EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE

Sketched this out yesterday. It's pretty slight but there were three things I wanted to achieve - 

I've been poring over EDUARDO RISSO's beautiful artwork lately. I'm fascinated by artists who aren't afraid of using huge areas of black and Risso is a master. I can never figure out how he manages to keep a pose so clear by using silhouette or shadow but he never fails to amaze me. There's never any confusion or lack of clarity so I figured I'd do something simple and see if I could I sell it in the same way.

Risso says "what?" one more time...

100 Bullets

He's also an extremely graphic artist. Hard shapes. There's not a lot of rendering or cross-hatching. Mostly just clean lines, broken up with clever use of black and white. (100 Bullets is just fantastic. You should go hunt down the trades and read them all right now.)

The second thing I was toying with was using photo reference for the pose. I found myself frustrated by my inability to beat the drawing into where I wanted it to go. Couldn't figure out the poses and eventually scoured the web for something I could refer to. And here's the thing - I felt like I was cheating. I can be too much of a purist when it comes to this stuff, I guess, and with myself too. There's a streak of pride that says I should be able to draw this stuff from my head and if I need help, that's a cheat.

But I like how the drawing turned out. It's not like I just traced a photograph. It's been altered and repositioned and reinterpreted and y'know, if I wanted to draw a 1973 Dodge Charger it's not like I'm going to pull that out of my head, now is it? When I worked in feature animation, all we did was use live-action reference for human movement and posing.

Then by some weird coincidence, I saw THIS ARTICLE this morning about using photo reference and now all's well with my world again. Need to give myself a break sometimes...

The thing is, now I'm asking myself why I haven't been doing this before...? Feel quite inspired now to try new things.

The third point was this sketch was initially supposed to be Fiona Apple but it's a little too generic looking to be her. Next time maybe. Needs some quirky.