How to draw a Japanese Koi Fish (part 1)

hey guys i'm daggett welcome back to my channel and in today's video we're going to be covering a highly requested topic and this is the topic of koi fish now in particular we're not just covering koi fish i'm going to be showing you guys how to draw scales the wrap around the body and follow the curvature of the body of the koi fish so many people have asked me how do i draw scales that wrap around the body of a dragon a snake or a koi fish etc so in today's video i'm going to break down at least my method on how to draw the scales that wrap around the shape and curvature of the body to give it a fairly realistic look and you can use this as a template for how to draw koi fish of any style so if you want to draw something realistic near traditional or new school you can use this as a really nice base template for that and just build upon it with your own style so without further ado guys let's get to today's video let's jump straight into it grab your drawing supplies let's head over to the table and to the overhead okay guys we're back at the table and like i said today we're going to be covering the japanese koi fish i'm going to be showing you guys something that's going to be a little bit of a mix of traditional and near traditional sort of style this is just because there are so many different styles and ways to apply textures and you know design elements and details to your koi fish if you want to make it look traditional or if you want to make it look near traditional or realistic sort of thing um so it's easier for me to show you sort of a mix and just the base sort of template for how to do this this will be different to my other videos in the sense that we're not going to be lining this whole thing and shading and coloring this whole thing because it is a large design and there is a lot to go through but i'm just going to start with today and show you how to lay out the base elements and do the scales and then in a future video we can cover shading coloring and lining the koi fish so this is an example of the koi that we'll be drawing or at least a result of the sketch that we'll be doing so we'll be doing something along those lines and i'm basically just using an a3 sketch pad today it's just a cheap um i think it's a student brand sketch pad the other difference in today's video is i'll be using a regular lead pencil and this is just to get a thicker line on the page because it's an a3 page and i want you guys to be able to see everything as i do it i'm going to keep the camera up mostly at this shot until the details come in later on and so using a thicker lead just to lay down a bit of a heavier framework for you guys to see but feel free to use a mechanical pencil when you follow along and feel free to lay down your lines really lightly if you do intend on inking straight over the top of them so we're going to start off with the shape of the body and the shape of the head and it's important to lay all of these shapes out in the beginning so our head's going to be down here and the body's going to curve up that way like it did in the other design to draw our head shape in we're going to basically draw a little box and the box will be this sort of shape that will be the top of this box so essentially we have a longer line here and they taper down to this shorter edge here the same is true for the back so we come down like this and then we taper forward and we join the front like this so we create a little box shape we're going to add in a center line to this so just drawing a line directly down the center and then coming up the side of the head or the side of the box and across the top and we do that roughly at the center mark for the sides as well this will give us placement for our eye so directly on that line that we just just drew you can draw a circular or an oval sort of shape that'll give you a place for the eye at the very front of this box we're going to come off the front edge of it if you can see what this does is it gives us different planes of perspective so this is the top of the koi fish head this becomes the side of the head and this is the front of where the mouth will be so it actually gives you a different plane of view as opposed to just drawing like a circular shape for the head so in this front area of the box we're going to be drawing in the mouth shape and for the time being we're pretty much going to draw in almost like a diamond shape or a really wide diamond shape and that just gives us placement for our mouth and your center line can continue down and to the front of that mouth so it comes down the front of the box a little bit and then out towards the front of that mouth in terms of drawing in the body shape we're going to follow the shape of from the head up this way and the body will take a turn so we're going to come up this way and there's a bit of a curvature to it it's not a straight line because the koi fish it's not completely flat it has a spine to it so we come up when you reach this sort of point you're going to turn back this way and then come back that way to flick off for where the tail will end up to join up the body so that you have a bit of a better shape and so you get an idea of how it's going to look if you need to erase something coming from the bottom of our box here we can just come with a curved line that joins into that spinal line that we did like this and from the other side we're going to do a curved line that comes to about here and then a curved line that parallels this line like this so we're just following that same shape but with a bend here from this point here roughly you're going to draw in a curve and this will be the cut-off for where your tail is and then you can just draw in the lines for your tail so we can bring one line down like this bring this curve right up around and curve that in as well and that gives you a shape for your nice big tail in terms of drawing in the dorsal fin we'll probably come back about a quarter of the way on the body about this point and bring a line that comes like forward or a curved line that comes towards the right here like this there's a lot of different ways to do this dorsal fin as well this is just the way we're doing it in today's video and for the sake of this we'll just bring it back to the spine and around and back like that one thing you can do is bring this curve out a little bit more and you actually get a little bit more flow in your spine or in your dorsal fins so to show you that you bring that line further out than the body and then back in and then this spinal line you actually join up to there now it's really easy to see that if you erase these lines inside the dorsal fin it's really easy to see how that's constructed and how that follows the shape of the body it has a flow to it and the fin doesn't look stagnant like it's not just stuck onto the back of the fish it's actually got a little bit of shape and a bit of flow to it in terms of drawing in the fins we're going to come back probably i don't know this far from the head i'm not sure you know what measurement that is let's say an inch and a half from where our head is and we're going to draw in our main fins so drawing in little circles and then follow that shape around the body make sure you're using a curved line to follow that shape around the body and just draw yourself a little indication of where that fin will be and from that position you're basically going to come out back down and in so if you think of it as a triangle we've got one two three lines you're just curving this long line and then bringing that line back so it's almost like a stretched out curved triangle shape same goes for the other side the only thing is you'll see a little bit less of the fin on the other side if you notice here the fin is actually in line with the bottom of the body so if we line the top of the head up with the body here the fin is actually attached closer to the bottom of the body which means on this side of the fish the fins not going to be sticking out from the top of the fish it's also going to be connected to you know lower on the body in which case you see a little bit less of the fin to draw in the back fin uh well there's two of them but usually one of them is visible we're going to come in just behind where we drew our dorsal fin drawing a little circle and put in just a little indication of our fin shape like this so it's just a curved line out and it's basically the same shape as this but a lot smaller and you can do it a little bit smoother as well it has a little bit less expression to it it sort of just hangs out back there okay so that gives you a really really solid foundation for your koi fish the body shape is right the shape of the head has planes so it's not just a really flat looking image and there's some nice curvature to the body making it really easy to put in some nice background elements and that sort of thing we're going to go ahead and draw in the scales now in terms of doing this you can just continue on with your lead pencil that you were using for the rest of the sketch but to make things a little bit easier for you i'm going to be using two different colored pencils a red and a blue and i actually think this is a valuable way to practice doing the scales this is how i did them in the beginning and this creates a really easy thing to follow right because you're not trying to juggle all these different tiny elements and details all in the same color but using a few different colored pencils can really help you get this pattern down so the way that it works essentially is we're going to draw rings around the body and the rings that come around the body need to follow the contours of the shape so with the spine being at the top these rings are essentially going to start from the bottom of the body come up to the spine and then go back down towards the front and bottom of the body like this they start a little bit closer together and as they get to the spine they're going to widen a little bit so this gap here is a little bit smaller than the gap at the spine and you're basically going to continue that pattern all the way down the body just completely disregard the dorsal fin don't worry about it for now just continue our pattern down the body once you've drawn all of your blue lines in we're going to take a red pencil and this again is just for clarity sake you would obviously just do this in whatever color or medium that you feel comfortable and we're going to follow the line of the spine for our first row here so starting at the head we're going to do a line that's fairly close to our spine here probably a centimeter or so and it's going to very closely follow the shape of the spine around the body and about the same width on the other side of the spine just coming around and that's going to continue through and up the back of the spine here now we're going to use we're going to in our minds we're going to delete that line from the spine and we're going to use just the two red lines as reference to create our next sort of contour line it's going to be about the same width as those two red lines and it's going to follow the shape and wrap around the body like that coming down from there again in the same roughly the same width we can come around the body and then the bottom of the body of course will link into that also and on the other side we're going to do the same thing same width coming around the body obviously the bottom of the body we fit another one another row uh at the back here which is like this line here is the same line that we see at the top of the fish here okay so in terms of actually drawing in our scales this is just the you know laying the foundations for them in terms of drawing them in we're going to do a dot at the center of each box each and every single box that we've drawn there's going to be a dot in the center of it so starting on your spine you can draw a dot at the center of all of the boxes you can skip all of the ones in the dorsal fin it's not important and just draw these little dots in for the center of the box and you go to your next row and you do the exact same thing you go to the next row and you continue to do the exact same thing drawing a dot in the center of each of these boxes okay so once you've drawn all of the dots in your foundation work is finally finished and you can start actually drawing scales how exciting is that um i am going to zoom in so that you can see a couple of the scale patterns and then i'll zoom back out okay so essentially what we're doing to draw in the actual scales themselves is we're going to use the red lines and the black dots that we just drew in as reference all the blue lines were there for is to give us reference for where to put the black dots so now we don't really focus on the blue lines at all we're primarily focused on the red lines and the black dots more specifically where the red line intersects with the blue line so i guess we do reference them a little bit but it's more like corners of the box is what we're focusing on so we're going to start in this corner here and essentially come up to our dot with a curved line and then from that dot back down to the corner with a curved line and we're going to come up to the center again and back down to the corner up to the center again and back down to the corner and then in terms of the ones that are hidden behind the dorsal fin we have a center point so we just come from the corner to the center from the corner to the center and we basically can continue that way and that actually cuts out a little bit of the work which is nice as well um the fin the the row next to it you're going to do the same thing you're actually going to go ahead and do this along the entire body for every single box that is on the body you're going to draw in a scale which is a curved line from the corner of that box to the center and then back down to the opposite corner or not to the opposite corner to the adjacent corner now i'm gonna go ahead and finish this now but i'll show you uh how to link these up first so to link the scales up now we're gonna completely reverse or basically do the opposite of that process so instead of linking from corner to center to corner we're now going to link from center to corner and down to center and we're going to gulp the body and basically link all of those center points to a corner and then back to another center point and we'll continue to do that again for every single scale that's on the body until it's completely covered and you've basically done the scale so i'm going to go ahead and do that and then we can get into details on drawing the head and the fins so i finished off all the scales using the method that i was showing you and as you can see we have a really nice set of scales i don't know about you guys but this is probably my preferred way of doing scales even if i'm doing traditional work i still like to do these style of scales which can be considered more near traditional but at the end of the day in my opinion it makes the artwork look better uh something i never liked about a lot of traditional designs is the way that the scales stop at an edge so basically when the scales meet this edge here or the belly edge they would just abruptly cut off so with a lot of designs that i've seen the scales will just cut off at that edge they don't wrap around the body with this particular method the scales wrap the body all the way down to the tail and it's fairly consistent and uniform and they actually have flow to them you know in themselves like the scale shapes actually have flow in them uh which i really like in making the design look a little bit nicer okay so on to doing a little bit of the details here i'm going to start by showing you how to do one of the fins and then you're basically going to repeat that for all of the fin shapes on this body so but for both of the front fins the dorsal fin and our small fin here they're basically going to be the exact same thing and even the tail is pretty much the same thing basically what we're doing is where we drew that circle we're going to go to the other side of it and taper a line down to the tip of our fin here just like that from that sort of center point where that circle is again we're gonna bring out another line and double up on that tapering to a tip as well or to a point same thing coming towards the back obviously these are getting smaller because they're following the shape of our fin and in this case we'll just do those three main spines and to link the fins up we're pretty much gonna do little curves like this that join those sections all those segments and they just want to stay within the realm of our initial uh sketch shape that we did and this last one will wrap around and back into the scale like that so it's very similar i guess to doing peony pedals we're just doing like little bumps little curved lines that join into each other and wrap around to the back to complete the fin and then from the outside going back towards the main point of our fin we can do some little whippy lines like this that are just going to give it a little bit more texture and make the fins look a little bit prettier so you're basically going to go ahead and do that for all the other fins okay so in terms of doing the dorsal fin you're going to do the same like peaks that we did the little spikes that we did but they're not going to come from one center point so you're not going to do a circle here and then do all of them coming from there you're just going to space them out you know as equally as you can and i like to do them you know probably two two to three scales apart and just throw them in like that and another couple before the end of the fin there and then again you link them up just using our little curved lines to add a bit of texture to the top of our fin like that and then you draw in your little veins or texture details onto the fin alrighty so in terms of doing the tail we're going to use the same detail we did for these little spines along both outer edges of the tail so basically just coming straight off the back of our fish you can bring a line up and taper it do it do a parallel line to that that tapers down to the tip so it starts off with the same thickness and tapers down and do the same thing on the other side this gives our tail a little bit of structure and helps link it into the body a little bit better and then to draw in the actual tail shape we're going to do our little curved lines down to the center on both sides and they're going to overlap roughly in the center as well like this and from the other side like that really simple guys not much to it and then drawing those little veins following the shape of our tail back towards our fish at the point where the tail overlaps as well i like to put a little loop in so where the front part of the tail comes sorry the um where it overlaps the piece that overlaps at the front is going to come down loop behind itself and continue out so there is actually a join in the tail and that little loop will indicate where it where it joins but there's an overlap so the two parts of the tail slightly overlap each other okay guys we're nearly there like i said this is a pretty big drawing and there is a lot of details to it but we're nearly there already so we're going to get into how to design the head keep the head simple and like i've spoken about before when doing composition if the background elements or other elements in the design are complex keep the parts simple that you want to stand out or vice versa so in this case the body of the fish is super complicated like there are scales and fins and then veins within those fins it's complex so keep that head simple and it'll pop out of your design alrighty guys we're on to drawing the head so i've come in a little bit here so that you can see a little bit better what i'm doing and we're basically going to start designing the head using those contour shapes to actually give us shape to what we're doing so to start with we're going to do our eye so we've already drawn in a shape for our eye which is perfect just behind it i'm going to come in with a curved line that sort of mirrors our curve at the back of the eye there and it's just going to come around to the front of the eye and then you can if you want to add some sort of detail you can put a little fold in behind that as well and off the back of the eye we're gonna do a little lip basically so it's just like a little um double up on that line and it joins back into that oval inside the eye we can draw in a pupil now there's lots of different ways to do it some people will draw the full like an iris and a pupil and they'll do the iris a different color some people do a really tiny little black pupil in this case we'll do circle like this maybe put a little highlight in and we'll just shade that black so we'll keep the eye nice and simple for this one but there's so many different ways to do it so you know you can play around with that and you know get an idea of how you want to draw um those little details in coming in from just behind the eye we're going to draw in some curved lines that come up and a little bit onto the top sort of portion of our head and this wraps around the bottom as well and this sort of encompasses the eye area and then just behind that we're going to draw in like part of the gills i guess of the fish so just behind this we can come out and do another row of these curved lines don't stress about your scales go straight over the top of them they're just there for guide and then if you want to make things simpler just erase whatever's behind that area so you can see what you're doing and you're going to draw little veins in on that as well and these ones in particular i like to keep close together and it adds a little bit of detail to the back of the head here that's really nice we're going to draw in a spot for our whiskers and in this case i think we're going to do really little whiskers but it really depends like sometimes koi are drawn with really over exaggerated whiskers kind of like dragon whiskers but in this case we're going to do maybe something slightly more realistic and just at the front of the head here drawing a little circle and a little whisker like this okay and off the set off the other side you can roughly gauge where that's going to be and do the same thing now like i said the the whiskers sometimes they're over exaggerated they're more like catfish catfish whiskers they're really really long and thin um and that's nice too it just depends what you're doing i like to keep koi fish whiskers quite short um sometimes even shorter than this just to give it that little bit more of what koi fish actually look like sort of thing and sometimes they'll be drawn with two whiskers so there'll be another little one here right next to our first one so that's another nice little detail that you can add in there to join the back part of the eye to where the whisker is we're pretty much just going to bring the face forward so coming in from where we drew this curved line you can do another little curve and just join it in there's no magic to to joining that forward really to do this portion at the back of the head here we're going to bring a line from where it starts down a little bit and then curve back up to the other side and at this point it would probably be a good idea to just throw in those scales that are missing like this and you can tell probably now that the top of the head is looking really flat and that's because we haven't drawn in the outer edge so to draw in the outer edge we're going to try and mimic roughly what we see on the top of this side of the head so we're going to come down with a bump there'll be another sort of bumpy area for the eye or where the eye sits the eye socket and then this part comes down pretty smoothly into the front of the head and that'll give the head a little bit more sort of shape and definition another thing you can do is coming from the back of the head here is putting a little uh indication line there and another one coming down the other side and then we can actually change our center line a little bit we're not changing the placement of it we're just going to redraw it as a curved line to give the head more shape so we're going to curve it up this way a little bit dip in the middle and then curve it back down and that gives the head a little bit more of a bulky sort of uh rounded shape as opposed to a real flat across the top sort of shape now coming into our mouth area here we're going to bring sort of following this line here bring that down towards the front on both sides and then coming off that line you can do a couple of folds and then join into the edge of the mouth here and then we're pretty much going to do a little wavy line that comes to the center line where it comes sort of drops back in and then from the center line we're going to come back out do the same shape on the other side and sort of curve it back in joining it up to that outside edge all right now i do realize this line is a little bit too high up so i'm going to erase a little bit of that and basically bulk that out a little bit just so it's a bit rounder in shape and to add a little bit of detail to the mouth basically where that crease is where the mouth folds a little bit you can draw a couple of little lines in and then i like to add this second lip to the top of the mouth it's just like a little edge and that's basically it in terms of the sketch for our koi fish we have a nice uh nicely composed koi fish it's got a nice flow to it the scales wrap around the body uh all the fins are roughly in the right place for the most part i think and i think it's a really aesthetically pleasing design it looks really nice now since the beginning of my channel i've been having requests on how to draw scales that wrap around the body of a koi or the body of a dragon this is basically the way to do it and i've also had requests on how to draw koi fish and i'll do this as a series so next time we can cover line work and then next time we you know look at the koi fish again we can cover shading and coloring and if you guys want me to i can go in a little bit on how to do flowers and background details with a koi fish as well you'll have to let me know in the comments section down below if you want to see the next part of this video and we'll see i'll try and make it happen um but anyways that's phase one the sketch thank you so much for watching today's video guys i really hope you enjoyed it and i hope that i was able to cover any of the questions and topics that you guys wanted to see this week's viewer submission feature goes to canal pahuja i hope i'm pronouncing that right he did this incredible design i'm actually very impressed by it it's a really cool design and i don't know he said that he used one of my tutorial videos to me it doesn't look that way it looks you know excellent in its own right but that's the great thing about these tutorials is you don't have to draw exactly what i've drawn in the video but just take elements from those videos and inject them into your art to make better art like that's what learning's about you know learning tools and techniques that you can use to better your art if you'd like to see your artwork featured on my channel head over to facebook at daget designs this is where i keep my online portfolio and any upcoming work and features that i have so if you head over there and flick me a direct message on facebook with a piece of your artwork um you can ask me questions over there i can try and give you some feedback and most of all it may get featured on one of my videos please make sure to leave a comment in the comment section down below letting me know what it is you'd like to see in the next video uh whatever i'm able to teach you i will show you and if you leave a request down below there's a good chance that i will use that in a future video most importantly guys please if you're new to my channel hit the subscribe button down below make sure you turn on the notification bell so you are notified every time a new video comes out and that's it from me today guys so have a good one and i'll see you later bye

Channel: Dagget Designs

Views: 97,870

Keywords: how to draw, how to draw koi fish, how to draw tattoo flash, koi fish tattoo, design koi fish, how to draw fish scales, how to draw dragon scales, how to draw snake scales, how to draw japanese koi, drawing japanese tattoo designs, tattoo design start to finish

Id: Q2l95BXQNZc

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020