The other day I received a few pages in the ol' E-mail for a Werewolf story that I was asked to do some illustrations for, and thought to myself, this would be a good time to go into a bit of my process for doing the pictures. There is no surprises here, or any ground breaking information, nor any divulging of any secrets.....it is read and think..........or at lest in my case read and doodle out what pops into my head as I read.
Any way, as I said, got a few pages of text that contained scenes for the illustrations and I printed them out to read. I know you don't have to do this and can read the words right off the computer screen, but I am really sort of old fashioned and like having paper in my hands. I also like to tote the things around with me and get to them as my schedule allows. If it is nice, I like to sit on my porch and do this, or in some cases if I have an appointment I carry them with me and do it whilst I wait.
{ The pages were really good for me and the way I like to work as well, there was detail, but just enough to give me the impressions of the illustrations, but also not so much as to limit what I see .......... I will work with whatever is presented me, but really like this combination and the freedom of interpretation }
The printed page also allows me to doodle right on the page as I read.............
........I am pretty sure there are programs and what not that allow you to do this as well, but like I said........I like paper in my hands.
So, now I have my initial doodle and idea down on the PAPER, I move onto a more "tighter" rough and play with the composition more if I feel the basic idea needs improvement ( or if I am told to by an AD or whomever I happen to be working for at the time ).....
... in the above photo I took my original idea and played with it some more. In this case I wasn't totally happy with what I jotted down, it didn't quite "feel" like the scene to me, so I played and felt I had it in the bottom thumbnail and proceeded to move on...
The two doodles in the boxes are the ideas I went with to move onto my inking .... (I will talk a bit about the other two in a few when we scroll down to it) ........ the bottom one is really fairly close to the original concept I scribbled onto the page with the text, and as you may notice the other has changed from the initial rough to more like the secondary doodles. From here I went on to do a bit of inking.........
... and ...
..........so I was really happy with the drawing and the inking of the second picture here, but still felt something wasn't right with the top one.......not too bad of a drawing in itself, but really sort of sucked when I looked at the She-woof I did just after, so I went back and re-read the text and found a clue...
( CLUE )
... once I found my clue, I went back to my paper and did some more sketching...........remember the other two drawings on the page.....
I moved the thing from her wrist to her waist sort of like my clue said, rearranged her on the page and bingo, I had something I liked better and felt right as well.
So now that I am feeling better I drew out the image from the bottom left onto a piece of bristol and have my pencil ready to ink............
.......which we'll get to later, but until then that is my process, and as I said there is nothing ground breaking in it, just good basic reading and comprehention and translating what I read into a picture....ILLUSTRATION!!!
