I was working on a page, saw a blank piece of Bristol and three minutes later there is a Hellboy sketch. And there you have it!

To make up for the scribbles I posted, here are some finished pages.

I never post this kinda BS. I love this little drill though. I learned it from LeSean when we were working at the same web animation place a long time ago. He's got stacks of this shit all over the place. It's a great exercise. You take a scene from something you like (Sean does mostly anime, but I do films a lot), and you freeze the pertinent frames and sketch 'em out. You can learn a ton of things this way. Composition, storytelling, and little things like what you see when you draw. You see what you're good at picking up right away, and what technique issues are apparent in their most basic form. These days, I don't draw it to the point where it's really legible, because I'm always addressing basic compositional shapes, not the drawing of (in this case) the animation.

This is a quick little scene from Steamboy. I only spent a few minutes here. Usually the drill should be an hour or two, so you can fatigue, and then really start to pair down what you "care" about. You stop thinking about illustrating and start hitting the shapes you really think are pertinent to storytelling. This was and is a great tool for me, both for learning and warming up.

I stopped short here because I ran out of 3B lead, and I HATE sketching with hard lead, lol. I also picked a rotten scene, because the storytelling is mostly backgrounds, CG and special effects, but gotta roll with it. All the same, this drill is as fun as it always has been.

-N

I've been working on a massive, 100 page graphic novel for the past few months, and will continue to do so for the next couple. It's been fun and challenging, because I'm drawing, inking, and putting the computer tones on it. Bryan Hill is the writer, and it's coming out this fall.

I've been in St. Louis without real internet access for a bit, but that's all solved now thanks to my favorite thing in the world, my macbook. I love it like the Knicks love overspending. Enough yackity yack, here's some art.




This is Nina Carmichael.