Anatomy of a Drawing

I had something really cool happen a few weeks back… Out of the blue, someone contacted me via email and let me know that some of my old art was on eBay. The auction was for several pieces that I finished right around the time I graduated high school… Stuff I (probably) turned in to an early college art class and never retrieved after the semester. I vaguely remembered a few of the pieces and was very excited to get them back and take a look at some of my early, lost work.

But there was a small problem… The person who notified me of the auction had purchased the bulk of the work for himself. Thankfully, he was kind enough to offer up his winning bid and send the pieces to me anyway. As a token of gratitude, I offered to draw him something in return… Whatever he liked, a favorite character or scene or whatever. Being an amateur artist himself, he emailed me a piece he had started but never completed and asked me to finish it. I looked over the piece and saw a lot of potential in the layout and started lightboxing the drawing (basically, tracing over the elements he already had in place). After a few hours, I realized this wasn’t going to work, as my drawing style didn’t jibe with the work he sent to me.

So I started over. I kept the pose and general composition but started re-working almost every part of the drawing. I thought this would be a few hours of work but as I delved into the drawing more, I realized that it was going to be a 15+ hour piece that was going to take me a few weeks to finish and I’d never make a Christmas deadline (not a hard deadline, just something I wanted to do as a thank you gift to this kind person). Knowing that I wasn’t going to finish in time, I started taking photos of the drawing in progress to email to him and get feedback in case he didn’t like something I was doing with the layout. I also wanted to reassure him that I was working on the drawing and that it was taking a bit of time to finish.

So this set me in a position I don’t often find myself… I can show readers how I break down a drawing from start to finish.

I started with the main character in the piece. He’s a viking archer with some kind of druid-like power to meld into the forest. Given the difficulty of the pose, I wanted to make sure I got this part right before I tried to draw anything else in the piece. I used quite a few anatomical references for this part of the drawing because this pose… Well, it’s kind of a bitch.

Originally, the archer was leaning forward but that didn’t really make sense for a man pulling the full weight of a non-composite bow so I arched (heh) his back more and put weight on his back foot, almost as if he’s leaning against the tree. At this point, I also started looking at genuine viking war garb and outfitting the guy in a hybrid viking/druid outfit for combat. Originally, the viking was more in the vein of Thor or another “pop culture” viking and I wanted a little (but just a little) more authenticity to the drawing.

This is where the drawing started to get out of control. I wanted to add a very stylized forest setting with a lot of vines wrapping around the trees (and the archer) to give it more of a fantasy setting. At this point, I knew the drawing was going to take a loooong time to finish.

Having wrapped up the pencils and cleaned them to acceptable levels, I started inking. The entire piece was inked with a Hunt 102 crow quill and a single Winsor & Newton brush, sized 00. I’ve been trying to break away from using a crow quill as often as I do so I tried to use the brush as often as possible. About 40% of this piece is done using a brush instead of a quill. Quite a departure from my typical 80/20 or higher split. I use a crow quill a lot.

I started filling in blacks earlier than normal in this piece. I wanted to make sure I got the weight of the shadows correct on the archer, as I struggled quite a bit with this pose and wanted to make sure he didn’t blend into the tree too much. Given the complexity of the vines and that the piece doesn’t play into the “outline” method of composition (basically, you create a silhouette of each character to see if they blend into one another too much, causing eye confusion), I knew that this piece could easily go wrong on me.

And the tree. You can see how the archer begins to blend into his surroundings. Kind of the point of the drawing but from a viewer perspective, not an optimal solution. Still, I think it works well enough to not be a problem with understanding what is happening in the illustration.

To avoid creating the most confusing drawing possible, I am lightly outlining the trees and not adding many shadows to the background. This is for two reasons: first, all that black in the front draws the eyes to the archer, where the focal point of the illustration should be and where viewers will look first to understand what is happening. Second, because when this is colored (if I get around to that), it will allow for a gentle fade of colors into the forest, creating an early morning “mist” feel to the setting, which plays up the fantasy feel I wanted with the drawing.

And finally, the finished piece. I’m quite happy with how it turned out but what this thing really needs is some color. It’s just a tad bit confusing in black and white and adding brighter greens up front and fading into olives and greys in the back will help quash some of the visual confusion with the archer melding into the tree. In the end, this probably took me between 15 and 20 hours to complete. If/when I add color to the piece, that will be another 4-6 hours. If I ever get around to coloring it, I’ll be sure to post it here so you can see what color can bring to a piece like this.

Thanks for reading and check back next week for more Aurorae art!

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