literature

Drawing BBWs: Lesson 1, pt 3

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Drawing Girls and BBW's the Kastemel Way:  Sketching and Inking
Lesson 1:  Danielle

Step 4:  Thinking and Inking:  Okay, here's where we make it count.  Inking provides greater clarity to your work, makes it possible to color digitally, and allows you to make precision details.  On the other hand, shading in ink is more difficult because you can't adjust the darkness like you can with pencil, you can only control the thickness of the lines you make.  We can deal with this a number of ways, and I personally am no pro at this, but I'll give you my take on it.

First, let's just lay out a plain outline, kay?  I use a Superfine Pitt Artist Pen, which is actually the thickest regular pen I use.  A thin felt tip will probably do the trick as well.  I've tried using a superfine ball point, but it comes out too scratchy and not fluid enough for me.

The more careful you were in the previous steps, the less you'll have to think while you ink.  It's up to personal style whether your pencisl are basically complete art that needs to just be redone in ink or whether your pencils are rough guidelines of where your inks are going to go.  On pieces with a lot of panels and less detailed work I'll often leave the pencils very vague, just get the basic markers in place then trust myself to not screw up with the pen.  For a pin up or something, I'm going to spend much more time working out the pencil details.  The blue pencils on Danielle here were pretty tight, but there's still some sketchy edges.  Because I'm drawing chubby girls, I typically lay the ink along the outermost edges of my pencils to get the best curves possible.

I have to draw in the feet better because those weren't really marked out in pencil, but you know, I don't really care about feet that much.  I care more than Rob Liefeld, but maybe it's because they just aren't hard to me.  HANDS, though, hands are my perennial nemesis.  I have no advice on how to draw those fuckers.  I try to draw from photos whenever possible because if you look at your own hand, (A if it's the same hand as your drawing hand it's inherently difficult, B) you still have to mentally compress a complicated 3 dimensional object into 2 dimensions, and C) you're going to wind up with a girl with big ole man hands.  

This really does matter.  Unfortunately, hands and faces are two of the most important details to a picture, it will separates the artists from the hacks, so to speak.  You want your figures to come alive on the paper, and that life depends upon them having personality.  Personality depends upon their style (clothes hair makeup) and their gestures, and gestures depend upon pose, face and hands.  A figure with no gesture to its pose is just a limp mannequin.  I've digressed long enough;  the important thing is that you get the hands right or don't at all, just like the face.  You sketch, detail, erase, and do it as many times as necessary until it looks how you want.  Pencils can forgive you, ink does not.
Sadly, I made a goof on her hand pose.  As I was inking the thumb I realized that Dani would be more likely to make the Peace sign that a gun/pointing/snap gesture like that.  You can see I pencilled in the middle finger in this position and adjusted the index finger, but then I realized that the tumb was already inked in the wrong position, and Danielle would be stuck making a possibly rude gesture instead of a peace sign, so I just went back to the pointing.

Try to not get ahead of yourself here.  I haven't added in many of the creases or shading yet, because I want to have a whole basic outline finished first.  For now the pencils stand in for all the shading, and we can use them to get an idea of how the finished product should look.

You can see a couple spots I had to adjust between as I was inking.  I had forgotten all of her piercings, first of all!  I not only added in her navel piercing under her tank top, but you can see I also changed my mind on where the navel should be.  I added in her eyebrow piercing and industrial through her left ear.  I checked at this point to see if there were any other character affects she needed, but her tattoo is covered up so I'm pretty sure this is everything (more on character consistency and motifs later).  

Is it obvious that I'm trying to drag this out yet?  I don't have much to say about this point in the process.  You lay down an outline before you start shading or playing with line weight.  I always use a much thinner pen (0.30 mm Micron Pen) for the facial features, as you really want to give yourself room to adjust here.  If you use a thin pen and make a mistake, you can sometimes thicken out the line and fudge over it;  if you're already using your fattest pen and you make one of her facial features lopsided, it's going to be harder to cover up.  You may notice that the ink here actually has much more sparse detailing than the pencils.  The less lines you make on the face the better in my book.  Less is more.

So there's a basic ink job.  You could quite easily take this into photoshop or whatever after either erasing the pencils by hand or (since these are colored pencils, greytones won't work) fading them out digitally.  With a clean black outline you could set the layer to "Multiply" and start coloring underneath it, and you'd have a pretty good picture.  I choose to detail the ink layer a bit further though, as I still prefer a good bit of manual shading and variations in line width before I get to the color part.

This is what I will show you next time, the process by which you add details and weight to your inking.  This will take Danielle closer to the level of detail I use in pin-up pieces.  Thanks for reading, let me know if you have any questions!
I wrote this part after taking a sleep aid. Can you tell? Leave comments and I'll will answer them!

Part 1: [link]
Part 2: [link]
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anysizebutsmall's avatar
the tutorial is nice, but i would like to know more about actually drawing the girl, not a basic drawing tutorial. However, your basic drawing tutorial is quite complete and helpful. I especially liked the part where it said pencil forgives you, ink does not, which is such a good way of putting it.