Drawing Method
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. As for how I might compare to an actual artist, well, let’s just say I won’t be showing my portfolio and expecting real work anytime soon. I mainly draw for fun. I mainly draw girls for fun — you know, the comic book, eight-head high, supermodel type of girls with big busts, thunderous hips, and so on. It was great fun, and it still is great fun, but it’s also getting boring. The drawings didn’t amount to anything other than just figures floating on the space of the paper, and doing random drawings just didn’t cut it anymore. So now my focus is on drawing the stuff behind the hot girl. Laying a horizon, and building a backdrop. It’s not just enough to do a simple scene for me. I love the lush landscapes and city views in comics, and that’s what I want to reproduce for my own artwork. Plus this appeals to the engineer inside me. The idea that I can use practical knowledge of geometry, some aesthetics, composition, and a healthy imagination to put together a world of my own (inhabited by good looking supermodel-esque women).
So…here’s the final drawing (click to see the whole thing):
Now, here’s how I put that drawing together…
The first step I did was to draw a “thumbnail.” Not quite a thumbnail. Thumbnails are supposed to be pretty small and quickly drawn. This is definitely not that. It took maybe an hour using measurements from a T-square and a straight edge for all the perspective and then some time to fill in all the fuzzy looking organic trees and shrubs. It’s not perfect either, but it’s ready for greater things.
I actually went out of my way to use Illustrator and cook up a sheet that had two 16×9 frames. These two 16×9 frames fit nicely on a 8.5×11 in sheet of paper, and I can print them out and use them for whatever I need. By the way, that frame is obviously not 16 in. by 9 in., but the ratio is 16:9 like a cinematic widescreen camera view. I didn’t want them too small because I wanted to add a considerable amount of detail and do perspective work. I didn’t have any smaller thumbnail drawings for this sketch, just this one. You’re probably thinking that I don’t really need something like that. Well, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to doing (perspective) drawings, so I like to know the box is 16×9 and where the frame is. I used to not draw with a frame at all. I would just draw onto a sheet of paper, so everything seemed to float in space without any solid ground. I’d throw it in at the last minute just to give characters something to stand on. I’ve seen storyboard and layout pages where there are printed tick marks or actual boxes for drawings to go into. It’s a good way to stay consistent, and to know “art goes here” in the box, and everywhere else is where art doesn’t go.
I scanned the above sheet into my computer. There’s a couple of tricks going on here. One is that I drew the entire drawing with a blue pencil. It’s an animator’s thing, and I’ve seen other artists do it, but the idea is that you draw your sketch in blue, and then you can go over it with a pencil or ink and get a final drawing. Scan into the computer, and take the blue out, and you’ve got a good, relatively clean drawing that can be further refined and painted digitally. The second trick has to do with the printer…
In the image above, on the left you see the smaller version of the drawing I put together. After scanning it in, I scaled it up in Photoshop until just the top 16×9 frame fit on one sheet of regular sized paper. I printed that out. Now I have a blown up drawing that I can make a more final rendering of. A nifty thing about having a color printer is that you can preserve the blue lines. That means when I scan the drawing in again after making my final rendering over it, I can remove the blue and get my picture. Also you’ll see on the blown up drawing, I’ve added in two figures walking (or they should look like they’re walking, but that’s another issue). BTW, if you’re curious about CMYK vs. RGB…doesn’t seem to matter. Printers print in CMYK color space, if you didn’t know, but I didn’t bother to make a conversion from RGB to CYMK. It prints out just fine and when I draw over the blown up image and re-scan it, you can pull the blue out just as well.
Drawing over that blown up drawing and it looks something like so…
Here’s how you get rid of the blue lines in Photoshop…
Goto your layers panel, pick channels, and then select only the blue channel. You’ll see your picture cleaned up automagically. No? Not quite? Maybe you see some lines hanging around or some residue from your blue drawing. No problem. You might want to adjust the color levels of your drawing and try it again. You can also just pick the blue channel and adjust the levels on the blue layer to get visual feedback that that layer is getting cleaned of all your unwanted blue lines. You’re done, if all you want was the sketch in your computer. The next step I would take would be to either quickly paint the drawing in Photoshop or really go to town and paint everything. I probably won’t do that with this image, since this is a practice sketch.
Maybe you don’t have Photoshop? I’m sure there are channel layers in your software of choice, but you’ll have to chime in about software such as GIMP, because I don’t know how they work.
As for the printer I’m using, it’s a Canon MP600…
I highly recommend it. It does pretty fast printing for just black and white text, you can do photo printing (4×6, 8.5×11 in.), it will scan, and even work as a copying machine if you don’t want the hassle of turning on your computer just to make a duplicate of a document. So far I’ve had it for a month. I’ve done a lot of printing out especially of blue line drawings, and I’ve done a few photographs that I’ve taken with my digital camera. Everything looks nice and the ink cartridges still seem pretty full. It’s also a relatively cheap multipurpose machine. It cost me $160 at Amazon.com, and I’m sure if you shopped around more you could find it for less. (Geez, looks like it’s even less on Amazon.)
