i’ve always liked to draw – since i was a very small boy.  but even though i developed a pretty handy knack for it over the years, recently, my skills have fallen into disuse and i’ve often wondered whether i’m any damn good at it at all anymore.  last year i made it a new years resolution to do more artwork, but that was an abysmal failure, as i only managed to do two drawings, one of which i was pretty ashamed of for its highly personal nature, and the other, i’m still working on.

so this morning, when my cats got me up super early for a saturday (8:30am), i turned to my computer and stumbled upon some youtube videos of one of my favourite illustrators, adam hughes, demonstrating his sketching technique.  and i got all fired up!!

hughes is probably best described as a pin-up artist – a guy who principally does comic book covers or posters or one-offs – and his subject matter is almost exclusively sexy young women with gorgeous, gravity-defying, back-breaking breasts.  i love his work (partly for its subject matter but) mostly because he has a dramatic use of line, an unerring sense of proportion (breasts excluded) and perspective, and his  exceptional use of foreshortening and composition.  the subtlety he places in his subjects’ expressions and situations are brilliant.  and he even did an excellent print for the local comic joint, the silver snail, which is hanging two feet from my face right now. 

i went out this afternoon (before my miserable stop-and-go 10k run – still, 10k is 10k) to get some bristol board, new leads for my pencil, some new inking pens, charged up with the inspiration of “doing it like hughes”.  after luring my cats out of my office/bedroom with squishy cat food, i set to work.

i decided to rip off his sketch of supergirl, the one he demonstrates in his youtube video.  i did this for a couple of reasons: kryptonians appeal to me more than just about anything except for cats, and i figured that it wouldn’t be cheating quite so badly if i did a sketch from a super-pixilated video than from a static drawing.  of course, it would have been better still to pull an image out of my head the way he does – but that will come with time and practice.

the part of hughes’s technique that i find most valuable is his acceptance of erasure.  i’ve always worked with very thin and hard leads, taking a very surgical, draftsman’s approach to drawing.  i like to precisely lay down each line and be sure that it’s right before moving on to the next one.  hughes (and probably every other illustrator ever) takes a more holistic approach – building his composition up from general shapes, constructing them loosely and quickly, and ERASING them so that they can be modified, improved and enhanced or reconstructed.  this will be a hard lesson for me to (re-)learn (for i’ve learned this approach many times before), but i think that it will be good for me.  also, my drawings tend to be very flat and straight-on, so i will be trying harder to create more dynamic and engaging compositions as i practice.

i don’t really have much spare time these days, but this sketch took me about an hour.  i think that if i can spare a few hours a week, that would be hundreds of sketches this year and maybe a few finished pieces – that should put me back where i want to be with respect to my illustration skills.  i don’t want to do anything professionally with them, but they sure are fun to have.

- g

song of the day for reinvigorating the artist within: superheroes, daft punk