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Creative Breakdown: Evil Criticism
Posted on 30 December 2010
Today I’m going to go over a drawing I’m dissatisfied with, and instead of throwing it out I’m going to study it for positives. As well, although some people might like the drawing, I’ll explain why you shouldn’t by going over its flaws, and how to keep an eye out for them in the future. The tools I used for this drawing were a purple Prismacolor COL-ERASE pencil, and a .03 black MICRON pen.
To start us off and to save some face, I’m going to consider this thing just a doodle. The first thing I find wrong with this doodle is that the figure is somewhat awkwardly modeled. It feels as if there is a fight between a flat 2d drawing and a 3d drawing. The solution for this would to be spend more time on the gesture drawing and flush it out. I should have been more confident in his actual form instead of rushing into the inking.
On the left in the below illustration is an example of the gesture drawing used in creating this doodle, and the right is how it should have been done. When I was first approaching this drawing I knew I wanted the character to look evil, so I included as many jagged lines as possible. The problem with that approach was that this distorted my vision and caused me to forgot how important the underlying form is, which is what caused the confusion between 3d and 2d.
The drawing on the left is much more developed and flushed out. I used circles to create a better 3d feel, but still kept in some of the jagged lines to give it that evil aesthetic.
Now let’s move onto tearing apart my inking process. I feel the inking of this doodle is mediocre at best. As illustrated below, you can see that my line-weight is pretty consistent for the most part, which results in a flatter rendering. I illustrated the ideal line weight above for the highlighted part of the ear. There are many factors that I consider when inking, but the most important ones are to always consider the light source, and the more important the shape you are outlining, the more heavy of a stroke you should use. This results in a better silhouette and makes the drawing more legible.
The next thing I didn’t like in this doodle was how I conceived the light source. Usually I imagine all of my lights when inking a piece, but on this one my brain got carried away and just started adding unnecessary random lines, causing a very strange lighting set-up. The solution to this would just be to think more before placing my pen down.
The last thing I could have easily fixed would be the texture of the tongue. Instead of using a reference I just started stabbing my pen into the paper hoping I would get a good result, which was not the case.
Now saying that this is just a doodle, I refused to throw it away because I wanted to point out my reasoning behind “hating everything I create.” It is my artistic instinct to nit-pick every creative aspect of my life, but if I don’t benefit from this I would end up nowhere.
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