Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Methods To Your Madness: An Artist's Thread

How do you go about drawing a picture? Do you follow a certain list of steps, or do you just wing it?

For me, I have a certain set of steps that I follow, but I have two ways of getting there.

DOODLES
For me, doodles are anything I do on 8 1/2 X 11 paper or smaller, and are usually done on the spur of the moment and without much conscious thought. The majority of my artwork are doodles, and are pretty much born by my putting pencil to paper and seeing what comes out. I often don't truly know where I'm going with a doodle until the picture is done.

I almost always start by drawing the eyes, then the nose and mouth, and finally the jawline and hairline. If drawing men, I can usually finish off the hair at this point, but if drawing a woman then I wait because my women tend to have longish hair, and therefore how it's drawn will be determined by the upper body I draw.

From there, I extend down to neck and shoulders, then chest and torso. Last are arms and legs. Now, with doodles, the clothes are being drawn as I go along, which is probably harder, because I inevitably end up retouching them once the figures have some form of musculature drawn. Much of my retouching will occur as I'm inking (if I ink the drawing at all), which is probably dangerous since if I don't get it right the first time, there's no going back. Many a pic has been tossed out at this stage, since I can't seem to learn from experience and adjust my artistic procedure to accommodate

FINISHED PIECES
For me, finished pieces are anything I draw on paper larger than 8 1/2 x 11. There is sometimes a thumbnail done first to give me a guideline of where I'm going with it, and a small to large amount of thought and planning occur before I get started.

After the planning is done, I then do a general pencil outline: oval shaped head, perhaps with guide lines drawn for eyes, nose and mouth. The rest of the general body shape is drawn at this time, with muscles and whatnot added in. Once the figure is finished, I then go back to my usual steps: eyes, nose, mouth, then finish off the shape of the head. Then I work my way done the body to add in the clothes. Sometimes, if the figure is wearing a cape, I will actually draw the clothes beneath the cape first... even in areas that the cape will cover, just to make sure that anything that will show is going to be in the appropriate places. Then I will go back and add the cape, making the fabric flow as best I can over the figure that I've already drawn.

From there, I do all my inking, again stupidly doing my touch ups in ink, and then once that's all done, all pencil lines get erased.

And that's about it, folks. The methods to my personal madness.

Anyone else care to share?

Very detailed methodology PC, if I were to make a suggestion I'd say make sure your pencils are tighter before going over with inks - it's a shame you throw stuff out when it goes awry at this stage. There's always white-out, or you can just cut/paste in patches. (or if you scan your stuff, it's even easier to fix) Or you can just stop the drawing and leave it as unfinished -- there's probly good stuff there. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and all.

For me, I guess it depends on the original inspiration -- was there a pose or situation in mind, was I just doodling a character's face and it became something more, was there a certain aspect to the character I want to convey etc... Then I down a fifth of scotch and by the time I wake up the next morning, voila! Finished drawing!

I don't really have a concrete method, but most often if it's a rough sketch I'll start with watever I can "see" the clearest. A knee; a hand; a face; whatever. For a finished piece I usually go with Burne Hogarth's method of starting with the torso then adding the legs, arms, and head.

My biggest problem is that I get too wrapped up in the details. I wasted at least a half hour the other day drawing in muscles that weren't even going to show in the end.

For non-figure drawing, anything goes.

I normally roughly sketch the general body shape - chest pointing this way, arms in such a position, legs going there, face turned that way, y'know - then fill in the detail as I go over it again.... of course I loooove abstractions so my attempts are psuedo-picasso-esqe (at their very best) and never likely to grace the pages of any mainstream magazine ever... or be shown to anyone actually.... think I may try to do a serious picture now and I'll get my scanner working and post it one of these days.

Of course if DC were to publish a comic of contemporary twist on Oz Aboriginal x-ray art I'd be the grand master of the genre... think George Perez in ochre corpse and diagonal line.... yum yum!

No methods here. I'm not an artist. I couldn't draw a proper stick figure to show a police officer in a foreign land to save my life in an emergency. I just ... envy all of you bastards who can do much more than that. Just wanted to get that on record {g}

I may start "A Writer's Thread" someday, though. We'll see.

Yeah, I draw with words, notes, and treble clefs. Though this thread is very informative, as I wish I was a better visual artist.

Interesting topic, Crujeckie. I've had a bit of a creative rebirth of late, and have been more aware of my actual processes:

As it always did, it starts with pencil and paper. All my recent efforts would actually fall into your "sketch" category-- I've been doing my work on 9x9 pieces of paper I rescued from work for sketch scrap. Pov!Art-- It's enviro-FRIENDLY!

I usually start with a bubble for the head, and I'll run a center (spine) line from there. Over that, I'll bubble in the torso and pelvis. Then I rough out my arms and legs. If I'm working other elements into a picture, i.e. backgrounds or props to the figure, they generally get roughed in here, too. I tighten the pencils, reworking the piece and adding details as needed.

Once I'm happy with the piece, I fuck it up by trying to ink it -- historically, at least. But all my recent pieces, while inked, have been scanned and finished on my PC, which has been really freeing for me. I find I don't agonize so much about a permanent inkline, because I can rework my scans. And that's made my efforts at inking better, I think, because there's not the hesitation I used to have-- and if I DO screw up a line, it doesn't ruin the piece, because I know I can rework the scanned image.

For my computer work, I save the scanned art as a .bmp image, and work on it in MS Paint. Primitive, I know, but it fits my needs. When I finish the image, I'll usually resize and save it as a .jpeg for sharing with friends online.

At least, that's the way I've done it for the last week and a half...

Ever read Betty Edwards' book
Drawing on the Artist Within, Grey? It might change your mind about your lack of talent. (And it's about increasing creativity in all aspects of life, so it's useful even if your not very interested in drawing.)