Structure Drawings

All my drawings begin with lots and lots of gestural drawings like this. Often there's a certain energy lost in the translation when I put the structure drawing under the light box to tighten it up, so I thought I'd share them here.



If you've been following my blog, this is a bit of a repeat, but for those of you who are new to my blog, here's a little rundown of my process:

I do a lot of these, on cheap 11x17 bond paper, so I don't feel so bad about wasting good paper. I can just draw them as freely as I like. Then I tighten them up on the light box, scan them, and print them out in blue onto stiffer bristol board. I tend to use the cheaper recycled kind, and have discovered no particular advantage is using the more expensive stuff. Then I ink it up, scan the inks, and select out the blue so that all I have are the black lines. This saves a lot of time and clean-up, compared to my old method of inking directly on the pencils and erasing them when I'm finished.

I usually do backgrounds separate from the figures, but do thumbnail roughs of the overall composition so I know where everything should go. Lately I've been assembling all the pencil drawings on photoshop before printing out the individual pieces in blue line, just to make sure everything's working the way it should.

Then I add color using scanned watercolor textures, and whoolah! All done. Though this one might be a while yet.