How to Draw Cartoon Marble

July 19, 2019

I’ve been working on scripting for my upcoming Sleuthhounds: Cruise game for over a year now. Having recently reached the end of the critical path I found myself craving a little variety before plunging into the scripting work for the various side investigations in the game. I decided to work on a few of the graphical assets for the game, among them the background for a room that I wanted to have a marble floor. The trouble was, I couldn’t find any tutorials online on how to draw cartoon styled marble. So I decided to write one so I myself would have something to refer back to.

Cartoon marble.

Step 1: The Veins

Starting with black and a single pixel pen size, sketch in a bunch of lines with sharp angles on them for the veins of the marble.

Step 2: The Blobs

Using light grey and a four pixel pen size, add blobs over parts of the white portions of the image. The blobs should generally be larger around clusters of the veins.

Step 3: Lightening the Veins

Using dark grey and a draw-over-color tool, convert to dark grey the parts of the black veins that are in, or close to, the white background. This helps add variation to the density of the veins in the final image.

Step 4: Colourizing the Marble

Marble comes in a variety of different colours. For my case I wanted a greyish marble, but not specifically greyscale. I’ve found that adding a bit of blue in helps to sell the look of white (or grey) colouring. I converted the four drawing colours used in the marble as follows:

Step 5: Scaling the Marble

When drawing on the computer, I usually work at about twice the final intended size of the image. This makes for a more comfortable working size and allows for sub-pixel detail to be put in when needed, which is especially helpful when doing cartoon textures like marble.

Scale the image by 50% taking care to interpolate the image when reducing.

Voila

The marble used in a work-in-progress ladies fitness room.
Click to view larger.

The visual style for the Sleuthhounds has a nice clean look to it. The trick was coming up with a caricatured marble look that both resembled marble and fit the rest of the art style. I think I’m pleased with the end result, but I’m planning to live with it for a few days to see if it sticks for me or not.

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