1 November, 2012
Moleskine Doodles 11.01.12
Recently, I have decided to change the way I approach doodling. In the past, I would fill a page with a random assortment of doodles (similar to this and this). Now, I am trying to fill each page with one particular drawing. The drawings above are an example of this new approach.
I would still classify these drawings more as doodles than sketches. While some of the drawings may have been inspired by elements in my surroundings, none of these were drawn directly from live subjects. As a result, they still have a bit of the stream of conscious quality that my old doodle pages have. That makes drawing these a great way to unwind after a long day at the day job.
These drawings were done in a small Moleskine Cahier notebook while I grabbed a bite to eat at Ceia Kitchen + Bar, a great restaurant just around the corner from me in Newburyport. Kudos to the gang at Ceia for recently being named one of Boston Magazine’s Top 50 restaurants!
10 July, 2012
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!
