Drawing Kara's Woodland Camo (+step by step) (Patreon)

I wanted to paint Kara's woodland camo shirt by hand instead of just pasting in a pattern and running it through a filter. To do this, I went on youtube and looked up some tutorials of people painting their guns in woodland, and basically just applied the technique to the drawing.

It looks incredibly complex, but once you break down the layering it's pretty simple.

Black base coat

Its that simple, just a flat, blue-ish black color.

Tan

For the tan, I did another flat layer, and then I cut these sort of stringy black shapes out of it to reveal the black underneath. I try to make them move laterally for the most part.

Brown

With the brown I actually did the opposite. I painted on, with a round brush, the brown blotches. It's a delicate balance; you want to be left with lots of lateral stringy sections of tan, but you also want the brown shapes to be a little larger and  more blotchy. It's hard to give an exact ratio, so I'd suggest just experimenting and looking at reference.

Then a final layer of green.

I did the green the same way I did the brown, with two little caveats. First, the green shapes should be much larger and more blotchy; little to no stringy lateral shapes. Additionally, I noticed that the green blotches tend to have sharper edges. They're more like maple leaves than the other colors. To do this, I went in with an eraser and carved out some sharper edges.

It was labor intensive but I think the result looks pretty good. It's nice to do things the hard way sometimes.