Poacher Punch-up

punch upI’ve been using my new light pad a lot transferring roughs to the final artwork and, in this case, from initial rough to a cleaned up version. As you can see, I started this in pencil then defined it in ink.

strangleholdHaving gone to so much care with the second rough, there didn’t seem any point in tracing it in pencil onto the watercolour paper so I traced it in ink, trying to be free and relaxed in my line. That saves not only the stage of tracing in pencil onto the watercolour paper, but also a lot of rubbing out once the pen line has dried.

As a drawing, I prefer the rough, which is animated because of the pencil construction lines however I hope the final pen drawing will come to life when I add inked shadows and finally watercolour.

Light pad

light padLast week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.

light padWorking in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.

With the light pad I can transfer from a problem figure on the watercolour paper to a sheet of layout paper then work out the pose including the parts of the figure that fall outside the boundary of the frame.

light padThe layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.

Link; Huion LED light pad