Day 22 of drawing. RWBY Volume 1 Soundtrack - 8. I May Fall

An incredible number of people (2) asked me what my process is. One, I think, because they can’t believe I’m doing this. I mean - I get that. I haven’t drawn since the mid 00’s, and have spent the whole month trying to go from “I don’t remember where I left my pencils” to “Yeah, that’s kind of how I remember drawing in the 90’s.” So, yeah. How do I draw like this? College, maybe 10 years of cartography and typeface work, then 20 years in the graphics and press industry helping people print their mangas or working on post production and rendering, then maybe 10 more years of auditing classes at the Minnesota College of Arts and Design every semester. Perhaps 8 years of ‘life drawing’ where you just sit in a freezing room with a nude model and a pro artist smacking you with sticks when you get it so wrong it angers them … then a year of doing pinup for a porn company and maybe 6 or 7 years of doing my own web comic and a little tiny bit of pro work for a Canadian Furry publisher.

So … I think that’s why I’m like this.

For the other person, I do start with a skeleton, but it’s mostly ‘Where’s the eyes? Where’s the ears?’ That tells me where the clavicle is and thus the shoulders and the sternum is right there, which gives you the rib cage, and thus the hips drawn in like boxer shorts, and then the knees have to be ‘Sailor Moon’ distance from that and the feet are I don’t know kind of down there somewhere, and make sure you don’t do anything symetrical. Hate semetrical with all your heart. Don’t even learn how to spell it. Then breasts are muscles that attach to the rib cage around the sternum, and don’t forget boobs have volume and muscles equals arms and then the hand is out there hanging like a big pizza pie.

I do work with ‘shapes’, sometimes more than others. But a lot of time I just kind of stroke the pencil until I get a line that feels right, and then I draw it harder and darker and then I put another piece of paper on top of that and draw it again.

And then another piece of paper on top of that and I draw it again.

Then I sleep on it, get another piece of paper, and draw it again.

Then I wonder if the clothes are hanging right. Is the hair in the right place? Am I on book for the eyes, the mouth, the hair? The clothes? Ponies have cutie marks, gotta remember the cutie marks.

Then I post it here.

If this was paid work, then I’d do at least another week of sleeping on it, and completely drawing it from scratch each day until I had a stack of maybe 20 to 30 possible images that I’d all scan in then composite in PhotoShop grabbing the most ‘good’ out of each drawing.

And … that’s it. Basically smash my face into it until it looks right.

This thing right here? This is me trying to “get” how the characters should lay out, which means I already have an idea of perspective and where the viewer is, and what the general look and feel of the image is.

Is it a-symetrical? Yes. Yes it is. Because fuck symetry. People aren’t sametricals.

I’m … maybe? Going to make the deadline. It’s the 30th so I have today and tomorrow at least to finish composition, and to see what I can do with coloring. Composition I think I can do, but coloring? Wow. That’s a whole different learning curve.