Thursday, January 28, 2010

Drawing or Just Reading About It?

I’ve been doing a lot of pencil-and-ink-wash pieces lately. Here’s a snippet from one featuring a princess:



When drawing this one I did something i hadn’t done for some time: I pulled out an old drawing book. The one I looked at was Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. I’ve had this one for almost as long as I can remember and, while it doesn’t really “make drawing easy” as it says on the cover (nothing makes drawing easy), it’s still a handy reference for the illustrator working in pencil or ink.

The other thing that I’ve been working on is the story for the second Zita the Spacegirl book. This means drawing stacks of thumbnail pages in an effort to get the story all out on paper in rough form. My thumbnail pages are scribbly and have a sort of manic quality to them, so I’m always tempted to scatter them all over the room and pretend like I’m a reclusive mad inventor.