Cleaning Up

One of the big frustrations in making cartooning-type drawings is keeping the loose spontaneity of your initial sketch in your finished piece. The images above clearly illustrate how I struggle with this.

In going through my files (A.k.a. the giant pile of papers scattered around my drawing board) I found this page from my sketchbook from a few year's back of everyone's favorite element man, Metamorpho, giving it to everyone's favorite caveman, Java. The drawing was just a quick, mindless scribble, but I liked the loosey-goosey energy, so I decided to do a finished marker drawing of it.

I blew it.

In cleaning up the original sketch on the lightbox, I tightened it up too much, and lost the qualities that I enjoyed in the drawing. Coloring it just made it worse.

It's not the worst drawing in the world, but I wish there was some magic formula to avoid the dillution (is that a word, and if so, did I spell it correctly?).

Oh yeah. There is a magic formula. It's called working on your drawing ability all the time!