All about the process

At deviantART there's a tag going on where an artist gives away 10 free pieces of art to the first 10 people who comment on their journal entry. The catch is, once you sign up for your freebie, you must post the tag in your journal as well, and do 10 free pieces of art for the first 10 people who comment on your journal entry.

For whatever reason, I signed up for a piece from clickypenpixie, so I now have 10 9 pieces of art (I drew one already) that I owe people. I actually signed up to encourage Andrea, because she's a really talented traditional artist, but her account is filled with mostly photographs. Frank (~Lefthanded) signed up, so I decided to draw something for him that I'd already been planning to draw, and in the process, challenge myself as an artist.

It starts with this drawing I did of Frank's characters, Symon and Rose.

Before I finished the final inking of this drawing, I was inspired to draw a follow-up piece, depicting what happened after this picture was taken of them. I thought it'd be good practice at drawing more dynamic figures, since pretty much everything I draw is characters standing around. So I sketched it out.



Hmm. . .There's so much that went wrong with this sketch, and only a few things right. One of the "right" things was Symon. Rose, on the other hand, I wasn't happy with at all. She's too big, her anatomy isn't right and I didn't know how to fix it in a subtle way, and the interaction between the both of them just isn't right. After much deliberation, I resigned myself to completely redrawing Rose, though I put a lot of effort into saving the initial version. I had drawn her whole body, but I cropped it to minimize how horrible the original looked.

Here's where the benefits of technology come in. So I wouldn't have to draw over the outline of the erased figure, I scanned the sketch into Photoshop, then erased Rose's figure, then turned Symon's pencils cyan, and printed them out on a sheet of acid-free card stock paper (much cheaper than Bristol).

I proceeded to redraw Rose referencing from a drawing that Frank had done a few years ago of the two sparring. I had never seen this drawing before, but it really helped to inspire me.



The redraw came out a lot better. The blue is the original with Symon, and the red is the redraw with Rose.



Finally, I inked it using Sakura Pigma Mircon pens.



After I finished inking, I realized there were a few inconsistencies in Rose's attire, but I like the second version better. I simplified her shoes. The detail was pain to draw the first time, and I think it was a bit distracting.