Monday, September 22, 2008

Lines, lines, lines....



It seems to take me an age of working out till I can start to see the finished lines. 

I remember in a Steve Rude Sketchbook there was a section where he'd put some of his older work.  In it you could see a mass of lines underneath the more finished drawing. His newer work had far less of these preliminery lines and he said that he had just come to a point where he knew where to put the finished line.

I'm hoping at some point I'll suss it out too, for now it just seems I have to draw a ton of lines until the drawing starts making sense to me. What I've put up here is an initial rough from my sketchbook that is pretty small. I then blew this up to the images print size and light boxed it through in blue. Again though I need to do a load of work to start to tighten it up and when I blow this upto artsize I still think I'll need to do some more before I can ink it, it's a hard life eh?


7 comments:

Lee Townsend said...

This is looking good Dylan great stuff! I have to do the same thing myself, I just can't take the chance on messing it up in the later stages.
See you in Birmingham!

Alan said...

Thanks for posting this. Very honest. Yeah, those guys who just throw down loose pencils then do it all in the inks - oh the envy.

dylan said...

Cheers Lee and Alan.
Alan it's not so much the inking over loose lines it's the way Rude gets to the tight line in his drawings so quickly, there doesn't seem to be much fumbling round to find the right line.

Roberto Zaghi said...

Dylan, these pencil looks very good to me - we have 7 characters each in a different/realistic posture, that necessarily means a hard work to get the drawing ready to be inked.
When it comes to draw such scenes I usually have problems in keeping the right proportions between the chairs and the table, and between foreground and background... sometimes a movie still helps!
Thanks for sharing.

Alan said...

Got you. Rude's line-quality is amazing. Although I recently came across a post (I think Comics Reporter) about a roasting he got from his idol Alex Toth over some pages of Johnny Quest he once pencilled. Quite amusing.
I agree with Roberto, your tighter pencils look great.

Alan said...

The Toth/Rude ruckas is linked at the "Drawn" blog

dylan said...

Thanks Roberto and Alan.

Yeah I remember that Toth critique, I think he made a lot of valid comments but was also a little harsh in places, but I spose if you're as good as Toth was you can say what you like lol.