Redrawing, Redrawing, Redrawing
Redrawing, Redrawing, Redrawing
Don't like how a piece is looking? Redraw it over and over again
Hello Sketchbugs,
We’re heading into the holidays with a post about how I illustrated this piece for the New Republic. You can find the article HERE.
A lot of people think that artists use the first drawings they make for the final product, and for some geniuses that is true. However, more often than not, the process to the final piece is riddled with redraw after redraw. This piece in particular, challenged me to break my system of working in order to achieve a level of finish I felt content with.
Like most editorial assignments, it started off with an email from reliable New Republic art director Robert A. Di Ieso. Unlike other editorial pieces, this one was quite conceptual and didn’t need an exact story to be portrayed. The only thing he was looking for was something whimsical to indicate reading, with people spread throughout the composition. When an art director (especially one I’ve worked with before) says I can go full whimsy, I strive to give it my all.
In every art piece I like to start off with sketching thoughts out in my sketchbook. The limited paper space forces you to see the simplicity of the idea before it get’s too complex, while also giving room to write and doodle miscellaneous things together without a backspace button. After much deliberation, I sent in 6 sketches to Robert who came back favoring #4, the book carousel in the sky.
This composition was a challenging one. There were several human characters riding horses in perspective with a view of a carousel spinning in the sky in the background. I LOVE pain. Considering how many moving parts were in this idea, I took some references of myself in the studio for the human characters and scoured the internet for carousel horse references.
With all this collected, I ended up with a few sketches to help get the ball rolling.
(Also check out my friend Cat Huang! She’s a super talented illustrator and comic artist whose debut graphic novel comes out soon!)
The next part was drawing the final line art and this is where my predicament began. I was approaching the drawing phase like I had in previous editorial pieces: all digital line art from a very loose sketch. This was a process I had streamlined and could do pretty fast and without much thought. The fact that I have a fast process that, more times than naught, leads to good work is a testament to practice and the reality of working on editorial projects for almost 5 years. But as I got to doing the line art, something felt off. My figures looked fine but they lacked the fluidity of the lines I brought out in my sketchbook. It felt like I wasn’t taking this piece as far as it could go because I was constraining myself to keeping with a formula. I was getting too “comfortable.”
The last 2 years I have pivoted most of my editorial process to the iPad for convenience and time management. If you can do everything in one program it saves so much time and streamlines the entire illustration process from line to color to final. You will find that most editorial artists work digitally to adjust to the harsh deadlines and the amount of edits they might need to make. I don’t see digital work as a bad thing. In fact, I’ve made some of my favorite work with just Procreate so it’s not necessarily the medium that was the issue. I even have a post on here talking about my process for an illustration that was due in a day. Read it HERE
After much contemplation, I realized I was so hung up on sticking to a process that I was ignoring my inner artistic drive to improve, to mark make and to have fun. I wasn’t pushing my abilities like I did right out of school, nor was I having the “fun anxiety”of trying something different and seeing the reward of the risk. Considering these nagging feelings I decided to rework my entire drawing in the analogue.
I decided to do a study of my own drawing. I took a piece of printer paper and observed my digital sketch like it was as a figure drawing of sorts. Getting the basic parts down while trying to add more expressive lines and poses where I could.
With this fluid sketch done, I went to do some medium studies with a ballpoint pen, a nib pen and graphite pencil. The pencil study was the most fun to do and gave me that spark that only traditional rendering can.
Using a light-table I was able to transfer the essence of the “new” sketch on warm Stonehenge paper. This drawing process went faster than expected, due in part to the lack of an undo button. If something was off with a part, I just erased and redrew it. I noticed I didn’t stress about how pixels looked together and just focused on how the drawing looked as a whole.
I scanned my piece into photoshop, made some edits and then colored it in Procreate. After some back and forth with Rob on adding some more books, the piece was done.
The idea of doing a traditional study of a digital mockup was an out of pocket late night thought. To add onto that, doing several medium drawing studies and sketch studies seems like overkill. All of that work however, paid off in the end. While this illustration is not perfect by any means (I still had to meet a deadline), I am content to say it helped reignite my drive to get better at drawing and shake up my process once in a while.
Final Thoughts
As artists, we all strive to improve and I think the end of the year brings a sense of reflection. This New Republic piece is just a small part of how I’ve been reflecting on myself as a whole; how to not feel stagnant with my artistic journey and in turn how, to develop my editorial work. In general, I’ve been pivoting more to the book world where the deadlines are long and the process is more fluid. It’s been refreshing to work on something where I have to constantly challenge myself to make striking images in a sequence with deadlines that can range from a month to almost a year. The elongated time forces you to reconsider drawings and redo entire concepts.
With editorial work, the quick deadlines make a fluid process seem unreasonable. Why waste time rethinking compositions, changing poses, or redrawing whole sections of a piece if you know you’re short on time and the line art you have is good enough. It’s a problem with the industry as a whole, especially for artists who enjoy making complicated pieces or for those who work slow. Though, the fast deadlines also give you the chance to be less precious with your work. I find that I can always try different things if the results are good and convey the article well. Since the turnaround is so fast, you don’t have to necessarily rely on the same technique either. I think relying on a streamlined style just happens a lot more in this industry because of how quickly deadlines can seep into one another and the very real fear of disappointing an art director. (If any art directors are reading this, I appreciate you.) All in all, sometimes you just have to redraw things, even if you’re scared to disrupt the process, because in the end, your piece will only benefit from the extra care you took into making it better.
There will be one more substack post this year so look forward to it. (Maybe even more, if the Holiday snooze doesn’t get to me first).
I always have so much respect and admiration for you and your work, but being shown all the work that happens unseen that just doubles those feelings! I totally agree that even if it's painful and tedious it really is almost always worth putting in the extra time and learning from the process!
Fascinating, thank you!