A Conglomeration of Ineptly Placed Lines

I've been putting of writing this post for far to long. I would blame the rather excellent new Deus Ex game, but that's rather like patting my large Budai like stomach and saying "but it was entirely the fault of the pastry chef!" Clearly the truth is I'm just a lazy schlub. The odd thing is that despite my putting it off I've had the post "prepped" for a while, and prepping is by far the most time consuming thing about making one of these posts. It's not like the writing has any time spent on it (as I'm sure you'll have noticed). Well, let's go and see what all that preparation has to show for itself (and more on what goes into it a little later).

The Good

From Reference

Hitting the ground running here, the very best sketches of June and July as based on photographs... at least I think they are. See, the one in the top left and the one in the bottom right might not be based on anything. I have no recollection of what they may be based on, but they're a bit to good to have come right off the top of my head, so therefor I must have copied them. It's a rubbish rational, but probably correct. As to the others, the bloke up top is off some generic muscular man (I don't recall where from), and the "angel" in the lower left is based on a fabulous model who's name I've completely forgotten even though I knew it when I drew it. I'm bound to draw her again at some point, and I'll make a note of her name next time. Finally the image in the top right is of the lovely Lala Ward in the Doctor Who serial City of Death (It's not a halo, it's her boating hat).

Without Reference

Quite pleased with a few of these. The expression of the girl in the lower right is quite good, as is the musculature of the figure at the top. The running guy (top middle) I like, though his head is to small, and next to him is a picture based on a photo of my friend Elisabeth, but went from memory rather than from the picture so it still counts (and looks nothing like her). The caricature of the chubby fellow in the middle is interesting, and the girl on the left is my first attempt at a Manga type styling.

The Bad

From Reference

It's not that I didn't do many bad images from reference in this time period, it's more that I did little from reference at all (don't forget that half of July was already covered in my last sketches post). I forget who the model for the ink sketch was, but this doesn't look like her anyway. Also, the sketch at the bottom is of my wife, if my wife was fatter, uglier and looked like a man. This looks almost nothing like her. Dreadful.

Without Reference

Really, words fail me at how awful most of these are. Just terrible.

So that's about it really. I did say I'd write a little more on the preparation that goes into these sketch posts, so I may as well cover that here, along with a "toy" I desperately want for Christmas (no honey-who-I-know-is-reading-this-and-is-still-offended-by-that-sketch that's not a hint). Generally the work it takes getting the sketches into something displayable on the blog takes longer than both drawing them and writing the text to go with them.

Firstly of course I have to scan the images, often several pages of them, especially in cases such as this where I've put off scanning for over a month. I have a good scanner, but it's not exactly the latest and greatest, so this can take a while.

Secondly I have to chop out all the individual images I consider the best and the worst to be found on those pages in Photoshop and throw them into one image.

Then I need to go through each of the images and remove artifacts left by the paper and/or the scanner (wrinkles, grain, smudges, that sort of thing). Darker areas where the paper isn't flush to the scanner are generally a pain as they can be darker than the pencil lines. In extreme cases I'll scan again making sure I get a good scan. While doing this I try my very best not to damage the integrity of the original sketch, which isn't easy with light pencil on dark paper I can tell you ;)

Once all that's done I need to lay out the sketches in a relatively pleasing manner. I allow myself to resize the sketches if necessary, but I try to keep them all the same comparative size whenever possible. Doing this is very time consuming - it actually reminds me quite a bit of doing UV Unwrapping at work, the final stage of which is almost the exact same process.

Once all that's done I just need to pick a small part of the image for my header icon. Sometimes there's just nothing that looks interesting that's the right size, but I try to avoid resizing the image for it if I can possible avoid it. I don't know why, I just prefer them when they're like that.

The process probably takes about an hour per image (more for the larger ones such as the one here, but there tend to be less of them. Actually doing it isn't hard, but finding the time and the inclination simultaneously to do them can be a problem, which is why I've been putting these off as long as I could. It's the end of August though, and I want to get back on a better schedule, so I have most of the last month scanned already, I just need to lay them out for posting, hopefully in the next week.

Oh! The Christmas present (still not a hint dear). Well, this was announced today from Wacom (who do all the best graphics tablets). It essentially allows you to draw on paper, while sorta/kinda scanning what you draw on the fly. The paper is still the medium, but it, and how it interacts with a scanner, ceases to be part of the equation when it comes to inputting what you drew into the computer. It's expensive though, and the quality of the pen could make or break it. I don't know that I would use if for all my sketching, but for pieces I plan on inking anyway, or rapid pose sketching (which I prefer to do in pen to begin with) where lots of close sketches are drawn very quickly and separating them is a real problem, this could be a real boon. Fingers crossed... Y'hear that Santa?! (still not a hint...)