Drawing-of-the-Day 17
Here’s another character from my doodles of last Sunday night, turned into a finished painting. I tried an experiment that was suggested to me by my mentor today — inking direct on the light-table from a sketch onto a new piece of paper. I’m currently sketching the graphic novel on cartridge paper (kind of like regular bond paper), planning to transfer the messy sketches in pencil more cleanly to the watermedia paper I plan to use. However, I wasn’t looking forward to all that tracing, then inking, then erasing the pencil lines for 64 pages. The suggestion was to ink directly from the sketch, as seen through the light table onto the watercolour paper. This made me a bit nervous to contemplate, but it certainly would be a huge time saver if it worked!
So I tried it with this little guy — I had to scan the tiny sketch and blow it up to print, but it worked very well. I was able to do minor editing over the copied sketch beneath my working paper, just as I would if I had traced it in pencil first. And look, no erasing! I’m sold.
Feline Swashbuckler — Pigma Micron pen, watercolour, Pitt White pen
Here’s the little sketch I worked from:
Feline Swashbuckler sketch — pencil
I’m so happy to have learned this, and had a successful experiment — it will save me hours and hours and hours!
Karen Gillmore Art 
He looks really great! Did you use watercolour with paints and brush or watercolour pencils? It is very interesting to see the changes you made in the final illustration. I haven’t got a light table up to now – I am using the window pane…
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Thank you, Ulla! I used regular watercolour and brush for this one. I’m trying to determine which is faster, the pencils or the paints. I think the pencils are actually slightly faster, but I won’t know until I do a timed experiment. But there are also the results to consider, of course. So many choices!
Window panes are great, if you aren’t having to do a lot of tracing, but I would get a crick in my neck if I did a whole project that way. I actually just upgraded to a bigger lightbox so I can see the whole page at once — the current project is 64 pages, and when I thought about trying to monkey around with a too-small work surface for that long — well! My studio has a really good window for tracing. But it only works in the daytime, and I work a lot at night, another reason to have a light box.
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He looks so debonair! Me-yow! 🐹
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He is quite the dude, isn’t he? I’m going to have to build a maquette of this one, I think.
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