Chapter 2 pencils (Deg Illustrations)

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Mon, 20 Mar 2017

These are the pencils for the second illustration for Deg, from Chapter 2. Again, I’d left about two thirds of the image empty, to be filled by a large distorted face later, but there was still a ton of detail to draw here.

A little note on the red borders and crop marks on the image. This was the first project I’d done in the excellent Clip Studio Pro art package, and also one of the first professional things I’d ever done for print. All my video game work is intended for the screen, as are the webscomics I’ve drawn, so I tend to think in pixels rather than paper sizes or dots per inch. I didn’t know what size the book would be printed at this stage, so chose A4 size for the illustrations, at a generous 600 dpi, which I figured would work whatever the final book size was, with a bit of cropping or resizing. I set up a new page in Clip Studio Pro with these dimensions, and it automatically created extra borders and guides for bleed and cropping and other print concepts I’m a bit unfamiliar with. Well, I just happily drew up to the edge of the outer border (marked by the red crosses at the top and bottom and sides), and only after I’d finished this second drawing did I realise I’d drawn way outside of the A4 safe area (the inner red border), and drawn important details right up to the edges that would likely be cropped off if printed at A4. Basically I was an idiot, and too eager to get drawing rather than getting to know the software I was using first. Once I’d realised, I decided, for the sake of consistency, to stick with the same error for the rest of the illustrations (so they’re all drawn into the crop area), and fix them all in one go by rejigging their sizes at the end, once I was ready to prepare them for print.

I drew a second penis here, but after this illustration I kind of held back from drawing some of the frequent sexual imagery in the later chapters, as I thought it might become too distracting to the eye - too much of the focus of every drawing - and left that kind of thing to the text from here on.

The spoonfaces were a recurring image in the book, and I used myself as a model for the faces in the reflected in the spoons. I didn’t want to use my face for one of the big distorted faces, so this was a sneaky way to get my face in there.

This drawing includes a nice cup of tea, with something dripping into it, which I also draw in the first illustration. Although it wasn’t deliberate, I think almost every other illustration has a cup of tea in it somewhere.

Click the 'Follow up post' link below to see the photo reference stage.

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Tags: deg, chapter2, drawing, illustration, book, novel, pencil, clip studio pro

Follow up post: Chapter 2 photo reference (Deg Illustrations)

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