Bolt Thundersmite- Dwarf Cleric- My Illustration Process in 5 Steps

Art and words by David Finley

 

 Today we're going to take a look at how to construct a drawing of Bolt Thundersmite, Dwarf Cleric of T'oerr. Bolt is a character from a fantasy adventure called, The Adventures of the Sudsy Fist Expedition Company.

Step 1: The Sketch

So, It's usually a good idea to start out with a loose sketch to get a feel of the character, work out line flow, and give the picture as much energy as you can before it goes to the computer. You'll notice we angled the sketch here so the action flows diagonally. 

 I like the loose and powerful energy of the sketch, so we should really try to retain that as we move to the next step.

Step 2: Line Weight, Inking, and Spotting of Blacks

 Next, we'll take the piece into Adobe Illustrator and begin our "inking" process. This is a meticulous combination of using the pen tool to get precise curves, and working with a combination of Illustrator's brush tool and your stylus to get a less perfect line. A word of advice: Too much precision zaps the energy away.

 If you don't have a digital stylus, no worries. Your mouse will be fine, but it might take a few more passes to get the lines you want.

 The heavy areas of black on the mountain, and in Bolt's mouth serve to anchor the composition or give "weight" to the drawing. In other words, you'll give the eye a resting point as it moves around the piece, (this process is known as spotting blacks)

 As we digitally ink our hero, it's also important to vary the line weight, or thickness of line to give our character more dimension. If all of the lines are the same size, the viewer's eye can more easily pass over our image. We want to lock them in with some variation.

Step 3: Flat Area Coloring

 Now we'll need to make some color choices for our character. For our colors, we'll take the image into Adobe Photoshop. Bolt wears plate metal armor, but we don't want to just color it with a simple, boring desaturated grey. Instead we'll use tones of purple. Purple just feels a little stormy.

 We'll vary the light and darkness of the purple to give his armor a pieced together look. And for his cape, boots, and leather straps, we'll also use purple, but make it more saturated, dark, and rich to differentiate it from his armor.

 Since we're using purple for the main character, we'll contrast that in the background with purple's opposite color, yellow. A yellow sky also makes a nice choice for a storm because it's not the color sky we'd necessarily expect.

 In this stage, we'll also go ahead and crackle up our lightening and give it a glow so we can see how our color choices will look with it. This glow effect can be achieved by duplicating the lightening in another layer in Photoshop, and blurring the lower layer a little.

Step 4: Coloring Your Lines

 This step is optional and really comes down to personal preference. Colored lines do tend to look a bit more dimensional since they don't weigh the eye as much, but if you want to keep your lines black, just skip this step.

Step 5: Highlights and Shadows

 This is where it gets really exciting. The shadows and highlights are really going to give dimension to our hero.

 It's important to remember that the lightning is striking overhead and behind Bolt so he will be mostly back and top lit. As you ad shadow, you'll want to saturate your colors a little more, but be careful not to overdo it.

Bonus Step: Background Contrast

 This is technically still part of step five, but here we'll add a few more shadowy areas to give our storm a little more muscle. You could add some highlights here, too if you'd like, but be careful not to draw focus from bolt.

And there you have it. Oh, and just for fun, here's another version of the colors that adds even more drama with a darker background.

 Just remember to have fun out there and most of all, happy drawing!

-Dave

Tutorial: The Adventures of Punky and Bucket in Graffiti Land

Words and images by David Finley

Greetings, Scofflaws!

Today's post is a tutorial explaining my process in the creation of this piece below.

A little over a week ago, I posted an article depicting a scene from a parody of Mary Poppins I am writing. If you would like, you can look and see some concept sketches and visual development on the characters from that previous post by clicking, here.

Today, I am going to follow my article up with a series of images involving those same characters, and explain the process I use to establish the visual look for this story.

With this particular drawing, I sat down with my sketch book and some markers putting down the first thought that came into my head. I enjoy sharpies because they don't allow me much room for meticulous detail or careful planning. They are powerful and bullish on the page, often bleeding into the paper. I don't have to care that the resulting drawing is crude and ugly, as long as it does its job.

At this point, the drawing is not even close to being polished and I'm not completely happy with the body language of the characters, but it establishes the tone and humor I'm trying to convey.

I've added lines of action, which are imaginary guides that control the directional flow of the eye across the picture.  

In my reworking, I tighten up the body language of the characters. I want the robot to be more delighted, upright and alert with his lines of action pointing the viewer to the wall behind him. The cat has good southern-belle characterization in the sketch, but I want to draw her lines out further to add grace and elongate her body lines.

Here you can better see the directional flow the lines of action give the piece. They are positioned to lead the viewer's eye in a pattern of direction ending with the robot's cane.

Now it's time to open Adobe Illustrator to tighten up and "ink" the linework.

 

The result is much closer to my original vision. I've also redone the background. It is still seedy, but I've taken away the needle and trash to avoid stealing focus from the graffiti that will be placed on the wall behind the characters.

My result is cleaner, and slightly more dynamic. The lines used to render the characters and the water curve and flow diagonally, giving them a more kinetic and moving feel, while also contrasting with the heavy and stable vertical line of the pipe, and simple and at-rest horizontal line of the ground.

It is also important to mention line weight, or the thickness of the lines. Thicker lines will bounce toward the eye faster than thinner lines. Balance is key with this device. It is important to use both thin and thick lines to avoid visual monotony. Thicker lines should be used to anchor, while thinner lines are useful for detail, and contrast.

Power to the People.

 At this stage, I insert the graffiti into the background. It was a lot of fun to design and create this graffiti myself. Because the graffiti is so kinetic and visually active, we do have the unfortunate problem that it threatens to bury the main characters and steal focus.

I then change the color of the graffiti from black to blue, which helps, but doesn't totally fix the problem. We want some focus on the graffiti, because in a sense it is a character, too, but in it's current state, it is still a bit too powerful.

We'll try to fix that with some simple color and shading choices.

Very Gene Kelly.

You'll notice I've added a dialogue balloon to complete the punchline.

The first color treatment I apply is an analogous, or blue tone color treatment. I really like this look, and I am tempted to keep it. It creates an old fashioned, and nostalgic feel that aids in portraying the innocence of the characters, but the characters are still getting just a little lost.

I have added color to the foreground characters, but have retained the monochromatic treatment of the background elements. The blue background color scheme contrasts nicely with the oranges, and reds used on the characters.

 So, there you have it. The result is clean, and dynamic with nice color contrasts. I would still like to find a way to use the monochromatic color scheme, but this is just a concept drawing and there is a lot of room to shift..

Thanks for reading!

Tutorial: Composition and Influence

I created this tutorial originally for another blog of mine, but have since decided to only keep one blog. I've long wanted to do an entry where I explain a piece of my work, my influences in creating that piece, and my process.
I'd like to look at one of my fine art drawings for this lesson today. This work is a mixed media collage/ drawing consisting of mostly charcoal, ink, white conte', matte medium, and charcoal paper. There are also staples and pieces of scotch tape in the piece to add depth and texture.

I've titled this piece, "The Quiet Man", which is also the title of a John Wayne movie that I enjoy.

I like to go to the library and study what other artists have accomplished when approaching goals similar to mine. Since, I wanted to do a piece about the horror of hearing loss, I needed to find a piece of anguish. The most notable influence on this piece is Pablo Picasso's "Guernica", which captures the horror of bombs being dropped on a city.



The distortion of figure and the flow of catastrophic movement really transfixes the viewer . You can't help, but have a reaction to a piece like this. However, I didn't want to just copy Picasso's technique, so I attempted to divine which portions of his work were the most effective in their communicative properties and drew my influence from that instead. In other words, I needed to find a way to express the emotion of his work without stealing his techniques.

I also wanted to consider what more contemporary artists were doing to express more shadowed emotional content. Two artists in particular really stood out to me: Kara Walker and William Kentridge.

Walker's work, with its projected backgrounds and silhouetted figures creates a disturbing story that is very real despite its fantasy elements. She tends to rewrite history, creating a confederate south that never really existed, but still spoke to the truth of the era. Walker's use of silhouette creates mystery. While the projected background enables the audience to further enter into the work itself,casting characters onto the scene made by their own silhouettes.

Here is an example of her work:


William Kentridge is a South African Artist who constructs short films out of charcoal drawings that he photographs, erases, and redraws repeatedly to form stop motion animation. His works are usually politically charged and disturbingly haunting. The erasure of the charcoal creates ghostly leavings of old mark makings.


Because "The Quiet Man" was to be about my own father, I wanted to create something meaningful. I had abandoned the idea that my art should be pretty and instead embraced the raw and disturbing beauty of uncorked frustration. I've long had a sense of inner turmoil over the gradual loss of my Father's hearing. It doesn't seem fair that the man who raised me, taught me, and who I know to be so intelligent and brilliant to be treated like a lesser human being, a child even, by those he can't quite understand in conversation anymore.

Initially, I was so caught up with the idea of shocking the viewer, that I embarked on a rather impersonal and shocking project about the world having its hearing stolen. I even did some sketches you can see here of the horrible fate being visited upon the people. Unfortunately, it was all rather dramatic and impersonal.

This just wasn't right and it didn't really get down to my true sadness, which wasn't hearing loss itself, but rather the lonely life my Dad has to lead because of his disability. It seemed risky to get so personal because I never had before. I always stayed just a little bit aloof even from my own work. However, immersing myself more honestly enabled me to express myself through art more effectively then I ever imagined I could. This is the first drawing that I've ever done, that caused me to cry because of it.

I decided to do charcoal drawings like William Kentridge, but put my own stamp on it by mixing matte medium with my charcoal underdrawings. This created a painterly effect, bringing forth deep rich tones. I added contrast with black ink and white conte'. These were done atop cut out pieces of paper because I wanted the piece to be three dimensional, even if it only a millimeter or two above the base surface.

What I started with is a simple drawing of my Dad, sitting on a couch in my living room.


I chose to draw a scene set in my own living room. What better way to effectively describe the alienation my Father, than by incriminating my own family? By accepting the blame as someone who inadvertently treats my Dad in the very way I've come to despise and resent, I could also express an even more personal emotion about this situation: Guilt. I felt guilty because I couldn't help him, and if anything, I make it harder for him by not accommodating his situation a little more.

I used a classic triangular composition to keep the eye moving around the page. The piece is weighted toward the left, where my brother's gaze will even slide you off the page, but there are directional cues to bring the eye back. This compositional slide creates tension because there are elements fighting to draw the eye back. Eventually, despite the chaos, the gaze of the audience moves toward the solitary figure of my Dad, sitting quietly on the couch, with his hands cupped together. His body language is very closed and non-communicative. He gazes somberly back to the left, which leads to my family.

On a side note, I think it is important to tell you that I wanted my Sister to be the link to my Father in this piece because she herself is also losing her hearing. That's why she stands "higher" both physically, and also symbolically, as she can not be held in guilt of the crime of alienation. I rendered her with tape over her mouth to express that she is not caught up in her own words and interests like every one else.


I also used the three male characters as "tent pegs" of sorts to anchor the composition. This also enforces the triangular flow that I want the eye to follow. Below I've highlighted the triangular flow in red. Note the run-off on the left side of the page. The three blue boxes highlight my tent peg anchors that keep the composition weighed down. These weights serve the purpose of giving the eye a focal point to occasionally rest on as it travels around the page, which can sustain the viewer for longer periods of interest.

The piece is in shades of gray, lacking the warmth of color. I've accentuated and distorted the anatomy of the characters, particularly the mouths, almost grotesquely, to make these characters almost monstrous. I want you to sympathize with the lone figure to the right of the page once you get past the horror of what is going on.

 I hope you enjoyed this long and exhaustive explanation of my own artistic process. I'd love to hear any feedback on whether this was an effective example of my process, and if it helped anyone in their own studies.