Drawing Homer Simpson

This tutorial will teach you how to draw the Simpson's favorite character, Homer Simpson, from grounds up. Our drawing project will involve drawing the outline of the character, applying strokes to these outlines, and then using various selection tools to color Homer's skin and clothing. Wel will then finish it off by adding shadows and highlights to make it look similar to the image below.

Drawing the Outlines

Start off by creating a new 260x380 document in Photoshop with the following parameters.

We are now going to draw a 2 px thick outline around Homer's body. Grab the Pen Tool from the Tools Panel on the left side of your workspace. Access your Paths Panel from the bottom right corner of your workspace, or if it is not available there, bring it out by going through Window>Paths. Click on the Create New Path button in the Paths Panel to create a new path. Double Click on the path's name to rename it to Body.

Grab the Pen Tool and start working your way around homer's body as shown below. Tracing would be a lot easier for you if you use a previous sketch you make of Homer as a reference image to drawn based upon, or use the sample picture shown in the beginning of the tutorial. This is how my drawn path of homer's body looks like.

Since paths are only vector guides and are not counted as pixels on the canvas, we need to apply a stroke to them using a brush. Grab the Brush Tool from the Tools Panel and Right Click anywhere on your canvas and choose a Drop Shadow Round brush while changing its Master Diameter to 2px.

While having the Brush Tool still selected, click the Stroke Path button from the Paths Panel. This will stroke the path around Homer's body using the brush we selected in the previous step.

This is how the body outline should look like now.

Drawing Inner Details

Homer's inner details are drawn the same way his body was drawn with a few minor modifications. Lets begin with creating a New Path in the Paths Panel to draw the body's inner details in. Double Click on the new path and rename it to Inner Details.

Using the Pen Tool , draw all the inner details of Homer's body that need to be stroked later on. Here is how mine turned out.

To complete Homer's outlining, we need to finally apply a Stroke to the paths we drew as previously done before, but this time using a 1px wide brush. Go back to your Layers Panel and create a New Layer for us to draw the inner detail's strokes on. By this step, you would have automatically already drawn the body outlines on Layer 1 and now we are going to draw the inner details on the newly created Layer 2. Double Click on the layers' name and rename Layer 1 to Body and Layer 2 to Inner Details.

Grab the Brush Tool from the Tools Panel and Right Click anywhere on your canvas and choose a Drop Shadow Round brush while changing its Master Diameter to 1px.

While keeping the Brush Tool still selected, click the Stroke Path button from the Paths Panel. This will apply the stroke to the path around Homer's body using the brush we selected in the previous step.

Homer's body details are now completely outlined, here is how your progression should look like so far.

We have drawn all the necessary outlines we need to detail Homer's body.

We now have all the necessary outlines of Homer's body ready. In this page we are going to color the body and the clothes (the base colors) and then we will apply shadows and highlights over them to make Homer look more professional!

Base Coloring

We are going to color parts of Homer by using the selection tools and then filling these selections with the desired colors. We will do the selection by using the Magic Wand and Polygonal Lasso Tool . Start off by accessing the Layers Panel to create a New Layer and then Drag it below the two outline layers we created previously. Rename this layer to Base Colors. This will ensure that our color fills do not cover the outlines of our drawing.

Grab the Magic Wand from the Tools Panel. From the panel on the top, set the wand's Tolerance to 20 and make sure Anti-alias, Contiguous and Sample All Layers are all ticked. We will first color Homer's yellow skin. Set your Background Color to #FBD800 and then click on Homer's head. Hold Shift and click on Homer's hands as well as his three fingers to create the sum of selection shown in the screenshot below.

Now just press Ctrl+Backspace to fill the selection with our Background Color.

Repeat the same step for the rest of Homer's body. Fill his pants with the color #43A0FF and his beard with the color #CFAE67.

Coloring the shoes is tricky, so they are going to need a different approach. Set your Background Color to #2C4541 and using the Magic Wand , click on both shoes to select them. Make sure you leave the small triangular area that is left out for the shoe's bottom color. Go through Select>Modify>Expand, and expand by 1 px. Press Ctrl+Backspace to fill the shoes. We expanded the fill to be able to select some of the semi-white pixels that the Magic Wandleft out.

As for the little triangle on Homer's right shoe. Select the Polygonal Lasso Tool from the Tools Panel and set your Background Color to #111614. Select the small triangular area and hit Ctrl+Backspace to fill it, since the the area is too small for the Magic Wand to select it perfectly.

To wrap up the base coloring section, we are going to draw two small circles as the eyes of Homer. Grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools Panel and create small round selections as shown in the screenshot below. Set your Background Color to #000000 and hit Ctrl+Backspace to fill the selection.

Shadow and Highlight Tones Coloring

The make our coloring more convincing we will be adding some shadows and highlights to Homer's skin and clothing. This is going to be done by using custom vector shapes, using the Pen Tool to represent the color tones, which will be placed below the outline layers and above the Base Color layer. Since we are going to create many Custom Vector Shapes we will create a group layer to accommodate all the shapes we are going to use. Access the Layers Panel, and click on the Create a New Group button from the lower part of the Layers panel. Place this group right above the Base Color layer, double click it to rename it to Color Tones.

Make sure that none of your previously drawn paths are selected before you proceed to the next step. To make sure of that, open the Paths tab and Click anywhere inside the panel away from the two existing paths to deselect them, you will notice that the sharp lines on your canvas are gone once this is done.

Using the Pen Tool , set your Foreground Color to #69CAFF and start drawing the pant's highlights as shown in the screenshot below. Be patient while drawing with the Pen Tool to maintain smoothness and precision of your shapes.

While keeping the same color chosen, draw the highlights of your the other pant as shown below using the same method as you've done in the previous step.

The rest of the color tones will all be drawn the same way. Set your Foreground Color to #ECA500 and draw the skin's shadow.

As for the shadow on the shirt, set your Foreground Color to #D9EEEF and draw the shape in accordance with the screenshot below.

Set your Foreground Color to #936213 and draw the beard's shadow as shown below.

Finally, set your Foreground Color to #131917 and draw the shoes' shadows as shown below to be all done with Homer Simpson.

Homer Simpson is now complete, you can optionally add an elliptical #C6CED1 shadow under him as a final touch as shown in the last segment below. Here are all the progression parts of drawing Homer put together as well as a PSD of the final result.

This concludes our tutorial, make sure you show off your work in the forum. I hope that you learnt something new from it, feel free to post at the if you have any comments of questions.