Assignments 2 & 3 - Developments, Technique and, Choosing a Style.

One of the most important things about being an artist is having your own style. Something that demonstrates to the viewer that the work is yours, and not someone else's. I have been researching about techniques and styles of drawing, but I felt like I need to work out my own way of doing things.

I like to start, with a blank piece of good quality cartridge paper, preferably in a4. I then like to use a very sharp H pencil, to start making some loose lines very lightly on the page. This is to mark out where my drawing will eventually be. I feel I need to under draw in light pencil first to check the design before it is made concrete in pen, or ink. 

When I have the drawing finished in pencil, I like to double check it by holding it at different angles and looking at it in a mirror, this is an old trick I learnt in art class at school. It allows you to see your work from a different way, and you can change any parts you feel look strange or not right. 

I then take a medium nibbed pen (0.3mm black ink) and draw around and over my original pencil drawing. I try to get this motion to be as fluid as possible, if there's a curved section, I like to draw it all at once, using the movement in my wrist. With long straight lines, I tend to pull the paper with the pen underneath. In my experience this has proved to create the straightest of lines. 

Then I take a good quality hard eraser (I think the large oval ones from WHSmiths are best) and I carefully remove all of the pencil lines. After I make sure that non of the ink has smudged or rubbed off. Its important to me to get the page looking neat before moving onto finishing the drawing.

Now, its the 'fun' bit. I take a thicker nibbed pen (0.5mm black ink) and roughly, bit still quite neatly, thicken up any areas of the drawing that I feel need to be thicker. I will also draw in any detail that needs to be thick, and colour in any pupils of the eyes. I will swap this pen for a ultra fine one (0.1mm black ink) and start drawing textures onto the lines, such as feathers and fur. Feathers are made by series of U's and fur is just a lot of tight lines moving in one direction. I finish by drawing any little bits of detail that I feel needs to be added, Sometimes I feel like I've ruined an image by adding too much detailing, so this is something I wish to avoid in my future illustrations.

I then scan them, and upload the .Tiff files into Photoshop. Its important to scan as a .Tiff because it isn't a degrading file type. You will not loose information the more you save the image, like you will with a .Jpeg for example. When in Photoshop (Cs5) I then make the background whiter, the lines blacker, and remove any dust or bits I didn't like. I might straighten a few parts, and generally get the image as good as I can with this form of digital post production. I can then print from these images, saving them as a flattened .Tiff and then as a .Jpeg, for internet usage.

I have developed this technique on my own, and feel that it works well for me. Its kind of an amalgamation of what I've learnt from research, put into a way that is adapted to my own artistic needs.