After drawing and grey-flatting each individual character(scroll down to see this in last weeks post) I began shuffling them around in Photoshop, playing with the variety of big and small, shrinking who I needed to be smaller and expanding who needed to be bigger. I’ve never done this before and it worked out remarkably well I think. My main goal was to not obscure the faces of any character and I actually did work in chuncks. For instance, I drew probably 60% of the characters and then composed them in a pleasing group, then I drew more in my sketchbook with the intention of filling those gaps, so, what you see is not completely random from sketchbook to this, there was probably 3-4 back and forth manuveurs.
Below on the left is the black and white printout on 11in x 17in paper. I did have to go into my character layers and change all of the grey flats to white flats to get here. It was a pain but had to be done to get a clear black and white layer. On the right is the first tracing. It was on this layer that I realized I would have to keep all of the bug antennae as feather lines and not try to draw them with outlines.
At last we’ve come to the final line and it’s a bit of an experiment as well. I’m always on the lookout for techniques that add variety but at the same time don’t add too many other tools into the mix. Line variety is that magic bullet that I want to experiment with much more on my next book. This images has a bit of it if you’ll notice the antennae and some of the edges of the fuzzy bugs. These lines were made with a very dull Blackwing pencil and a technique called “the stop and go line”. They contrasted very well with the rest of the finer lines done with a 0.5mm lead mechanical pencil.
Alright, next week, COLOR! Thanks again for tuning in, if you’ve found it helpful please share it around. Crowd scenes are no one’s favorite thing to draw (excepting Martin Handford, Where’s Waldo) so I hope this helps someone along the way.