Saturday, November 27, 2010

Notes

I've been mostly working offline over the past week. While I put in 4-5 hours of drawing on the computer, I've been drawing around twice that much when I'm at work. Most of it has been problem solving stuff, elements that I'm not too used to. I've noticed that in the process of practicing that I've stretched my muscles in these areas resulting in rediscovered skills.

Hands



My hands drawings have been crap lately. Historically, I seem to recall my skill fluctuating. I was doing some hand drawing practice and at one point I decided to switch from a realistic bone structure to cartoon balloon hands. The results were really good. All of a sudden I was able to remember how to draw hands properly! After a while of drawing with cartoon hands, I switched back to more realistic hands and they were much better looking. I think I still have some kinks to work out, but I'll wait until they actually arise when I'm inking before tackling this subject again.

Backgrounds



I don't draw backgrounds very often. Most of my time is spent trying to make natural, appealing looking characters. So, one day I began drawing backgrounds of the various locales in my comic. By doing this, I was able to work out general problems about texture balance, where the shadows and half tone lines (crosshatch) marks need to be, room props and so forth. Going forward, I need to practice drawing lots of props. Also, experiment with line widths for background drawings.

Effects




One effect I've been focused on recently is what looks like a variation of the kirby crackle... But I've only ever seen it in manga. Either way, I love the effect and want to use it as often as possible. I practiced it once on a panel. This version isn't very confident. It was a cold run, and I've since practiced and studied the effect in detail so I'll be redrawing the panel. It was actually pretty simple.


So tonight continue to practice drawing these elements some more!

1 comment:

  1. Backgrounds are a ton of fun, but putting characters into them is a pain. I hate it.

    In the past I used to draw the characters first, then draw the backgrounds around them, which probably wasn't the best way to do it. Working the other way round is a heck of a lot easier. Can't wait to see what a full page looks like.

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