It’s just been that kind of a month. I think I am probably still recovering from Hurricane Ida. And maybe from some old Katrina PTSD that Ida dredged up, as well. I feel like I have at least one more “my characters sitting in a big library reading” drawing in me. Possibly also because we got some new bookshelves this week, and I’ve been working on finally getting all my books out of boxes and onto shelves.
This one’s a bit of an experiment; I have a commission at the sketch stage that I think will be well-served by evoking a Japanese woodblock print feeling. Sometimes when I want to explore stuff like that I will make room in the price range for the commission to fuck up and redo from scratch; this time I felt like exploring it in some personal work.
I tried four different ways to get an outline happening:
my initial shitty rough
Astute’s Dynamic Sketch tool
just some simple, monoweight lines
trying to make Illustrator automatically add an extra, thick outline to everything
illustrator’s Blob Brush
The blob brush looked the best, but I kind of hate the blob brush because it feels like working in Flash. And it still felt kind of really sloppy no matter what I did. So I just did a slight variant of my usual methods: I drew some solid-filled shapes, and had an outline on them. I had to be a little more careful about certain aspects of how I overlapped the shapes to make sure the outlines looked good, but it was only slightly slower than my normal methods, and felt a lot less insane than trying to nail the whole thing down as a composition in the line stage, then decide how to best flood-fill everything. Probably by using Live Paint.
Which, yes, is a thing most artists do all the goddamn time, I know. I haven’t been working lines-first since about 2000 and it really just breaks a lot of my workflow to do that.
My original sketch had her kind of flopping coils onto the shelves, but it didn’t feel right. So I looked at some pictures of snakes climbing up sheer walls and ladders and trees, cloned the body layer, and drew something new on the original layer.
I liked the results so I deleted the copy.
And then I had to fill some more bookshelves. I drew new book-spine brushes instead of using the ones from the previous picture, and thought a bit about ways to quickly shuffle around the brushes and colors on them. Astute’s Super Marquee is already a tool that’s found a place in my workflow, and its ability to select a randomized subset of the paths in the area it’s selecting was super useful here. I threw together the above image to share it this process on the Astute chat; I could maybe add some more details to how it’s done, but that’s for some other time.
Overall this took about seven hours to do. Which feels like a while for me for a single character drawing, but I spent a couple hours on things like “testing four different approaches to creating a fake ‘ink line’ look”, “making the pattern on her clothes via some tools that let me make symmetry groups that Illustrator’s native pattern tools can’t handle”, and “figuring out why the rug pattern that I generated with the source of a Twitter bot is coming in as black-on-black”.
Anyway. Patreon supporters can get the AI file over here if they want to pick it apart; if you have a blank space on your wall, in your cupboard, or on your body that you think this image would fill nicely, you can get it printed on a bunch of stuff over on Redbubble.
