GearHead: Issue 3, page 6

Been a while since i posted a full page, so i thought, since this is a non story-give-away page, i'd throw it up for y'all.

I have a tendency to just breeze through pages like crazy. Most guys usually spend a minimum of 6-8 hours on a given page... This might be a case of shooting myself in the foot, but i rarely spend more than 5 hours on a page, and more often than not 4 hours is usually where I top out at.

I started this page a little after 2pm today, and finished about 5:45pm.

Thing is, I was taking my time.

I dunno, I have always been of the Dave Sim mantra of "get good, get fast"... After my two year sabbatical from doing much drawing after I got out of the Kubert School, I picked up drawing pages again, and found that it was taking me a minimum of 12 hours to do a page, and most things were taking me over 20 hours to do. This was for stuff that is way less detailed and far simpler shots than I have been doing lately at a much faster rate. I found that, over time, I began to do more of my drawing not so much in the finished line but in the rough layouts and rough pencils, so that when it came time to put the finished lines down, I began thinking like an inker and using one line, instead of the sktch sktch sktch of multiple lines making up one line eventually.

Making decisions like that not only forced my confidence to improve, as in getting the line right the first time, but also made the process of drawing go so much faster than I had even anticipated. It's been awhile since I've done so, but I have found that now, I can easily do 3 pages in one day, and not suffer from any lack of quality or content.

A lot of the drawing process for me is about learning, and refining, and unlike most artist's, I am not about the finished product. Any reason for me to do a page, or any other finished drawing, is in the process, the layouts, the rough pencils. By the time I get to putting down the finished line, I have reached the end of the lesson, and am merely executing the sum of the things that I have learned from doing that page combined with the knowledge I had going into that page.

I have found that if I were to spend more time on pages, the end results would not change. The pages that i spent 20 hours on, while having a certain amount of charm to them when I peruse them now, do not have any thing more to them than the work I do now. In fact, the work I am doing now has, I think, a lot more life, action, and detail to it than before.

I dunno, most of you looking at this sight wouldn't know much of that work anyways. I'm sure some of it can be found by digging through past posts, if one were so inclined.

Anyways, was thinking about that while drawing this page. Was also thinking about the nature of how i draw a line... but that's for another day.

-K