Fanart WIP: Come As An Old Enemy
I'm pretty bad about posting art-in-progress on this blog and I should probably be more consistent about that.
So, while writing Come As An Old Enemy a had a sudden impulse to illustrate it as well. The story was for a challenge and I knew that I couldn't complete the piece for the original deadline, so I'm now trying to finish it in a roundabout, lazy fashion. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but the sketch proved to be one of the most brutal, unfocused things I've ever made. The scene was (and is) very clear in my mind, but it just wouldn't translate onto paper.
Here is the semi-finished original sketch (graphite on paper):
I ended up redrawing certain sections so many times that the graphite left 'shadows' on the card stock that I couldn't erase. When I scanned it, it looked dirty as a result. This usually isn't a problem because I go over everything in ink and then erase the graphite entirely, but even when I did that this time it still looked grungy and I spent a lot of time in Photoshop 'cleaning' the line sketch as well. Plus, at some point, I decided that the jacket wasn't right, and that the body was too thin and that his chin and nose needed reworking. After I did all of that, I had to rearrange the proportions a little because his face looked stretched. I'm not sure that anyone would notice this but me.
Here's the cleaned line version:
As you may or may not notice, there is a blueish halo around the figures - that's the card stock texture peeking through even though the linework has been reduced to an exposed extreme in order to make the background transparent (I add colour behind the linework layer so I need to be able to see what I'm colouring). Seriously... this sketch is just a major pain in the ass.
So, the next step is flats, background (oh, lordy!), and then details. Since I certainly won't get to those today, they'll have to be saved for another post.
So, while writing Come As An Old Enemy a had a sudden impulse to illustrate it as well. The story was for a challenge and I knew that I couldn't complete the piece for the original deadline, so I'm now trying to finish it in a roundabout, lazy fashion. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but the sketch proved to be one of the most brutal, unfocused things I've ever made. The scene was (and is) very clear in my mind, but it just wouldn't translate onto paper.
Here is the semi-finished original sketch (graphite on paper):
I ended up redrawing certain sections so many times that the graphite left 'shadows' on the card stock that I couldn't erase. When I scanned it, it looked dirty as a result. This usually isn't a problem because I go over everything in ink and then erase the graphite entirely, but even when I did that this time it still looked grungy and I spent a lot of time in Photoshop 'cleaning' the line sketch as well. Plus, at some point, I decided that the jacket wasn't right, and that the body was too thin and that his chin and nose needed reworking. After I did all of that, I had to rearrange the proportions a little because his face looked stretched. I'm not sure that anyone would notice this but me.
Here's the cleaned line version:
As you may or may not notice, there is a blueish halo around the figures - that's the card stock texture peeking through even though the linework has been reduced to an exposed extreme in order to make the background transparent (I add colour behind the linework layer so I need to be able to see what I'm colouring). Seriously... this sketch is just a major pain in the ass.
So, the next step is flats, background (oh, lordy!), and then details. Since I certainly won't get to those today, they'll have to be saved for another post.