Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Doggone Digital Pencil



OK, so last time I was showing you my drawing of the ice skating dogs. 
This time I'll show you my neurotic attempts to render the darn little guys. 

Maybe I should explain a bit first. 
You all know I do colored pencil art. 
What you may not know is that for a while I've been on fence about doing it for children's book work. Just because it takes soooo loooong, and most children's book work budgets aren't big enough to make spending this long on a piece of art in this style worth doing. (I don't mind working hard on something and having it take a long time ... but there's "normal" long time, and then there's "I need to have my head examined because this is insane" long time. Colored pencil work falls into the second category.)

But old habits die hard, so I started rendering this in colored pencils anyway, just because I felt like it.
And this is as far as I got before I thought "yeah, this is taking too long ..." 





And then, "I know! I'll do it digital! That'll be quicker!" 
And it could be, if I could work out a way to do it ... less detailed? Less perfect? Because the way I've been working, doing the colored pencil texture digitally, takes just as long as the old-fashioned way. The fact that its digital makes it easier to make corrections and changes, yes, which is a huge plus. But it still takes too long. Seriously.


Here's the guy with no color on his coat yet. I like being able to get in there and really render it to death. I just can't help myself. I get in there with a 4pt brush and fiddle around, and get lost in some microscopic detail.






Here, the face it a little more done, and I starting playing with the coat. There are I don't know how many layers of colors on that coat. It doesn't even look like colored pencil anymore, does it?




And more.
This is where I stopped, and did a reality check. I started outlining, which is fine, but is that what I really want to do? (rhetorical question) I'm just saying. I've had to stop working on this for a while, and will come back to it with fresh eyes, when I've had some time to mull over what I want to do exactly.



I still think this is a viable technique. I just think that for what I was originally intending to do with it - faster children's book work - its not working. For me. Like this. I may figure out a way to do it faster, and if so, I'll share. 

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer. I just thought it might help someone else who's struggling to figure something out, to show that things don't always go smoothly. Misery loves company, after all.  


Thursday, March 06, 2014

Dogs Skating Update

Hey. Thought I'd better check in with something, even if its not finished art. Had a lot going on this week, but in between all of that I've been working on the dogs skating. You can see the first rough ideas and how its progressed, and where we left off last time, here ~
http://drawingafineline.blogspot.com/2014/02/dogs-skating-work-in-progress.html
(or, just scroll down to the last post)



Before, they were in a kind of long-ish horizontal layout. But I thought "hey! I might want to make prints of this, so let's make it 8 x 10 instead." So that's what I did. I reorganized all the little doggies in a more 8 x 10-ish clump. 

I also made the wiener dog leaning forward a bit more. I did this with Photoshop, and you can see how I haven't erased out the second head on him yet. I love working in layers in PS, and how you can make a new layer, try something, hide it if you're not sure, delete it, or whatever.






And here's a more cleaned up version of the drawing above. Its ready to be transferred to the final paper. Or should be. Except something kept nagging at me. I found all kind of things to do except that. Like laundry, other cleaning, cat chores, a nap, shopping, knitting ... something in me wasn't happy with this yet. 







First, I took out the guy 'walking' the dogs, because you know what? I didn't like the leashes, and I also figured that if the dogs were smart enough to be able to put on clothes and skates and you know, ice skate, they didn't need to be on leashes.
I rearranged the dogs a bit too, to make them interact with each other more. 

And then it hit me. It needed KITTIES! 


So I sketched in some little furry guys in the snow behind the dogs. One is about to throw a snowball, and his buddy is hiding behind a big stockpile of ready-to-go snowballs. Another one is making a snowman. One is skating out onto the ice, and another is skiing.





Here it is, tightened up a bit. The dogs are totally oblivious, of course. They're just out for a nice little skate. The cats, on the other hand  ...



This makes a much better illustration, with more storytelling. It has a lot more going on, with the cats, and is more fun.
This has been transferred to the final paper and is being colored as we speak. I've taken out the skiing guy - somehow he wasn't working for me. But who knows, he could always end up back in. 


I'm also working on my new website, S...L...O...W...L...Y, but surely. It'll get there. I've ordered some new nice paper and colored envelopes (oooh, fancy) to make some cards for my etsy shop. I know, I've said before that I hate making cards, and I do. BUT. I would really like to have some other options in the shop besides prints, and I thought some card sets would be nice. 

So that's what I'll be up to over the next week, no doubt with a lot of help from this guy (when he's not doing this) ~