Last week I did a piece for More magazine about the relationship between a young girl and her hip writer boyfriend in a dysfunctional relationship. After a couple of rounds of sketches, the art director ok’d this sketch and I took it to final.
A couple of days later, I heard back from the art director told me that the editors didn’t want the girl in such a disturbed pose and asked me to do something else with her. At first I didn’t want to, but then I re-drew it so that she was sleeping instead. Also, I added a couple of textures as an experiment since I had a bit more time. I was pretty surprised how changing the figure the way I did totally changed the narrative to be so much more about the guy.
have a great week, thanks for reading.
frank
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Amazing drawing! Really interesting to see how much it changed because of the girl.
Nicely done, I do prefer the second one .
great piece. they both work, but have very different moods.
Frank…you are a damn beast….your line work always gives me goosebumps.The looseness of them gives the drawing so much character. I was always wondering…how much do you refine your pencil stages before the inking. I see the sketch you have posted..and then the final…but is there a stage where you clean up your drawing or do you just jump straight to the inking from the rough?…Keep crankin’ man. Your work is very inspiring.
-Tin
Thanks everyone!
Tin, to answer your question: yes, sometimes there is a tight pencil drawing in between the sketch and the final. Generally when I blog I like to show what was ok’d by the art director.
Whether or not I do the extra step depends on the complexity of the piece–i.e. if something is going to be difficult to draw, I’ll sketch it up really tight.
For the Southern Poverty piece last week, I drew the pencils very tight because of all the details I wanted to get right. I can usually draw a figure on the fly with a really loose sketch or nothing at all, but for details like trees and plants the final drawing can come out wanky if I don’t think it through ahead of time.
Pieces that are very simple, like my Indiana Jones sketches, were done with only a few very loose scribbles and improvised from there.
Thanks for the question!
Frank