For last week’s Flavor Friday, I posted a melancholy Melonpan Donut.

Since this one had more texturing to it than usual for my Flavor Friday donuts, I decided to make a quick GIF on my layering process. I love going back and turning different layers on and off in a donut drawing. Just a weird habit of mine.

This particular donut drawing had around 30 layers in Photoshop, compared to something like my Red Velvet donut, which had closer to 15 layers.

I generally start off with a donut outline on a white background (here, it’s yellow to frame it), and then color in the outline with one flat color as the base.

Since melonpan has scores in it, I had to remember to put those in. They also ended up serving as outlines for the shading.

On a normal donut, I usually shade the center first, but the hatches in the melonpan were slightly more important (gasp!) than the actual donut part of this drawing.

Shading and highlighting is when the fun starts to happen since it begins to look more and more real. This is where I really get excited on what I’m drawing.

Texturing donuts is really fun for me, because I end up playing around with brushes and stuff in Photoshop. This is when I determine what type of donut I’m drawing, if it’s more cakey or breadlike and if it seems crumbly or if it has a ton of glaze on it. Topping donuts with shiny glaze or bits of sugar is always fun.

The melonpan donut was a special case since it wasn’t a normal donut. So instead of glaze or tons of sprinkles on top, I made it look a bit more toasty.

My absolute favorite part of drawing donuts is taking off the donut outline for good. It’s like that moment when you feel like you’ve written a good amount of stuff in an essay, and then you go to double space your paper and it’s like magic and you feel glorious inside.

Like that.

Or maybe like taking baked good fresh out the oven.

The face is always the last thing I add on a donut, then I play around with the background colors and patterns, then add a caption or pun.

I love drawing donuts.