Planning a picture...

[eller]

...or: Textmarker Sketch From Hell. Posted mainly for yhlee's amusement.

This is one of my sketches for this mermaid ATC, and it has occurred to me that, yes, I posted a step-by-step of what I did on the finished piece, but nothing of the work that goes on the side, especially when it comes to planning that picture in the first place.



For this thingy to make any sense at all, you need to understand that, basically, there are two very different concepts of "sketch". One is simply a very fast drawing that is still somehow supposed to render an object. (I have posted such sketches for example here or here.) The other is... preparatory work for something that's happening on another piece of paper. And that's what we're looking at here.

Things you can observe from comparing this scribble excellent sketch to the actual mermaid painting:



- This artist clearly dislikes preparatory sketching and/or is pretty confident in her coloring skills. She's put the bare minimum of effort into a composition sketch that nevertheless contains most necessary compositorial information, and/or she belongs to the school of thought that too much detail in this kind of sketch distracts from and weakens the overall composition.
- Line dynamics. (Even with no detail at all, you'll notice that not much about mermaid or fish changed when you compare it to the finished picture.)
- Actually: some missing line dynamics. The stillness created by the curved-but-mostly-parallel water plants was clearly a later addition! (This artist likes to improvise. LOL)
- Areas of contrasting colors. (The fish in the finished mermaid painting are not just objects providing a "warm" color splash in front of a cool background - they're part of a whole wedge of warmer color.)
- Weird dark area in the upper right. (I also retained this in the finished painting: basically, I drew extra attention to the mermaid's face because I considered it important. Unfortunately, it wasn't going to be the lightest part of the picture - that was always going to be her tail - so I exaggerated the shadow in order to create a secondary focus point by value contrast there.)
- No shadow planning beyond the second-focal-point thing. From this, you can conclude that this artist is either hopelessly overconfident in her imagination of shadows or (more likely) did that in another sketch she already lost because it was also on a piece of crappy note paper that's already thrown out. XD
(- Corollary: this artist will be instantaneously kicked out of any serious art academy should she ever try to apply with this kind of sketch work. LOL)

Comments

[yhlee]

This is really neat, thank you! I think I should start color-thumbnailing digitally - I find it helpful for lineart where I can easily duplicate layers/erase/undo to try different ideas.

[eller]

Heh, maybe! :) Just don't fall into the trap of adding too much detail at this stage - it will water the line dynamics down. Also, ideally, a color sketch would be done in the same medium and with exactly the same pigments that are going to be in the finished picture. In this case, I didn't do that, which may have been because I did this on the tram and I'm probably somewhat overconfident when it comes to color (XD), but... Yeah, maybe use some suuuuper cheap watercolor paper to try out different ideas? I mean, drawing the few lines takes half a minute, anyway, so doing it digitally won't save much time...

[aliax_alexandre]

*takes dutiful notes*

Thanks so much for those explanations! They're so much fun to read, and instructive at the same time. The best!