Still Life Page 2 Timelapse
Added 2023-05-08 11:41:31 +0000 UTCHere‘s a timelapse video of the pencilling process for page 2 of Still Life. I drew the story, as most of my work these days, in Procreate on an iPad Pro. I have worked digitally for many years as I really like the flexibility of it - I often draw quite improvisationally, without doing a lot of pre-planning with thumbnails, and so it is good for me to be able to adjust and redraw easily. You can see that I drew the large first panel of the artist’s studio without having established the lower half of the page. I knew in my head what was going to be in panels 2-4 but I work on instinct much of the time and didn’t find it necessary to pre-plan this page. I invented the details of the studio mostly from imagination, you can see where I roughly sketched out my impression of the shot and then refined it with extra layers.
For this story I wanted to draw quickly and loosely, with a much rougher line than in most of my previous comics work - I have come to really like the 6B pencil in Procreate rather than the clean ink line that I used previously. more and more I am finding texture in my linework appealing rather than the sterile “perfection” of clean ink.
Comments
Thank you! It’s largely intuition. I find that perfectly precise perspective is not always necessary - I follow the general rule that as long as it *looks* right to the eye, it *is* right. Obviously for certain shots - depending on scale, detail, etc - there’s more room for error if you just wing it completely, so for me it’s often just a panel-by-panel judgement call on whether I will use a grid or not. I frequently flip my canvas to look at it in reverse, which is a really good way of seeing blatant errors. Perspective guides are very useful and I encourage you to use them, but once you’ve done it enough, I think you internalize it and don’t have to rely on them every time. I drew this story a couple of years ago, so unfortunately I don’t fully remember the process, but I know that I sketched it out by intuition, and then used a perspective guide to slightly refine it. You can also see the degree of perspective shift a couple of times, I believe that I wanted a slightly more extreme angle downward so I just transformed the entire panel to narrow the bottom and widen the top. It’s probably not mathematically precise but the shot ended up looking how I wanted it.
Cameron S
2023-05-09 09:11:40 +0000 UTCBeautiful work! I was wondering how you approached the perspective, is that intuition, based on experience or do you create and work from a perspective grid that wasn't rendered in the time-lapse?
Chris
2023-05-08 23:59:36 +0000 UTC
