A hydra is a many-headed dragon. It can have as few as seven or as many as one million heads! The hydra has notoriously bad breath because it exhales poison or acid. This monster often inhabits rivers.
Step One I start by using a 2H pencil to draw the basic shape of the hydra. My main concern in this step is to make sure all these darn heads can exist in the same place in a plausible way!
Step Two I draw the legs and feet, which at this point look like a robot’s. Then I continue building the shapes, adding facial guidelines to the heads. I also delineate the fronts of the necks with lateral lines.
Step Three Using my construction lines, I refine the legs and feet. I make the feet a cross between a human’s and an elephant’s, with large, squarish nails. Then I add horizontal lines on the torso that curve with the body’s form.
Step Four I continue the curved lines up the fronts of the necks, refining the heads as I go and erasing my construction lines as I no longer need them. These heads are quite rounded, rather than angular—they remind me of baby dinosaurs.
Step Five Using a 2B pencil, I add facial features and tone to six of the heads. Because I’m working from left to right, I forgo finishing the last head for now. (I find myself resting my hand near the last head, and I don’t want to smudge the graphite.) I try to give each head a different personality while maintaining general uniformity, so I vary their poses and features. When adding tone to the heads, I lightly rub the graphite with a paper towel to create a simple gradation. I draw ridges on some of the necks, and then I move to the creature’s haunches, where I add a rough, bumpy texture. I continue this texture down the creature’s right leg and onto its foot. I add small circles to enhance the texture, and I draw very unkempt toenails.
Step Six As I continue to build up the overall tone with the soft graphite, I make sure not to grind it into the paper so that I can blend the tone later. Then I shift my attention to the belly scales, shading them and blending with a paper towel. I continue the bumpy texture down the creature’s left leg and apply the same ragged-toenail treatment to the creature’s left foot.
Step Seven Now I’m ready to render the final head. After doing so, I use a paper towel to blend heavy areas of graphite, creating dark, rich, even tones. I run a vinyl eraser along the contour edges to clean up any stray marks. I also use the eraser to pull out highlights; I use a craft knife to carve specialty shapes in my eraser so I can reach tight areas.