hand painting and modifying reference materials.

The end product gets a final highlight pass to help it pop a bit. Here I've added a lighted charge indicator, but I've also kept all the ref to pass to production. Thanks for looking y'all.