Art Journal 034: Sketch Styles

Every page I’ve ever drawn has started with a sketch phase, to hash out my ideas and block in what I want the page to do, which goes without saying at this point.  But while this has always been the first step in my process, I’ve had a couple different approaches to actually doing it over the years, so this week I’d like to highlight a couple different ways I’ll sketch a comic.  I’ve made pages in all these styles over the years and they’ve all branched off into offshoot ways of drawing.  I’ll also try to explain why I made my choices and what the benefits were to the different ways of doing seemingly the same task.  So with that out of the way, let’s get to it!

Way back when I started making comics my resources were an old laptop and a 5-inch USB Graphire 4 tablet.  I ran a copy of Photoshop 6 or 7, I forget which, on my laptop, and with its available memory it could run that and Winamp and not a whole lot else.  Because of this hardware limitation I also made my first comics at 72dpi, and kept the painting work pretty blendy to cover up the blurriness of the lower resolution.  At the time my sketch phase was also my inking phase- I would scratch out my figures and just blob in my dark tones on a layer underneath.  Back then I used a black hard-edge brush where my tablet’s pen pressure controlled line width and I treated it much like a ball-point pen, often scratching in my figures with lots and lots of short little lines.  This is the reason the earliest pages of my comic look as rough as they do, because the inks and sketches were essentially the same.  The benefit to doing some hard-pen sketches is I could capture the gestural energy of a sketch and just erase out the stray marks. It’s also very quick to produce an end product, since once you’re “done” you’re done.  The drawbacks to this method were how rough and unfinished it actually looks- this is an aesthetic thing but it generally looks pretty unfinished.  It was a good starting point but eventually I moved on.

For a while, beginning after my first or second color section, I started using my sketch method listed above as an actual sketch method, and I began going over it in proper inks to keep everything looking cleaner and sharper.  This worked out okay for a while but I soon began running into problems, mostly stemming from the black ink and the fact that I was using a solid brush to sketch with- often when trying to block something in in perspective I would end up making so many lines, all uniformly dark, that I had a hard time telling what was what when it came time to ink, and even though I used a lighter opacity on my sketch layers I missed a couple gaps painting black inks over lighter-black pencil marks.  I made a couple adaptations to my sketch technique which on the surface seem pretty minor, but the little details make all the difference!  

The first problem I addressed was visibility: since my eyes were getting lost in the grey pencils I started drawing in a peachy red color which was softer on the eyes, and that problem was solved!  Black shows up very clearly over a red, and the inks are even clearer when I lower my sketch layer’s opacity to 30% and ink on a separate layer above that.  I chose this particular shade of red as my sketch color because it had an organic warmth and it made my drawings feel more alive as I drew them, especially compared to the coldness of grey pencils.  The second problem I addressed was my pencils becoming a confusing mess.  Because I used a brush where pressure sensitivity controlled line width all my sketch marks were the exact same opacity, so every stroke of the pen blended in with everything else, and this made making block-in marks a big headache.  I later discovered I could set brushes to control opacity with pen pressure, and I made myself a custom brush that uses opacity control with a tiny bit of line width variation to basically simulate the pressure-sensitive lightness of a real-media pencil.  With one brush setting I could softly block in my skeletal shapes, go over rough features lightly and then apply more pressure to get darker lines where I wanted to add emphasis.  Sometimes even that isn’t clear enough, so where I want to add an extra layer of clarity I started using a separate blue color as a pseudo-ink mark to draw cleaner lines over messier red sketch lines.  This is a good way to make things clearer overtop of a noisy area without having to erase anything and is especially handy once it comes time to ink- there’s been many cases where I’d scratched in a hand as a blob of thick-lined fingers which in the back of my mind I knew how to make sense of but when I’m inking I start wondering what I was thinking.  The blue lines are just my extra layer of precision, and overall this is still how I sketch my comics, or really anything at all, to this day.  I’ve always used this shade of red and blue for years and years, and just have custom spots for them in my palette file, but any two colors can work, and the reason two colors works great for sketching in Photoshop is you can hit the X key to swap your foreground and background colors, and easily switch between two values while you draw with minimal fuss!

For a while I had a bit of trouble getting what was in my head to make sense on a page, and I ended up doing lots and lots of draft sketches I ended up throwing out, and wasting a lot of time with no real results.  My traditional sketch technique works great until I can’t wrap my head around something, and in those cases I came up with an alternate approach to drawing sketches in abstract positions.  Instead of starting purely in line and framing shapes that way, what I did instead was I took my pressure-opacity brush, lowered the opacity on top of that and just blotched in shapes roughly mirroring the silhouettes I wanted my figures to have.  I made my brush size nice and large, and I use varying pressure to indicate fore- and background shapes without getting too specific- the shins in the middle drawing above is a good example of this.  I didn’t think too much at all about the details, I’m just really gesturally noodling in where I wanted my figure to be.  I was focusing too much on little details or nuances in shape so I divorced myself entirely from those details by working in pure abstraction of shape in broad strokes of a big brush.

Once I had my figures blocked in as a light blotchy brush shape, I’ll go in with my traditional pencil brush and sketch overtop of those shapes, using the blotch layer as a rough guideline for how I wanted to build my figure.  It might not seem like much but just having the space defined before I started sketching helped my brain more easily make sense of the lines I was making and the depth of field I was working in.  As shown in the above examples, my sketches end up coming out much cleaner in one go when I work this way, and I can block in a nice natural sitting pose. I don’t have to adhere entirely to the blotch marks, they’re strictly a suggestion, but they make the first steps into actually drawing my figures much more informed than if I were just drawing fresh onto a white piece of paper.  I started using this method in my comics in the Omnimart arc, specifically on a page where Lizzie was unbuttoning her workshirt to give to Alice (page 350).  I sketched my comics in this way for a while after this point, but after a bit I became concerned that I was going to develop a dependency on these shapes and my ability to free-draw in real media would wither without using a light-grey alcohol marker to simulate the effect, so I consciously went back to drawing in lines.  This was probably a baseless concern, and I probably learned a lot about visualizing depth and form from working in this way, but it was still a thought I had and I haven’t drawn this way too much since, even if it was pretty useful.  Since I tried it out in drawing these examples I might start using it again whenever I get stuck on a difficult composition. It was useful at the time, there’s no reason to let that experience go to waste!

The last method of sketching I’ve experimented with was actually from a time when I tried working without an ink layer in a bid to save time in my comics and to try for a more painterly aesthetic.  This sketch method was an evolution of the blotchy shape method, where instead of blotching in a rough silhouette, drawing a figure over it and then inking on top of that to paint behind it, I’d cut right to the chase and use my mid-tone grey to paint in a fairly precise silhouette of the figure I wanted to draw, and then I’d just go right in, ctrl-click that layer in the layer window to select active pixels and paint the details inside the silhouette, erasing and trimming the borders wherever I saw fit.  I’d use my eraser and block in a pair of eyes to help give me an idea of where I was pointing my faces and just paint over those holes later, but aside from that I just went full-silhouette and went with it.  I started using this method just after the second musical scene (page 484) and while I liked the look of it, I ran into some difficulties: namely, working without outlines didn’t save me any production time, it actually took me even longer to make comics!  Since I didn’t have any internal outlines I had to be extra conscious of my value contrasts defining shapes where previously an inked outline would have sufficed, so my painting had to become even tighter to compensate instead of just skating by between the seams.  I ended up switching back to the current ink-and-sketch method to actually save time after my first attempt at saving time cost me weeks more time than I wanted, but I never actually abandoned this silhouette method.  Whenever I want to do a fast painting sketch this is the method I fall back on, blocking in a big silhouette and then painting on top of that, and it’s become one of my favorite ways to just freeform-paint for fun in between work contracts or comic pages.  

As time progressed and my comic evolved, my needs evolved as well, and I’ve always been conscious not just of what I was doing, but the how and why of it as well, and I’ve always kept an open mind to trying new approaches to solve new problems.  A drawing’s sketch phase is a foundational element, and there’s no single hard-and-fast way of doing it; you can tinker with how you sketch things in many ways to suit your needs, or even come up with an approach you’ve never seen someone else do before, and if it works it’s one more tool in your toolbox to bring out in your work or just for fun.  These are a couple ways I’ve handled sketches in the past, and I can’t say for certain that I won’t have some new technique to try out in the future.