Ruff sketch...

Here's a little quick sketch that I did of a pontificating fellow.

It was done in with an ebony pencil with plain copy paper.

Never underestimate the power of copy paper for pencil drawings...it's a great drawing surface for a couple of dollars per ream!

If you've noticed, I haven't posted a whole lot of cleaned up drawings in the past. The reason is simple; there's a power to the ruff sketch that comes right out of the imagination onto a clean sheet of paper. There's going to be a bunch of imperfections, but the power of the lines and the raw attitude of the pose makes it much more interesting to me than a labored over clean up. Besides, I can rough out a pose like this in a minute or two whereas a clean up will take me much much longer to lock down.

Bottomline, I'm able to post quick sketches much more frequently.

To this day, I learn a whole lot from rough drawings. It's almost like you can see how the artist approached the sketch. There's something about a really great ruff sketch that gets me totally enthused. The vitality of the drawing really takes over and makes the thing alive!

Now don't get me wrong...a really well done finished drawing can also be terrific...with the emphasis on 'can be'. But the truth is, some clean ups are merely adequate, and lose all the flavor of the original rough drawing because the rough is traced.

A direct tracing with a clean sheet of paper over the original almost always loses something in the process. Unless you have a master artist doing the clean ups!

When a great clean up artist is at work, he or she enhances the original rough by redrawing it, trying to plus the original.

I've worked with a few clean up artists over the years and some of them should have been animating because they were just that good. But they preferred working in the trenches because they did their jobs well and didn't have to worry about producing 7 feet of quality animation in a week. Thank god that we had these people content in their jobs because they made the character animators look sensational!

Anyway, getting back to the rough drawing above, a friend commented to me that this drawing wasn't all that rough. His point was that most of the detail was there and locked down in single lines.

Well, I've done ruffs that resemble lollipops with scribbles for legs and I've done drawings that have many of the elements close to locked down. But even with a drawing that appears to be close to done, there's still things that I would like to add or change before I finalize it.

OH by the way, I did this drawing today...not in 01 as I mistakenly scribbled on the bottom.