How A Drawing Happens
| My friend Rachel Barenblat has asked me to do a drawing for a personalized Haggadah she is preparing. A number of her artist friends from around the country are contributing artwork for her project.
So as long as I’m doing a new drawing anyway, I thought I would document the successive stages involved for the benefit of those folks who are always asking me how computers have come to affect my way of drawing.
No, I don’t use a Wacom tablet and stylus yet, although I have to say that many of my cartoonist friends are getting really impressive results by going entirely "paperless" and drawing directly into their computers. As you can see from what follows, my own drawing goes back and forth, into and out of my PowerMac G4 at least twice before it’s cooked.
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A
Outside the Mac: I do some initial sketches in pencil on typewriter paper.
B
Outside the Mac: I place a sheet of vellum over my pencils and do slightly tightened ink sketches. (Notice how I’m not yet worrying about how the elements will be grouped. That comes next.)
C
Inside the Mac: I’ve scanned my ink sketches. In Adobe Photoshop I separate each figure onto its own layer so that I can use the move tool to play with ways to assemble them into a satisfying composition. Sometimes I will reduce or enlarge a figure slightly. When I’m finished I print the result onto a new piece of paper.
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D
Outside the Mac: I tape the printout onto the back of a sheet of Strathmore Bristol board and place them both over a light table. 2-ply Bristol is translucent enough to see through when light is behind it. I then trace my sketch onto the Strathmore in pencil and ink it. I don’t yet bother filling in black areas or fixing the small flaws that in my pre-digital days would have called for white-out or pasted-on patches, because these final corrections are much more easily made, once I erase my pencil lines, if I scan my newly inked "finish" so that the drawing is back…
E
Inside the Mac, where Photoshop’s tools make it a breeze to bring my drawing to completion.
If anybody has questions or remarks about this process (which is not necessarily the best one, just the one I happen to have arrived at from my experimentation), toss ‘em my way. As anyone knows who has spent time at my web site’s Cartoonists Corner, I have pedagogical tendencies that are way out of control!
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This entry was posted
on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Shop Talk.
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March 12th, 2006 at 11:45 am
This is so neat! I’m fascinated by the insight into how you create your work, and it’s especially cool to see how this particular piece came into being.