Ever since going to France last year, I’ve gotten in the habit of carrying blank index cards with me everywhere.  So I end up doodling at odd times like standing in line or waiting for friends to show up, etc.  Back in France I carried a pencil, eraser and pencil sharpener, but it’s just so messy and annoying to carry around that I just stopped and tend to favor the pen I already keep in my pocket.

So I’ve been doodling with an ink pen more and more.  It’s tricky.  No pencil means no rough sketch. 

Here’s a bunch of them:

Working on Uncle Rich’s car (as in, it was leaking oil on a long trip on an extra hot day, so we stopped to let it cool down and give it some fresh oil to hold it over until we get home and he can actually fix the leak.)

 At the book store.  Playing with Marc’s technique of putting more detail in the center and letting fade out toward the edges.

 Sketching while watching TV (it’s tough when the reference is always changing! :)

More TV sketching.

sketched over lunch:

 more tv sketching

 more tv sketching

 sketching while burning backup discs (see the stack of index cards on the bottom left?)

 sketched while out at breakfast:

 Idea while standing in line for coffee:

Yes, it works and I’ll sue you if you steal my soap idea! :)

had time to kill before a movie started.

The dots are how I’ve been making a rough sketch without a pencil.  If you scroll back up you might see a stray dot here and there on the more elaborate sketches (I don’t do it as much for the quick cartoons)

~Danny

I don’t really like lugging around a bag just to have my sketchbook and pencil box with me. Especially since I find that if I do bring it along, I don’t always get a chance to sketch and if I don’t bring it along I often end up sitting somewhere bored and wish I had my sketchbook. Plus the packing and unpacking of stuff makes it pretty inconvenient on a daily bases.

Lately, I’ve been keeping a stack of maybe 10 index-cards in my jacket pocket at all times. I clipped them together with a couple of binder clips so they don’t get messed up in my pocket (keeps edges from getting messed up and also keeps them from rubbing against each other and smearing the sketches). However it turns out having them clipped together also makes it really easy to draw on the top card in the stack while standing up. So I can be standing in line somewhere and just pull the cards out of my pocket, and start sketching. Then jam them back in my pocket when I’ve got to get moving again.

As a result, I always have them with me and I’ve been doodling more, which is always good.

The second half of that equation are the pens and pencils I bring with me. I recently discovered “snack bags” in the grocery store.
For years, they only had “sandwich bags”, but now you can find “snack bags,” which are half the size. They’re the perfect size for stashing a few pens and putting them in your pocket.

The last ingredients are the caps for the pencils. I originally started capping my pencils because I got tired of them putting holes in my pockets or stabbing me in the hand when I reached into my pocket. I find pen caps are too big, but my fiance’s eyeliner caps are nearly perfect. I just slipped in a small piece of paper to make sure they’re nice and snug.

Hope these tricks help you sketch on the go!

I’ve been making a comic journal and a vacation comic journal (as you can tell by the links at the top of the page). In both cases I knew I had a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time. I needed a style that would get the point of the content across to the viewer but also something that was moderately fast to crank out. So I went with a loosely drawn Sunday comic strip style. It worked great. The looseness of the lines kept me moving and discouraged me from getting bogged down and spending 3 hours adding excessive detail to an otherwise lighthearted story.

However, one day I went back and cleaned up one of the pages and realized that it looked better. Not night and day, but definitely better. Here’s an example:

I thought loose drawing *had* to look sloppy. I thought having lines meet in overlapping intersections was what made it classified as “loose drawing.” However, now I realize you can still have a loose drawing with clean lines and corners. And I think it looks better. So, yes, I went back and cleaned up every page.

It’s really surprising how fast a few clicks of the eraser tool can really cleanup a sketch. I’ll definitely be setting aside more time to cleanup my work more often.

“Remember, there are no rules, just tools.” ~Glen Vilppu

If you’re anything like me, you don’t have a lot of time to begin with, so the little time you have to sketch or make art is very valuable. At the same time making art is all about spending as much time as you need to “finish” the piece. A buzz word in game development right now is “iteration time.” The more times you iterate on something, the better it can be in the end. If it takes 10 to 20 iterations before something is just the way you like it, wouldn’t you want to iterate as fast and clean as possible? Wouldn’t you want to safely experiment for a few iterations without ruining all the work you’ve do so far (like destroying your original)?

Enter this technique, which I’m calling “Virtual Tracing Paper.” Traditionally, one of the first things you learn is to sketch very very VERY lightly with a lighter pencil. Then you make iterations by very slowly moving to a darker pencil and finally to ink. I’m bad at this, I’m too heavy handed (and I do still practice this BTW, so I am getting better). That leads us to the next traditional technique of tracing paper and/or light-boxes. If you make all your iterations on a new sheet of paper, then a world of possibilities open up for the direction you can take the piece you’re working on.

Virtual Tracing Paper is the idea of leveraging the computer as if it were a light-box. It requires a scanner and a printer. Basically scan in the image you’re working on, lighten it up, and print it back out. Continue to work on the printout.

Advantages:

• you can re-size/rotate things.
  for example: take a small doodle and grow it to be the size of the page for the next iteration, or grow one detail to the size of the page so you can work on all the little hard to reach areas. If you have a sketch that’s to tall or two wide, you can squash or stretch it. If you draw at an angle, you can tilt it to be more upright.

• you can move things.
  think “proportions.” it’s always easy to look at a drawing and say “crap, that’s too long,” or too short or too far apart, etc. But it’s a pain in the but to do something about it. In many cases it’s faster to just start over than to try to “save” the sketch. However if you scan it in and print it out you can move or re-size parts of the sketch to achieve the proportions you wanted. It will look bad because parts won’t line up, but as soon as you lighten the sketch and print it back out, you can use everything as guides to draw new, better lines.
• flip it!
  it’s a common trick to hold a piece of paper up to the light and look at it through the back side. You see everything in reverse so it helps your brain spot problem areas. Now you can just mirror the sketch and print it out and keep working.
• experiments and shading.
  print out 5 copies of your line-work, shade each one differently. Suddenly you can experiment without worrying about messing up the original.

The Next Level

If you want to bring the technique to a 2.0, get a tablet. If you have a tablet you can skip the printing out part and just alpha out your current layer, create a new layer, and go to town on it. Iterations become extremely easy.

A word of caution.

This can be a fun and fast way to work and experiment, however it can also be one hell of a crutch. As soon as you can move, rotate, re-size, and stretch your sketch, you start making a habit of not getting your proportions right the first time. So don’t stop drawing on paper and don’t stop trying to make traditional pieces the traditional way. Remember, you’ll learn more if you start a piece over from scratch to fix and proportions than if you just use the computer to fix the proportions. If you want to get better, you’ve got to bite the bullet and do the practice work involved with getting better. In the end, use your best judgment for what your personal goals are.