Deborah's Drawings of Stuff

[DalekCheese]

That’s very good. The real problem I have is that I can’t tell whether Tom’s got an open mouth or a pink moustache.

it's meant to be the huge sticking plaster he has over the bite he got from paul seeds dog in the promotional photos for s16

[Deborah J]

Just so I'm not clogging the TCOS thread with junk (haha, what a joke) I thought I'd share this here, as a fun little illustration of how I draw things these days. Because a lot of things I draw straight to the computer, I'll block in the rough shape in one colour, do the rough details in a second colour, then redraw with more care and attention in a third colour, but when I'm doing something a little more complicated, with a lot of people in it, or a fiddly sort of angle, it helps to sketch out a rough something first. So we've all seen this picture of the band and friends backstage in glasgow, that I posted last night:



Well this is what it looked like before it went into the computer:



So yeah, I do most of the haeavy liftng digitally. Usually if I'm doing a paper start point I give a bit more detail first, try and at least rough in all the faces, but since I can draw my face without looking these days, and most of the others don't have faces, or are at such ridiculous angles it's not going to help, I mostly just winged it.

[Danoftardis]

haeavy liftng? That's a song title right there.

[TheSparrow]

That's brilliant! I wish I could draw as good as that. Your style is brilliant. How did you get the glow from those lights on the mirror? Because that's really brilliant.

I'm dead confused on some stuff though, who's the girl you're sat next to and what is the master doing here
I'm guessing they're mostly in jokes that I've missed out on

[Danoftardis]

That's brilliant! I wish I could draw as good as that. Your style is brilliant. How did you get the glow from those lights on the mirror? Because that's really brilliant.

I'm dead confused on some stuff though, who's the girl you're sat next to and what is the master doing here
I'm guessing they're mostly in jokes that I've missed out on

Yeah you must've missed some of the posts from around the time of the concert, otherwise they'd make total sense. I can imagine some of it might seem to bit odd to someone who wasn't in the know.

But like Sparrow says your style is brillaint Deb, I mean there's so much going on here artistically that's great I don't know where to start.

[Deborah J]

That's brilliant! I wish I could draw as good as that. Your style is brilliant. How did you get the glow from those lights on the mirror? Because that's really brilliant.

I'm dead confused on some stuff though, who's the girl you're sat next to and what is the master doing here
I'm guessing they're mostly in jokes that I've missed out on

Aww, you've not been following the TCOS thread, Sparrow, this was our night in glasgow, last friday, I invited my friend Hannah to come hang out backstage, because she lives in glasgow, and DC said if I was bringing a friend he wanted to invite his friend Mr Retsam, who we were unsure about, but as you can see he's sneaking him in through the fire escape. I suppose you were passed out drunk for most of the night, so it makes sense that you don't remember much of this.

The glowing lights is really just a colouring trick, everything is covered with a kind of greyblue wash to make it dingier, then the light sources are gone over in a whitish colour in whatever hue they're meant to be, then anything that they're shining on gets a little of that on them, then the bulbs themselves get an extra burry dodd of pure white overlayed onto them to give them that extra inner glow. It's a variety of tricks I've worked on and workshopped for quite a while.

[Deborah J]

To counterbalance this, I have one preserved example of my drawing process from before I switched to digital at all, the picture I did of the first 11 doctors, beck in the summer of 2010, I took a photo of it at various stages, one after I had done the pencil sketch, one after I did the lineart in pen and I recently scanned the colour one to share, earlier in this thread, so if that's of interest to anyone, here are those three pictures:





The marks at the top are where the blutac on it kind of greased the paper over the years it was stuck to my bedroom door. But yeah, back then every detail was drawn just ablut exactly in pencil, then usually something would be lost along the way in the inking as I invariably did a worse job when I used pen and only had one go at it. It's interesting to chart how I've progressed over time, because my transition to digital drawing was very gradual, for a long time I was drawing pencil then ink like this and then scanning and colouring, which took a while to get the hang of, and had a lot of steps as I improved my technique, like I would do backgrounds as a seperate picture and then add them in, but it laft a white fringe if I took the blank background off a hand drawn picture, which I had to figure out how to get rid off. I used to make comics, I'd draw the backgrounds on the back of the paper in morrored image, so they lined up with the foregrounds. then I started digitally fixing bits of drawings that I'd messed up the inking of, then I found I could draw the lioneart digitally I started doing digital backgrounds first then with a lot of practice the whole image, and that changed the whole game, that's only been for the last 4 or 5 years I've done that, but I guess that's longer than I was doing half and half. I should add, I don't have a drawing tablet for these, I have to do it all with my mouse, it's fiddly work, but I like to think I'm always improving.

[Danoftardis]

This is exactly how I've done all the art for TCoS, pencil then pen and then colour, so I'm very familiar with that process. For a long time I used to not ink at all actually, I only transitioned to inking the outlines in 2016, my first real success with that technique came with a graphic novel cover I did for a friend when I was very ill that Christmas. I used to draw loads of Doctor Who comics when I was younger but that stopped after GCSE art. When I started drawing again it was portraits of characters from shows and films, not much Who though otherwise I'd probably post them here. I tried to get back into comic art a couple of years ago but couldn't settle on a style, I got very frustrated and lost a lot of artistic confidence in the process.

And I'm really struggling to believe you've done your digital art with a mouse, that's crazy. Having to use a mouse has been the thing that's really put me off from attempting any proper digital art, I'm just so used to a pencil it feels really odd trying to use a mouse, I lose all my feeling. So massive respect points there.

[Deborah J]

This is exactly how I've done all the art for TCoS, pencil then pen and then colour, so I'm very familiar with that process. For a long time I used to not ink at all actually, I only transitioned to inking the outlines in 2016, my first real success with that technique came with a graphic novel cover I did for a friend when I was very ill that Christmas. I used to draw loads of Doctor Who comics when I was younger but that stopped after GCSE art. When I started drawing again it was portraits of characters from shows and films, not much Who though otherwise I'd probably post them here. I tried to get back into comic art a couple of years ago but couldn't settle on a style, I got very frustrated and lost a lot of artistic confidence in the process.

And I'm really struggling to believe you've done your digital art with a mouse, that's crazy. Having to use a mouse has been the thing that's really put me off from attempting any proper digital art, I'm just so used to a pencil it feels really odd trying to use a mouse, I lose all my feeling. So massive respect points there.

My comics were kind of in a toned down version of the style I do my current drawings in, a bit more simplified in look, and I changed about how I drew things and people, like I used to do everyone with sort of open close bracket (..) mr man type eyes, but when I started doing them digitally I found that a real hassle to colour in, and it was inconsistant, not all characters had that, so from the second "season" of them I gave everyone solid eyes (except one character who just didn't look right with normal eyes) and I redesigned and refined a lot of other aspects of the characters.

Drawing with a mouse is a fiddly thing to do, for sure, I can't do it very well freehand, what I do generally is do a rough sketchy pass, then the final one I just do it in lots of tiny motions, along the approximate lineart I've already set down, but refining it where necesary, and I zoom way away in to get as clean and accurate as I can. Hard to really explain, but that's what I do.

[Deborah J]

Just a sneaky bump here, I do intend to put more stuff here eventually, and I don't want to lose the thread through inactivity and have to start over. I have some illustrations I did for a friend who was working on a doctor who project a whioe back, if shecever finishes and releases that then I'll share those, it would be bad form to share them before the project itself was released. Also I might just do some more general drawingy stuff. Just don't letbthe fire go out completely, I'm not dead yet