Life Cycle of a drawing

There was a time when a drawing like the above would have been tossed in the trash. After all, I drew it on notebook paper and have study sketches littering the left side.


But in today's world of computers and such, I can scan it and then use a program like Paint to cut away most of the extraneous material and blue lines.



By getting really meticulous I can eradicate the remaining blue lines and print out the cleaned up drawing.



Then I can use colored pencils to color it in, the old fashioned way. And then rescan.





Again, using Paint, I can fill in some background colors. I can print this out again, or work on it some more.


This is just an example of how I plan to begin saving more of my raw artwork. The above started out very raw, and while the finished product is not really 100% to my liking (or finished for that matter), I am happy to be able to take something that I once would have thrown away and actually make something out of it. Portfolio material if nothing else.

My favorite is actually the first colored version, without the background. The good thing about all this is that I can play around and put in different backgrounds if I want. The above is really quick and dirty and looks a lot like the comic book style that was popular when I was growing up. I owe a lot of my style to Frazetta, Kirby, Ditko, Sal and John Buscema, and probably even Kubert. Anyway, this started out to be a viking, but my oldest looked at the first drawing and called it Thor...so Thor it is.