Today I realized that I was a couple days past a deadline: I needed to do a couple of sketches that would be added to copies of a Kickstarted comics anthology I was part of. I don’t do physical work very much any more, so I figured I’d document my current process.
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- First: sketch. I pulled up some inspirational imagery by duckgoing for “classical portrait”, pulled out a small sketchbook and a brown pen, and scribbled this rough out pretty quickly.
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- Then I photographed it with my iPad and went into the bedroom closet (the darkest place in the apartment) with the piece of marker paper I wanted to do the final image on. Tablets work great as small lightboxes in a pinch, with the added power of scaling an image!
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- I took the drawing into the studio, and masked off the edges with some masking tape. Spent like ten minutes trying to find my kneaded eraser to knock the rough back, ended up just using the eraser on the Col-Erase pencil I’d traced it with.
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- And then I pulled out a couple of Prismacolor markers and went to work. I laid down most of the yellow, then the brown – starting with the face, so that I didn’t lose too much work if I screwed that up – and then picked up a golden paint pen I had hanging around for the wrought-iron.
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- A little touch-up with a white paint pen, and it’s ready for a signature. I chose to leave the pencil lines that’d been hidden by the masking tape to keep it feeling like a sketch.
Now that I look over the whole process, I might go back and add the earring I had in the rough and forgot about. I should also either do the other sketch I have to do for this Kickstarter, or get some work in on Parallax – I spent half the day procrastinating on doing this drawing!