DAY 2

Book Sketching Day 2.

Still working from Alim Le Tanneur volume 1.

Picked a page that was not as busy. At least -that had less characters on it. Still ran out of time. Stage 1 blocking in panels and gestures took about 10 minutes. I made a bigger effort to keep this stage simple. Yesturday I blocked in some basic shapes along witht the gesture. Basically, I added volumes for things like the torso etc. Today, I tried to avoid this and only work with a skeleton type gesture that showed the hips, spine, shoulders, head, arms and legs.

Stage 2 adding form (volume) took another 10-12 minutes, and then the last stage took almost 40 minutes, but I still ran out of time. Realizing I was running out of time when I got to the 3rd row of panels, I made the decision to focus on the characters and leave the background alone. As I got to the last panel of the page, I started to go back and do a bit more of backgrounds.

As far as backgrounds go, I am eyeballing the perspective. I know its not perfect, but right now it's good enough. I plan to spend more time with backgrounds in a few months when I am more 'warmed up'. ha ha.

Today I really tried to be conscious of what my purpose was in each stage. Especially during Stage 2 -where I tried to think of complete forms and draw through even where there was overlap. When a person copies, there's a tendency to want to only copy the what's shown rather than really drawing forms.

It's a bit messy doing this, so a couple of times, I erased a bit -to help me keep things clear after I drew forms on top of each other. a good example where you might see this is in the 2ND panel of row 2 , where the man is hugging the little girl. I drew the man's torso as a full shape (rounded box) then put the cylinder arm shapes over top. It was getting messy, so i erased the inside of the arm shapes so they could pop out and help me see the relationship of the shapes better.

Stage 3 was probably the least thought out as I was rushing to try and finish. For this last stage I basically went in with a pen to try and define the details. Because most of these were left out in the earlier stages I just had one shot to make these work. Sadly, I don't think I did a great job. Tomorrow I will probably try and block in some of these details (especially Eyes, fingers or other key details) before I go to use the pen. Hopefully, that will allow me to have 2 chances to work out the relationships of the details to the bigger shapes.