Realism

Now that the protagonist felt real to me I realised that the 'cartoonish', simplified look I had first drawn him with would lack gravitas in the story. Therefore I realised I would need a more realistic drawing style.

Achieving this would prove to be the hardest part of the project as my personal style was quite flat and basic. I began to research drawing realistically and how to bridge the gap and improve my style. Especially when drawing fictional characters this would be complex. Parks (2003), states "One of the main reasons for people being unable to draw realistic people and particularly faces is that they are almost pre-programmed to recognise and reiterate learned patterns and therefore all noses, eyes and so forth are drawn exactly the same regardless of character" (p75). This was very much true for my drawings, as I looked at them, I noted that a lot of the characters faces were drawn the same way. In particular my last project 'Wylde', I looked at critically from a drawing point of view and realised that it was only the protagonists' hair that made him distinguishable from the other characters faces.

I began practising using the techniques I had learned in my research. One of the most beneficial things that I had discovered was that if I intended to conceive the character in colour, then I needed to let the color and shade do the majority of the work and keep the line-work to a minimum.

For the realism, I started to use a number of new processes and new software.

The first of these processes was doing rough line-work for my concepts on paper in ink/pencil and then scan the work and do a second tighter version. This system is utilised by many comic artists, the roughs are used to figure out angles and compositions and the finals are done digitally.

I also started to learn Adobe Illustrator to make the line-work that I did use smoother and sharper as working from pen/pencils scans often left me with rough edges. At first the software was quite difficult to learn as it was a very separate entity to Photoshop, there was no easy erase system and very few tools. However, after a lot of practise I began to get to grips with it and my line-work improved greatly. Though this was not the way I previously worked I wanted to adapt to this new system as soon as possible so that it was in place for the concepting of my final piece. Hitch 2010, states "Every artist I know has a different way of working and develops their own solutions to problems as they learn." (p10). I had found my own solutions and I now needed to adapt to them as the status quo.

Below is an example of my pencil-scan line-work compared to my Illustrator lines.

Many comic book artists such as Marvel's Joe Quesada (2011) and Sara Pichelli (2011), now only work in digital form and even do their roughs digitally. Below is a short video of how Pichelli works her lines digitally.

Pichelli is a good example of an artist who uses economic lines, this was a style that I wanted to try and emulate but with a more realistic content.