Time Drawn: February 2006
This particular file has the name of “Evil Guy”. That was the entirety of what I decided was important about this particular character. And really, there’s nothing specifically evil about him, though his expression has a lot of callous greed in it. Which, actually, was what I was trying to go for.
This is one of a set of drawings I made when I bought a brush pen. If you don’t know, that’s a felt-tip marker that has a cone-shaped flexible tip. It acts a lot like a tiny paintbrush, allowing you to vary how thick the line is fairly easily.
That line variance is a surprisingly important thing once you get good at drawing. It lets you bring shadows and highlights into the line drawing itself, to give a hint of the color gradients that exist in real life even when you’re working in pure black and white.
I never got very good at using a brush pen. It didn’t take too long for me to decide that its largest line width was just too thick for my tastes, and that it was tough to get smooth lines with it. But I still work with line weight variation a lot, both in my digital and physical pieces.
And this piece did let me play with coloring in Photoshop. I was just learning the program at the time, applying what I’d learned in my art classes and following random tutorials on the internet.
I haven’t a clue how I made those fancy circular shapes in the background. I think I was following some sort of tutorial, but I might have also just stole them from another image. But then again, I’ve always kept away from incorporating other peoples works in my own, so that’s not too likely. Ah well, maybe I’ll find that tutorial again sometime. Though it has been about eight years since I made this, and the internet is a very different place, so who knows if it even exists anymore.
