Let’s start with the upper torso (click to embiggen, of course):

Lower torso (crazy NSFW):

Legs:

Feet:

Arms:

Hands:

Faces (poor showing this week…):

A hand, which I fucking hated as I was doing it (see the colored commentary under it). Now that I look at it, not too bad. Once you look at it close up, the sloppy pencilwork shows… still learning how to render certain colors to grayscale… fingers should be longer to match the model… grumble…

Another foot. Better rendering, but still not as good as the first two I did:

Fun with prismas. The shadows aren’t as deep as I’d like because I learned the lesson that prismas look darker wet than they are when they dry…. still learning just how much they lighten up as they dry. Her forehead’s a little klingon too, too much face real estate in general….

A character concept for a comic project I’m doing for grins:

And then, fun with photoshop colors…

Keep the pencil moving people….

The most underrated illustrator of the last 30 years gets his due.

A lot of illustrators shot up the ranks of Marvel and DC in the late 80’s – early 90’s to become brand names in their own right. In many cases, well deserved, in other cases, not at all.

Despite strong runs on good titles (Cloak & Dagger, Spiderman 2099, Nightwing), Rick Leonardi never did.

And that’s total bullshit. He’s like Children of Men at the 2006 Oscars.

I could go into a history here, but I’m just not that versed. For that, I highly recommend reading Will Shyne’s translation of a spanish interview done with Rick at his blog Sunny Day Indoors. Good reading.

What I will go into is the quality of the man’s work. I’ve cherry picked a bit, mainly because the man is maked or breaked by his inkers and colorists (his Uncanny X-Men run looks like ass colored, a muddy, disgraceful mess). Regardless, these examples illustrate what Leonardi has consistently done best throughout his career.

First and foremost – LINE! His line work blows me away. There are no wasted lines at all; they convey form, depth and texture with economical choices of weight and curve. Check out the scans from Batgirl below, noting Poison Ivy’s knees and collar in the first panel, and the vet’s hands in the proceeding panel:

What else has he got? The ability to capture motion and convey the feeling and mood of it. His silhouettes express character perfectly. Check out joy:

Anger:

Violence:

Threat:

Heros on the move!:

On the storytelling front, his sequentials have a strong sense of pacing. There is a momentum. These next two are some of my favorite little bits from his sequentials. It takes us from a lull to a strong reveal:

And now for some full pagers. Talk about pacing:

Check out the composition of the pages below from Cloak & Dagger. First, a long vertical serene panel of a church scene, crosscut with another scene that changes angle panel to panel. A sense of urgency all over it. (love page 2, panel 1, makes you feel like you’re dollying in and tilting up at the priest.):

This is from my own collection of original art, which actually is only one piece of art and this is it. Have it hanging next to my art desk as inspiration.

Go back and dig for this guy’s work. I think his Cloak & Dagger run with inker Terry Austin is one of the most important of the 80’s. (And why the fuck can’t Marvel reprint those in black and white phonebook style?)

Currently he’s working as a fill-in at DC, and has been primary penciller on their Vigilante series.

Because wirebound sketchbooks just don’t stack evenly.

I really hate wirebound sketchbooks. Maybe hate is too strong, but it’s still a heavy dislike. Yes, they stack like shit. You have to stack them spiral one way, then spiral the otherway, and so on. Ugh. When you work in them, you turn the page, and the perforated paper in the spiral gets all smashed up, then it’s no longer a flush surface. Fuck that. The process of page turning gets all up in my workflow.

And then pad style sketchbooks… three words: desk real estate. Takes it over. Property values go south.

But the biggest issue: cost.

Here’s a breakdown from dickblick.com of different sketchbooks at list price:

• $5.50       50 pgs.        Aquabee Pen Sketcher’s Pad 8.5 x 11
• $6.65       24 pgs.        Canson Classic Drawing Pad 9 x 12
• $11.20     100 pgs.       Canson Heavyweight Sketch Pad 12 x 9
• $9.10       24 pgs.        Strathmore 400 Series Drawing Pad 9 x 12
• $10.20     30 pgs.        Strathmore Dry Media Pad 9.5 x 12

Figure about 15 cents per page. If you do a lot of drawing, that adds up. Especially if you compare it to cheap ass copy paper from Sam’s Club:

• $31.88     5000 pgs.     Office Impressions Multipurpose Copy Paper

That comes out to about .6 cents per page. That’s less than a penny.

5000 pages at the art sketchbook rate of 15 cents a page equals $750.

$750 > $31.88

Now, sketchbooks have good quality paper, no doubt. I like the tooth you can get with different paper types. But if I am sketching out some ideas, why would I waste it on good quality paper? I tend to go through tens of poses and silhouettes before I settle on a good thumbnail. Then I sketch little studies of different parts of the composition and anatomy studies of the characters and so on. Considering paper quality doesn’t matter in these initial steps, why use the good stuff?

Copy paper, being less than a dime a dozen, is built for exactly this task. You can pour through fiscally responsible sheet after sheet. But that ain’t the only advantage!

The surface has almost no resistance to any medium. It’s real smooth, and if you’ve read my other blogs, you know how much I value the weightlessness of a medium in the visualization stages of arting. The crayola markers work awesome here. Your ideas glide out. Drawing with butter and all that.

Cheap copy paper is also suited to tracing. I don’t mean tracing from photos, but from your own sketches:

And of course, it stacks very well:

Maybe I just don’t like the name ’sketchbook’. They should be treated like artbooks. When you draw on that quality paper, you should be doing some quality ass artwork. But if you’re just sketching out your ideas, save the cash and buy the copy paper.

A crash course in using line weight.

If your drawings lack depth and distinction, you’re probably not doing much in the way of changing line weights. And even if you do, you’re probably a little hesitant about going too fat with your lines. This exercise’ll get you a little less gunshy.

Get yourself a sharpie or similarly tipped thick pen and a micron, like a 02 or 01, or a ball point (i’ll be using a Pilot V5). I recommend using reference for this, something with a good amount of detail and depth, like a full body shot of a person.

Before starting, go ahead and draw your hand twice, once with the sharpie and once with the micron. Do not double back over lines to make them thicker – keep it all the same thickness. Make it as complete a drawing as you can.

Sharpie only, Micron only:

(Yes, I cheated a little on the micron).  Now, go back in with the other type of pen for each picture and render whatever you think is missing from each. As you do this, think about depth, mass and controlling the viewer’s attention. The eye is usually drawn to the area of highest contrasts…

Sharpie + Micron, Micron + Sharpie:

The one on the left, you get a sense of form from the heavy contour line. The one of the right, you feel the mass where the heavier line weight is.

So now you got the basic idea. I recommend starting with the micron because you get to build up your picture. I find it helps you learn to control attention, mass and distance more so than the starting with the sharpie. Again, don’t double back lines or modify the line weight of the sharpie or micron, and try to make as complete a drawing before you switch to the sharpie.

Micron first, Sharpie second:

I think I was more successful with the boxer than the dancer; I put too much weight on her thigh (by totally cheating with doubling the line) and it draws the eye away from the focal point. Compared against the following sharpie first drawing, these look more organic and natural in the use of line weight to depict mass.

Start with the sharpie now, then finish with the micron. Think about how to make the details you fill in with the micron stand out against the heavy lines of the sharpie. (I tend to make a heavy contour line when starting with the sharpie, and in my drawings in general, so this one’s good if you have the same problem.)

Sharpie first, Micron second:

While I didn’t double up the line, I did have to hatch the hell out of it to compete with the thick contour line. But the weight of the micron lines doesn’t always have to compete – the line under the thumbnail works because it is smaller that the contour and gives mass to the nail. Play around til you see what works and what doesn’t.

This exercise is more for beginners to get comfortable with line weights. For me, this was the spark in the kindling to go nuts with line weights. Occasionally I go back to the well with this exercise, but really, once you get in the habit of using line weighting, you’re not going to stop.

Tackling the three hardest parts of the human body: hands, feet and faces….

Hands are the worst, but probably after the face (and maybe posture), the most expressive part of the body. Did these after doing some blind contours, which usually solves my angular line problem…

Feet are deceptively tough to draw well, almost as tough as the hand, with which it goes hand in hand. Awesome play on words. Back to point, if you can draw feets, and toes especially, you can draw hands. And my scanner sucks, so the shading on the first foot is lost.

Faces. A woman’s face is the hardest to draw, especially in line. Dudes are easy, all cheekbones and brows. Women, a lot less to hang your pencil on. You have to develop an economy of line – overrender a woman’s face and she’ll look old or like a dude. More on the sex differences of the face in a later blog… Also, blind contour comes in handy! Did one right before the second face I drew to get familiar with her face.

See you next time.

Eye’s off your paper! The brussels sprouts of art class is back and it’s good for you, I swear.

Blind contour drawing. I fraking HATED doing these in high school. Why am I wasting my time drawing these freakshow elephantitus hands? Why do I have to do this in front of everyone? Everyone’s gonna see that I suck at drawing! I’ll just take a quick peek down…

I was a moron. Nobody cares. Photographers don’t show you every picture from a shoot, just the awesome ones. So if it really bothers you like it did me back then, throw away (or recycle) the paper after you finish.

Blind contour drawing’s an exercise. A vital exercise. And like holding horse stance in martial arts, you’ll never actually use it in real life. What you will use is the skills and strengths you develop from doing it.

Teachers will tell you how blind contour drawing will improve your hand-eye coordination. Ugh. Hand-eye coordination is one of those irritatingly general and ultimately nebulous terms, like scientist.

Now, yes, blind contour drawing will improve your brain’s ability to correlate visual input with the locomotion of your hand, arm and shoulder. However, that’s not the specific advantage of blind contour drawing (you could draw looking at your paper and develop hand-eye coordination). So what’s the advantage?

Two overlooked faculties of the human mind are kinesthesia and proprioception.  Kinesthesia is the body’s awareness of motion in the body and proprioception is the body’s awareness of the position of the body.  Both of these senses work exclusive of vision, but they are usually trumped by your vision. Take your ability to balance.  Balance is achieved when your brain combines proprioception, sight, and equilibrioception (inner ear). Stand on one foot with your eyes open, you’re probably fine. Close your eyes, and now your body has to rely on your sense of proprioception, and you’ll probably lose balance pretty quick. Now try the same thing while swinging your leg and see how good your kinesthesia is. In both cases, when your senses of kinesthesia and proprioception aren’t strong, your body doesn’t quite know what’s going on without your eyes, and can’t send the proper impulses to your muscles to establish balance.

The importance of kinesthesia and proprioception is that you can be aware of what your body is doing without looking. Blind contour drawing develops these skills.

But why bother? The less you have to look, the better you will be. Think of dancers and gymnasts – they don’t have to look behind them to make sure they’ve lifted their leg to the right angle to make a certain line. They know. The tools you use to create art should be wielded just as effortlessly and confidently. So when you’re doing a life drawing, you don’t have to look down as much to reorient yourself and you can spend more time studying the object you’re drawing. It also helps when drawing from imagination – I usually do all my sketches and thumbnails blind, or using my peripheral vision.

So grab some paper and free up your hand. I recommend using a felt pen or real soft lead, like a 4B. Start by just doing the outline of your hand in one continuous line:

Do a few til you feel comfortable to move on. It looks like shit, I know. Getting it ‘right’ can take hours or it can take days. Be patient, but not too patient. If your suckiness plateaus, it’s time to move on.

So if you’re good to move on, keep drawing continuous line, but start dipping in and getting some details, separating fingers, getting nails, etc:

For you advanced students, no more continuous line. I know some teachers say look down every time you pick up your pen/cil. I say that’s for suckas. Don’t look down ’til you’re done:

Remember, unless you’re the best artist since evar, these drawings will look like you drew them with your left hand (or right if you’re leftie, or foot if you’re ambidextrous). If you’re having problems, I recommend setting a timer, 30 seconds to a minute per drawing. Somehow a ticking bomb helps.

If you’re REALLY off mark with your drawings, I invite you to peak, but not look, at your drawing. No more than twice per drawing and for less than a second – a flick of the eye. All you want is a quick snapshot in your head. Don’t stare, and don’t abuse this little allowance, as it defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.

So find a recycle bin and get going.

Copic? Prismacolor? Tombo? Garbage. The best marker on the market only costs 44 cents.

Yup, Crayola markers. Not the skinny ones, the fat ones. I love these freakin markers.

First, the felt tip on these are the best on any felt tip pen I’ve ever used. They’ll give you a wide range of line thickness and have a consistent response to pressure. And best of all, they’re practically indestructible. Still got sharp tips on all of mine. Check out this sketch all done with a blue Crayola. Note the line defining her collar bone versus the line at the hollow of the neck:

The ink, while not waterproof (no felt pen is because india ink’s pigments are too big for felt), gives these markers a glide I haven’t found in any other markers. It’s like drawing with butter. The marker is weightless in your hand.

And that’s the biggest draw for me. The weightlessness helps to get ideas down fast before I can second guess them. The drag on, say, a 2H pencil slows me down too much, to the point where I will think about the lines I’m drawing. That’s no good. I use Crayola markers to do almost all my initial sketches. (Not to slight the 2H pencil, that’s usually my next step after markering).

Now, realistically, the Crayola marker isn’t in the same ballpark as the pro pens; you’re not gonna color with it like a Copic. But, aside from previzing your ideas, it works great for inking to scan for color. It rivals brushwork to me. And the marker can be ‘modded’ as much as any other marker. Dip it in water and you can make some cool washes with it. And dying markers make for awesome texture.

Crayolas are a great way to develop cleaner, more confident lines as well as learn how to use line weighting. Give it a try. It’ll only cost you 44 cents.