How to Draw a Grim Reaper

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com, and I'm going to teach you how to draw the Grim Reaper. Okay, there are lots of Grim Reapers and lots of styles, but what we're going to do, kind of your classic here, we're going to show a bit of the skull, but at the end I'll show you how to avoid that if you want to. A good way to do it is to get a kind of a stooped pose because you want him to look kind of sickly, unless you want a tall, ominous looking Grim Reaper, you can have a more straight spine. We're going to have him pointing at us just to really scare us. I'm just going to do an impression of hands now, we're going to do the details in a minute. You don't have to detail the body very much because it's going to be covered in a robe. So, let's get - our hood is going to cover half his face in this case. Now a good way to get a nice, creepy look is to tatter the edges, so... hoods are a little tricky, they come up to the front. Then we're going to do this angled view of a skull. Now with this you want to make the eyes kind of evil looking because it's the Grim Reaper, he's kind of scary, and even though that's not natural in a skull, it looks cool on a Grim Reaper. And got the skull in there, and the rest of this is pretty straightforward. You want to make the clothes hanging loosely on this body of death. You have the wide cuff to the sleeve, and the ragged edges, let's get where this is. Now the trick with drawing bony hands, it'll be less of it in this one because he's holding something...Just to remember that the thumb unlike the other fingers starts at the base of the hand, at the wrist. We'll make it circling over him since we're running out of paper. Good creepiness is to make it all crooked. Uneven...and here we have our foreshortened hand, our arm coming at us. We'll do the - see where the thumb comes from the wrist, whereas the others have the bones along the back of the hand first and then the actual fingers. And this is all foreshortened so just use little curves like that for all the bones, and the point... Points of the fingers on bones are very sharp, so, it's bad, and then, also the rest is just in a robe, make it flowing, spread out, more tatters, and then I said at the end I would show you how to do - how to avoid the head if you want to, and that is to fill it with darkness. And it still has the same effect. And that's your basic tutorial on how to draw the Grim Reaper."