Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Drawing? Oh yeah, I learned that once...

Hello, everyone. This is Lee checking in from the Crescent City. Many of you met me last December. Hell, some of you might even remember me. I was a guest critique-er for your comic projects in Digital Adventures as well as your final book project for the Junior Studio. Though I am primarily a designer (with a slim knowledge of illustration), Mike seems to think that I may be of use in this little experiment. I too will be participating in the projects so that, in effect, I will be serving two purposes at once: (1) to critique your work, and (2) to make you all look better by posting my poor excuses for illustrations.

Now then, I haven't drawn on a regular basis at least since Barbaro roamed the earth, so instead of investigating too many approaches up front, I decided to just do some sketching of Mr. Elvis Costello. Below, you can see the two approaches I was taking. The marker approach... well, the marker approach sucks, but the other approach (uniball micros, as it were) has a bit of promise.



And yes, by "promise" I mean there were a total of two decent sketches, one of which looks suspiciously like Jack Nicholson despite the fact that he was nowhere near my apartment during this process.

A while later, I managed to churn out this baby.



It isn't perfect, but it's better than I expected to achieve on day 1. I like the look and feel of it, so I think I'm going to stick to the pen and ink approach; however, I still need to determine what he'll be doing in the image.

So, my question to you all... any thoughts on the last image? Any illustrators I should check out if I'm going to continue with this approach?

2 comments:

John Hendrix said...

Your last image is the best one up there. Better focus on the proportions of his face and not just the nooks and crannies. What about something like David Cowles?

Victoria Schwab said...

I'd like to see how you're going to play with line weight, especially since he has those glasses. The rest of him could easily disappear (for better or worse) behind them.