Transforming Hands

I promise to stop talking about this soon, but bear with me… I’m still excited. One of the quite obvious benefits of using a tablet that hadn’t quite sunk in is how you can pull bits of a sketch around.

I was working on a character sketch last night, and finished drawing one of the hands. It was quite respectable, obviously hand-like and not particularly mutated or alien. However, only once I’d finished did I notice that it was a little bit too big and in the wrong place. So… I dragged a marquee around it to select, scaled it down, then pulled it into a better position.

I guess you could look at this as cheating, and that I should practice until I can sketch it right straight off. It just seems like a great idea if you’ve drawn something you’re happy with, but slightly wrong or out of position.

Another quite cool thing is to use different layers to try out alternate versions for particular parts of a sketch. So I could create a couple of alternate hand sketches for the same character, then use layer comps to look at the different versions and decide how to proceed.

I’m still playing around with some of this, but from my experience so far it seems like sketching directly to a PC opens up quite a lot of flexibility. I’m also wondering about scanning images, fading them right down to use in the background as a template. At this stage I’m just trying to emulate some of the styles I like, so this seems like a great way to learn.