Drawings of Trolls: a practical breakdown
The Trolls franchise from DreamWorks has a very specific art style that looks easy but is actually pretty fiddly if you try to do it properly. I have drawn these characters for commissions and fan projects over the years, and the main problem most people run into is not the hair but the face proportions.
Where to find desenhos do trolls
If you are looking for reference sheets and practice drawings, the most useful sources are not the official movies alone. Character design sheets published by DreamWorks show the models from multiple angles, which is the difference between a drawing that looks flat and one that actually reads as three-dimensional. Fan artists on ArtStation and Pinterest also post breakdowns, but you need to filter for original work and not re-uploads with watermarks. One thing I always tell people starting out is to avoid using only screenshots from the films. The animation applies lighting, color correction, and camera effects that compress the line work and hide details. A reference sheet pulled from production art gives you clean anatomy without the render overlay getting in the way.
Getting the proportions right
The heads are roughly two-thirds of the total figure height. The eyes sit lower than you would expect, near the middle of the head rather than the upper third. This is the mistake that makes everything look wrong. When the eyes sit too high, the character reads as a generic cartoon instead of a Troll. The mouths are small and placed well below the eye line, often just above the chin area. Hair is not a single shape. It is a cluster of separate tubes or braids, each with its own volume. You should block each hair strand as a cylinder before adding detail. If you try to draw one continuous outline for the hair, it will look like a hat instead of individual strands.
Tools I actually use
I draw digitally now, mostly in Clip Studio Paint, but the workflow works the same in Procreate or even traditional media. Start with a light construction circle for the head, then drop a second shape for the jaw. The jaw is softer than you think. It does not come to a sharp point. It rounds out gently into the chin. For hair, I build a base mass first. This is a single shape that reads as the overall hairstyle from a distance. Then I break it into sections. Each section gets a core cylinder and a highlight edge. The highlight edge is what sells the rounded form. Without it, the hair looks flat no matter how many colors you layer on top.
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A problem I ran into and how I fixed it
I was working on a commission for a full-body gang pose with six characters, and every drawing had the same issue. The hair colors bled into each other when I shaded them. The animation style uses saturated neon colors, and blending them directly on the canvas made everything muddy within about ten minutes of rendering. I tried adjusting the blend modes, lowering opacity on individual layers, and even rebuilding the palette, but nothing worked cleanly. The fix was to separate the hair into three layers: base color, shadow color, and a thin midtone transition layer between them. I kept each layer at full opacity and used hard-edged brushes for the shadow pass instead of soft airbrushes. That stopped the bleeding completely. It added about fifteen minutes to the shading step, but it saved me from repainting three characters from scratch later.
Common mistakes that waste time
Adding fine lines too early is the biggest one. Beginners tend to draw every individual strand in the hair before the head structure is solid. This leads to redraws when the proportions shift. The structure comes first. The hair detail comes after the face and body are locked in. Another mistake is over-detailing the clothes. The Trolls style is clean and simple. The clothing uses basic shapes and solid colors. Busy patterns on the outfits compete with the hair, which is already the busiest part of the design. Keep the clothes simple. Let the hair carry the visual weight.
What this style does not do well
The Trolls aesthetic is not suited for realistic shading or heavy dramatic lighting. If you push the rendering toward realism, the exaggerated proportions start to look distorted instead of stylized. The style works best with flat coloring or minimal cel-shading. Trying to render it like a traditional painting usually produces awkward results because the underlying forms were built for a different rendering approach. If you want more realistic anatomy while keeping the Troll characters recognizable, you are better off studying the character design sheets first and then doing a separate stylized piece rather than trying to merge both approaches in one drawing.
Quick reference values
A standard full-body Troll drawing at 300 DPI on an A4 canvas takes roughly forty-five to sixty minutes for a clean lineart and flat color pass, assuming you are working from a reference sheet. Shading and finishing add another thirty to forty-five minutes. A fully rendered piece with background elements can run two to three hours depending on complexity. This is for an intermediate drawer. A complete beginner will spend significantly longer and will likely need to redo sections.
Final practical note
Save your reference sheets at the same resolution you plan to draw at. Upcaling low-resolution images introduces blur that makes it nearly impossible to follow the original line work accurately. This detail matters more than most people realize when they are early in the process.
