Grid Pix - Pencil #1

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Mon, 18 Feb 2019

These are my clean digital pencils, ready to ink.

Once I’d neatened up the blocks I then needed to subdivide them into a grid pattern on each face that I could use to suggest individual bricks making up each block, and also mark out the puzzle patterns on some of the block faces by recessing certain bricks.

I started off doing a clever geometric perspective technique to get the subdivision lines in the correct positions. This involved drawing lines from opposite corners of each block face to find the centre, the drawing the first subdivision lines from this centre point, then subdividing the resulting squares down even further. This ensured the subdivision lines were properly ‘perspective corrected’ (to use video game terminology), with each square getting slightly smaller into the distance, which you wouldn’t get by measuring and evenly dividing each line into 8 or 10 equal sized subdivisions.

At this point I wondered why the heck I hadn’t built the whole thing as a 3D model, where I’d get all this information for free. I considered it, but even accounting for the work I’d already done, I’m not sure it would have been any quicker. Maybe I’m just slow at 3D, but even with simple cubes, I still would have spent hours and hours resizing and positioning each one to get it just right, and messing about with the camera position and fov to get the look I wanted, and although the subdividing in Clip Studio was tedious, I don’t think I would have saved any time by going with a 3D model.

After a few blocks, I ditched the geometric subdividing, and just did it by eye, which was much quicker!

» Ste's Illustration Process Blog

Tags: process, gridpix, cover, drawing, pencil, perspective, clip studio

Follow up post: Grid Pix - Pencil #2

Predecessor post: Grid Pix - Rough #1

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