Recently I got to spend some time hanging out with my friend Ken Steacy at DragonCon here in Atlanta. For those of you not familiar with Ken's work, here's a link to his Lambiek page:
http://lambiek.net/artists/s/steacy_k.htm
Ken was set up in artist's alley and as it was his first southern convention appearance (he's Canadian, eh) he had a lot of sketch commissions. He was nice enough to let me follow along and photograph his progress for one of them, a Hawaiian cutie that seemed appropriate as we had dined at Trader Vic's just the night before.





Ken prefers to use Canson paper over bristol board, and uses the paper color as his midtone, adding shadow and highlight with colored pencils. The toothy texture of the paper picks up the pencil nicely and adds grain to the drawing. He starts by roughing in the figure loosely with an HB pencil.




When he's gotten the lines he wants, he starts to refine and begins inking using a Faber Castell marker.




Inking continues until the figure is done.




After the keyline is in, Ken takes a gum eraser and removes the pencil lines, then begins shading with a black Prismacolor pencil.




From there, he begins adding highlights with a white Prismacolor pencil, including the moon and the dappling on the water.





 
When he finishes highlighting, Ken goes back with the Faber Castell marker and adds final ink details.





A few more tweaks and she's done! The customer loved the sketch, it was his second commission of the day.





To see more of Ken's work visit his website at http://www.kenspublishing.com or find him at a convention and give him money to draw for you!

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