Thursday, October 16, 2008

How practice makes. . .pretty good.

You'd think after designing characters professionally for years, things would start to come naturally, right? Well, you're. . .probably right, actually. But I'm too thick-headed to learn that fast.

I started with this great mental image of a warty-necked (pronounced nekk-ed) witch. I always expect that when I have a good mental picture, drawing it will be easy. Unfortunately, there's a disconnect between the picture my imagination thinks is cool and the drawing that my eyes have to reluctantly accept as the best I can do. I drew this character about 12 times before she started to look okay, at best.

A few positive lessons I learned, though:

- Drawing the same character over and over seems to always help

- I've created a brush that allows me to procrastinate design decisions until the image is nearly finished. There's nothing like reinforcing bad habits.

- Chicken scratch drawings can be forgiven if nobody ever knows they existed. Oh, whoops.

- Witch hats look stupid if they are blowing the opposite way of travel (maybe that's why my son drew his witch flying backward?) Apparently my kids already have a better grasp of physics than I do.
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9 comments:

  1. Dennis Jones5:15 AM

    ...Wow...a magic Halloween brush that allows you to procrastinate and still get the job done! ...is there any way for me to get one of those?

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  2. pibby6:59 AM

    Good Job! Thanks for the post.

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  3. Marilyn7:52 AM

    That's a good bunny.

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  4. Unknown12:05 PM

    drawing the same character again and again does help. But when is the time to stop redoing it?

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  5. Sam Nielson12:22 PM

    Dennis: It's pretty simple actually, just a Round Tip Pen in painter with the minimum size taken all the way to zero. Just a warning though---it only allows procrastination in that it's really easy to redo things---it's not going to make the process take less time.

    joonasjoonas: Ideally, when it's finally great. In my case, when you get tired of it.

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  6. Aaron Ludwig1:28 PM

    I love posts that open up the brain of the artist a little bit (like this one). Thanks for sharing your process!
    P.S. Are you teaching your digital painting class next semester?

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  7. Sam Nielson9:00 PM

    rabidmilkman: I hope so, but don't know yet.

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  8. SteveLambe3:16 AM

    Definitely can't argue with the final product. That's a damn fine witch.

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  9. Unknown6:48 PM

    Glad to know I'm not the only one who suffers from that frustration..thanks!

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