Flower girls: Step by step

I thought it would be fun to show you all how I draw. Not line by line, as that would take forever and a half, but rather step by step. 

All my drawings start with an idea. Usually this is a very loose idea, and it always (no exceptions) changes as I go along. Today I knew I wanted to draw two girls, and I knew I wanted flowers to be involved. At first I thought about giving them both flower crowns but quickly decided against it, as it would take the focus away from the the girls themselves. I started off, as always, by making a quick pencil sketch: 

I usually use a regular HB pencil when I sketch (I find that B-pencils tend to smudge easily and thus make the lines harder to remove afterwards, and that H-pencils are too hard on the paper), but this is just my personal preference. Today my favourite pencil had gone missing (damn those house elves!) so I had to make do with one of my reserve pencils. 

Once I'm satisfied with the initial sketch, I trace the lines with a pigment liner: 

At the moment I'm using both Faber-Castell's ECCO pigment liners and Staedtler's pigment liners, as I can't for the life of me figure out which brand I prefer. 

Once the tracing is done, I erase all visible pencil marks: 

Normally tracing is a piece of cake. This time, however, the liner slipped (so annoying), and the girls' lips ended up looking like this: 

But I did not despair! Most liner mishaps can be corrected. This time I fixed it by giving my girls black lipstick. I was originally planning on giving them red lips, but like I mentioned above, the initial idea always changes:

A wee side note: I hate how my drawings look at this stage (pictured above). I always feel they look both boring and bland and bah with just the initial layer of markers. But once I've added multiple layers and retraced the drawing with a ticker liner, I'm usually a lot happier with the finished result: 

I actually feel the black lips and the matching collars make the drawing 'pop' a lot more than it would have had the lips been red like I'd originally planned. I guess that's what you call a lucky mistake!

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Did you enjoy this step by step post? Should I make more posts like this in the future?