Drink N’ Draw N’ Doodles

Yesterday, I posted an illustration I recently did for the Facebook page for the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw group. Today, I thought I would post some of the rough sketches that went into the creation of that illustration.

The dimensions of the Facebook cover images are extremely horizontal, so I thought is presented an opportunity to cram a bunch of Drink N’ Draw participants partaking in the kinds of revelry that occurs at these events. Compositions that feature multiple subjects are not my strong suit, so I saw this illustration as an opportunity to push myself a bit.

The first thing I do with any illustration is to do some rough sketches. At the early stages, I am not generally concerned with the overall composition, I am more concerned with exploring ideas and elements of the drawing.

After the initial brainstorming doodles, I start to focus on firming up the composition. For this illustration, I ended up doing a lot more of these sketches than I typically do, because I really wanted to explore different combinations of characters and actions that they are doing. My rough drawings tend to be pretty rough. A lot of times, I am sneaking these in while I am out and about. Many of the drawings below were done in bars and during a business flight down to Florida.

Finally, I got a rough sketch that I (sort of) liked. While it was far from perfect, I thought it had the elements I wanted to move forward with.

As I said, the sketch wasn’t perfect so I brought it into Photoshop and made some rough corrections to get it close to where I wanted it. Some of these corrections involved pasting in elements from other sketches. With that finished, I printed out the cobbled together rough drawing and used a light box to re-draw in onto a sheet of bristol board. Typically, I use a India ink and a brush to do my linework, but for this one I was in the mood to ink it with my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. The final inked drawing can be seen below.

Next, I scan the inked drawing into the computer and clean up the linework where appropriate. I knew I wanted a limited color palette for this so I colored it with the two colors from the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw logo. Check out the final illustration in action at the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw Facebook page!