A few weeks ago I wrote about the 5×7 inch cartoon art cards that I was doing for my Gatsby project. I was making the art cards and then doing something new with them. I was pasting down paper on top of the drawing and making new drawings on that paper. The funny thing is that after working up that new technique and liking it I went back to my old technique this week to draw six new superhero cartoon art cards.
The paste up technique was a way to make some boring drawings interesting. I didn’t have to do that with these new 5×7 cartoon art cards because I was drawing masks and marks on their faces. Since those things make the face drawings inherently more interesting to me than my regular face drawings there was not need to paste stuff down on them.
Here is another new thing about those new art cards. I drew them digitally on my iPad in Procreate. Usually I would draw a face on a 5×7 inch piece of paper, ink that face, write something in the balloon above the characters head, and the marker color it to have a finished piece. This was my tried and true method but I’ve been looking to speed it up a little bit.
Earlier this year I drew a basic face with just the basic features that I could use as a starting point. I scanned that face in and then printed the face out onto a 5×7 inch piece of paper. That way I didn’t have to draw out the basic features over and over again for each face. I could start with the basic drawing on every page in blue line and draw right over that in pencil. It saved some time and worked okay but I wasn’t really into it. So I decided to try doing the same thing but digitally.
I took the 5×7 inch file with the face drawn in it and brought that into Procreate on my iPad. One of the cool things Procreate has is a mirror drawing feature. Whatever I draw on one side of the page is mirrored on the other side. This means I can draw the right eye and it automatically draw the left eye exactly the same. There is no need for me to even cut and paste.
I found this saved me a lot of time. I only had to draw half a face to have a whole face. And with the blue line drawing underneath as a guide I didn’t have to worry about getting my proportions correct over and over. Overall I had fun drawing that way.
Perfect symmetry isn’t always called for but I can always turn it off if I want some asymmetrical stuff in there. As a matter of fact perfect symmetry can look a bit disconcerting after a while. But so can having one eye on a face a quarter inch higher than the other eye. That has happened to me more times than I can count.
Whenever I’m drawing a face without these time saving shortcuts it can take me a remarkably long time. Or not. It’s inconsistent. To do a basic drawing of a full face first I drew an egg shape for the head and then I bisect the egg with a line for the eyes, bisect the lower part to place the nose, and finally a third bisection under the nose for the mouth placement. Plus I have to place the ears and the hair line.
Even after all my years of drawing any of these placements can be off. I can’t tell you how many times I got the nose to low or the mouth too high. Even more often I draw the two eyed and then notice one of them is a fraction of an inch too high or wide. I have to erase it and start over.
This is all fine if I’m doing one single drawing. It’s all part of the process. But when I’m doing a series, such as the Super Hero Cartoon Art Cards, that can get very frustrating. The basic drawing phase can take anywhere from two to fifteen minutes. That’s a big variation. If I expect the drawing to take half an hour but instead it takes forty five minutes to an hour over six drawings then that’s a lot of unexpected time and can get annoying.
I found that when drawing these faces in Procreate with the mirror function on I didn’t have to think about the basic drawing so much. I could concentrate on the design of the face. It was very freeing and I had fun doing it. That’s key. There is no such thing as cheating in drawing. If you can find a way to make it a little bit easier on yourself then you can get more done. That was my goal.
I also did the writing and lettering digitally. My face template has a blue line word balloon in it along with literal blue lines, like notebook paper, for me to write in between. So after drawing the super hero face I would figure out what I wanted them to say and letter it in blue between the lines.
After drawing the face and writing the Superhero Cartoon Art Card I would print it out on a 5×7 inch piece of paper and ink it. First I would ink it with a thin marker and then ink it with a brusk and ink. I would also use a marker to letter it in ink on top of the blue line. This gives me the hand lettered look that I want.
The final step is to color it. I’ve been starting with the backgrounds and using two or three colored markers to scumble in some basic background colors. I like to keep it simple but I don’t want just one solid color. So I break the color up into a couple of mixed up values. The final step is to color the face itself.
I got six new faces done over two days. That’s not a bad pace. It’s not super fast but it’s a little bit faster than before. And that’s good.