It always amazes me just how long it takes to do something right. Last night I worked almost nonstop from 5:30PM until 3:30 AM on a project for my Workshop class today, didn’t even come close to where I wanted to be, and then realized that I totally botched one of the basic parts. That’s what I’m here for, to learn – but jeez. I spent all that time on it, and it still wasn’t right. But it was far from a total loss, because the learning – oh, the learning!
What did I learn last night? First, that it’s extremely difficult to maintain a constant perspective when freehand drawing in ink across three sheets of paper. Like, almost impossible. Tape the three sheets together (tape on the back, of course), then use a ruler to measure off the planes on each sheet so that what’s straight-on in the left sheet doesn’t become top-down by the right one. When the image below is reduced, the perspective gets really drunken on the right side. When I was drawing it one sheet at a time on my clipboard this wasn’t apparent at all. D’OH. Hence the need for rulers. Second, don’t try to draw at 2:30 AM unless you’ve had a good night’s sleep beforehand, or have a great ruler. And third, it is entirely possible and wholly awesome to use photo texturing in Photoshop to create truly amazing effects. The piece below (click on it for a huge 350K version) took way too long, but the techniques learned were totally worth it.