I've been trying to find ways to increase my drawing and rendering speed, which on one hand is a direct result of workflow, and the other is related to anatomical and art style knowledge and experience. I'm quite comfortable with where my artwork is going and the workflow I've been using is relatively swift and consistent, however I still find some problems with anatomy that can only be addressed by further study. I did a fair bit of that, combining what I'd learnt with style development: I prefer semi-real, almost caricatured art styles for my characters, so that was something I wanted to implement into my own work.
I have loads of pages of sketchbook studies - still to be scanned - which I'll share in a later post. When I was doing these studies I chose to go straight to ink on paper, skipping any pencil sketching phases in an attempt to gain confidence and efficiency. To a degree this worked out for me: by making every mark count, I found myself becoming more careful and thoughtful before putting pen to paper. Although there were a TON of bad drawings during this process, there was some visible improvement along the way.
When I next went to create some drawings using my digital workflow, there were some improvements in speed and execution. Here are a few of my earlier attempts at injecting some style into my characters. The focus of these attempts was mainly on linework and sketchy value explanation rather than character design or tight rendering.
The main problem I found while doing these digital sketches was that I was trying to come up with characters from imagination, without any prior character design iterations. This slowed the drawing process down a little, as I was trying to find shapes and designs I liked before committing to design.
As a result, I considered how I might be able to further increase my output speed. The first set of sketches were pretty swift to make, taking only an hour or so to get from sketch to refined lineart, so I knew my technique was getting quicker. I figured that basing my next set of drawings on existing character designs might be a good way to focus more time on technique rather than having to worry about coming up with interesting designs on the fly.
For that reason, I decided that drawing up some super-heroes in my style might be an interesting idea. I've never really been all that into the Marvel or DC comic universe, but there's no doubting that their characters are well designed and I later found out that they're actually quite good fun to draw too. I made a point of making each day count for this exercise, so over the course of a few days, I used my morning warm-up session - before essays, other projects etc - be about drawing up a different character.
To try and increase the time I had to focus on technique with these drawings, I made sure that I didn't think too much about the colouring stage - I was thinking more of a graphic design perspective with each illustration and kept things relatively simple. The result was fairly successful, I was able to get some experimentation in lineart techniques (even the sketching phases were an improvement for me as I had a little more time to focus on trying to get things right first time - although it didn't always work out too great in the end).
Following this exercise I took a step back and began to re-evaluate my work. While I was sticking quite closely to my lineart style from before, seeing it in this simple form made me think that might lines were a bit too cartoony... I'm trying to mature my artstyle in one way, while playing with stylised character designs, so I needed to rethink that aspect.
I decided that for the next character, I would place a bit more emphasis on the thought process behind the illustration. I thought Thor might be a good character to draw next, so did a quick bit of visual research to see what the trends in his design were. I gathered that he is often portrayed as a handsome, musculature hero figure - as most of these characters are - so I decided to rough him up a bit and age him a little to emphasise that roughness. Scars upon his face might be a good way to get across the point of him being a warrior too.
With this in my mind, I started thinking about my art style and how I could improve that. The first thing I realised was that I had grown out of the bold lines... a number of artists prefer to use more refined linework for their drawings and I've always thought that style looked more improved upon mine, so I thought about implementing that into my work.
Secondly was my colouring style: I would generally just lay on the flat colours, some gradients for colour variations, then finish up with cel-shaded shadows. It was about time to evolve that style a little and adopt the comic-book colouring technique (which is fairly similar, but with more highlights applied to add volume to the otherwise quite flat cel-shading). It was pretty easy to implement this new technique into my workflow and I quickly adapted it to fit. Here are the results of that exercise:
So in summary, my linework overhaul worked out well - I'm really happy with the new look of that stage. The additions to my colouring technique worked out ok too, I think. I like the process of the colouring technique as it's technical, yet fast and fun. As for the final result of the colours, I think there's a bit more I could add to them in terms of values, but the end result is far better looking than my previous cel-shading efforts, so that's something I'll be using more of in future.
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