Draw lightly
I drew 2.5 pieces of fan art this week.
I painted these two on January 15. One of them has a slightly different facial expression, so it counts as 0.5 pictures. I tried to do a simple "doodle" for the fan art, which was a cute costume in a video game. Even so, it took me half a day to draw this. I'm trying to figure out how to finish it so that I can make and post more pictures like this one.
And on January 19, I posted another color illustration with a well-drawn background. See this river! However, I forgot to draw a few things, so I added them the next day. You can see the latest version in high quality on “Detail” link and Tumblr!
Looking Back
This week I challenged myself to do some light illustration. I had just written about this in my illustration review notes. I will review those notes.
I created this fan art as a celebration of the addition of this character's voice in the game.
This illustration has no background. And the shadows are drawn with few tones. In the past, I would have said, "This kind of illustration would have taken me no time at all, and it would have been done without any burden. And I have made many mistakes with that idea. The way to avoid making mistakes when drawing a picture that looks easy is not to make it easy. I learned about this while I was working on this illustration.
When I began working on this illustration, I still expected the task to be an easy one. I did a few rough sketches, erased them, and repeated the process. I was waiting for an accidental rough draft that would be easy to finish and look good. But no such rough will appear
That's when I finally realized. I can never know if a good illustration will turn out just from a rough sketch. And there is no easy way. All I have to do is keep working on the roughs and keep drawing.
I chose one rough. In it the person had a normal standing posture. This is different from when I was trying to be fancy by randomly drawing various poses. I proceeded to make changes to that humble rough sketch. Wrinkles in the clothing, detailed facial expressions, etc. By adding things like this, the quality of the illustration improves. There is no easy way. Illustrations that looked easily completed were not easily drawn. They were completed quickly because the backgrounds were not drawn.
I had always assumed that it would be easy to draw because it was a lightweight illustration. But that is not true. Doodles, often called "rkgk" by Japanese illustrators, are no different from tightly finished illustrations. This is something that could be called a technique to speed up the process by omitting cleanup or cropping the area to be depicted into a smaller size.
KuniKuni