Dragons in Progress, Part Two

Picking up from my last post. . . .

Below and side-by-side are the pencils and the inks for the piece.  I mentioned I keep my pencils rough to allow for a more spontaneous and enjoyable experience in completing the drawing as opposed to just tracing etched-in pencil lines.  That allows for a certain amount of freedom, like in changing the intended Moebius-style clouds in the pencils to the Franklin Booth-style explosion of clouds I ended up drawing straight in ink.

Another freeing element of my current work flow is the freedom it grants me to make mistakes.  If the Booth clouds didn't work out as planned, or if I messed up any other portion beyond my ability to fix on the board, a fresh page of the pencils and a restart is ready to go after printing it again.

I've had a few discussion with other artists and dealers who think this work process is creating some confusion among collectors.  In many cases there's a finished page of inks available from the inker and a finished page of pencils available from the penciller and some are thinking the simultaneous existence of both versions work to reduce the value of both pieces.  I get that, but I come down on the side of the inker as having the more intrinsically valuable piece since the comic book was reproduced from that work.  The pencils, in this case, are merely a by-product of the process.  In my particular case, the pencils often don't exist in a finished form.

Were someone to ask, the pencils for this piece exist as two partial drawings on 14x17" sheets of Bond paper and the contents were altered even before being printed off.  I have sold them to interested buyers previously, but they're not things I'd carry around in my portfolio to sell at conventions.  As such, the only finished artwork I ever produce is the inked drawing, meaning there are no competing versions of pencils and inks.


the digital colouring is something that's becoming more a part of the conceptual process as I work.  When inking I knew very few of the lines would remain black in the final piece, particularly the lines describing the clouds.  However, I'm now drawing elements in ink that I know will become colour elements in the finished piece.  While inking I had a memory of a flock of gulls flying in the wake of a sail boat on Lake Ontario;  the sky behind the boat and birds was full of slate grey clouds, but the sun was still shining brightly making them bright white specks.  Here I drew the birds in black, but them "painted" them white on the line art layer.  The process is becoming more like painting as much as anything else as I go.

I should probably mention some of the compositional devices I use as I wrap this up.

I usually start thumb-nailing my ideas with one or another of two compositional frameworks; a grid divided into thirds (often called the rule of thirds) or a fibonacci (or golden) spiral.  I'll save a discussion of why these structure work for another time.  For this piece I started with the grid as it's easier to visualize when placing shapes at a very small size and is less reliant of the overall proportions of the picture.

As you can see, the general placement of shapes lines up with the grid without slavishly following the lines.  This composition also follows a backwards "L" structure as well.  I used to teach a course in design and composition, so this stuff interests me more than most, I suspect.

Some of you may have digital cameras with the grid option for the viewers and I think Corel Painter has both the spiral and grid as tools in their more recent versions of the software.

This should be available as a high quality, limited edition print through The Outland Collective shortly.

Dragons in Progress, Part One

It's August and my turn to do one of the monthly full-colour pieces for the Outland Collective.  

I've been incredibly busy these past few months, so this came up at the wrong time and was completed a few days later than I'd have preferred.

I thought I'd start off by showing some of the development work.  I started off with around 30 or so tiny idea thumbnails, legible only to myself, so scanning and sharing that wasn't worth it.  They tend to be very simple, geometric scribbled about 1x1.5"  so I usually end up with 15 or so a page.  For a while it looked like I was designing a landscape format (wider than tall) image, but along the way I liked the idea of the clouds rising high from the sea and the portrait format took hold.

When I felt I had the shapes and idea relatively pinned down I did my initial sketch:

I do most of my development work on translucent bond paper.  I can and do often will take one sketch and place it under the next blank sheet and start sketching different elements or variations of things in the previous sketch.  As a result I may end up with several pages of paper with just parts of the composition sketched on them.  The one above is the most complete of them for this piece.  At one point the rocks were crumbling giant statues, another it was a woman and a sabre-toothed tiger lounging in the shade, and another there were dozens of dragons swirling in the sky or perched on the ruins.  Lots of variations, but working this way it doesn't take very long.  

When I was younger I didn't have the patience for the the planning through numerous sketches;  as soon as I thought I had the idea I started drawing and I often drew myself into troublesome problems.  I learned the hard way that an extra hour in planning at the start saves many hours trying to save an  image falling short through compositional or my drawing ability.

Since this image contains so many small elements, I decided to cut the sketch in half and printed the parts out each on an 17x11" sheet of paper so I could draw these tiny dragons, figures, ruins and the boat nearly twice the size I would eventually ink them.  Whenever possible I draw at a comfortable size, which means I may draw something very large much smaller to better control the perspective or proportions, or draw something that will be very small considerably larger so I can get a better gesture or pose to work with.   It may just be me, but I find it more difficult to draw good proportions, suggest costume or clearly show the action when drawing figures an inch or smaller so this is my work-around.

So this would be considered very rough pencils.  I scanned the top half of the page and. . .

 . . . then scanned the bottom half.  I assembled the piece in Photoshop then took another look at the image.  I moved elements around, while flipping the image horizontally occasionally to see if the composition held up.

When I was happy with what I saw on the screen, I converted the image to CMYK, cut the pencils and pasted them into the cyan channel before selecting the now-blue layer, C&Ping again to float the blue drawing and reduced the opacity to 21% and printed it on to 500 series 2-ply plate finish Bristol

A few years ago I stopped doing tight pencils when I realised I was just making the drawing less fun and more tedious from having to draw everything twice.  Now, unless the elements are particularly complex, once the structure of the drawing is solid (by my standards) I'm more than happy to start inking.

When I share the inks you'll see that a number of things changed once a pen was in my hand. . . .

~R