So, this is what I call a ‘work in progress’. This is a developmental promo piece for a project that I’ve got brewing in the old noggin’ which I’m going to post part by part as I complete each section of the piece.
So here we have part one - pencils.
As I’m sure you can see, I’m not exactly the neatest wielder of a pencil. I don’t tend to rub out construction lines or much else when I’m sketching something out. This isn’t necessarily bad technique, especially when I’m inking digitally which I will be with this piece. For the vast majority of artwork I do, I draw things out in an A4 sketchbook. I seem to have a preference for WH Smith sketchbooks, which seem to give me an amazing quality of paper for a relatively low price (costs about £4 for 50 pages – 8p a page, or 13c for the North Americans out there). I also use a .5 HB mechanical pencil, mostly for convenience, and a Staedtler rubber as they give me the best quality when erasing stray lines.
As you can see, I’m a fan of construction lines when it comes to building up a decent picture, however if I’m feeling really good in a day I might find myself winging it. I have a habit of doing this when I’m doing the pencils on a comic page. I then tend to put in quite a lot of detail onto the page at the pencilling stage. Apart from making myself sure of small details like costuming and shading, there’s no real reason I do this – just a personal preference I guess.
Once I have a picture that I feel I can work with, I digitise the picture. We have a small HP all-in-one printer scanner that does the trick for me. I fire up Photoshop on my Windows install and scan in the picture to start editing – in this case 300dpi in greyscale mode. I’ll be changing it in to RGB mode once I start editing, but I bring it in greyscale as so to get no stray colours in the pencil layer.
Next up is part two – inking, which will be followed by part three – colouring and part four – finishing touches. I’ll be picking this up later in the week, once I’ve finished inking the above piece.
