Condition Clear

I really don’t have the free time that I wish I did. Lately, finding time to sketch has been next to impossible, which drives me a little crazy. It didn’t always; in fact, there was a period of years where I didn’t sketch at all, except for the occasional doodle while stuck on a conference call. It’s nice that this has changed, and my fingers get itchy when they can’t draw.

But that also means I don’t have a lot to post here. I’m spending an awful lot of time reading about digital workflows and digital painting and digital wireframing and all sorts of things that are extremely useful to me, now that I do the vast majority of my work on the computer.

Four books arrived from Amazon last night. Here are my micro-thoughts on three of them (haven’t touched the fourth yet):

Bold Visions: A Digital Painting Bible, by Gary Tonge

Yeah, not so much on the Bible part. This is mostly a collection of workflows from an obviously talented digital landscape and matte painter, but the word ‘bible’ suggests you’ll learn everything you need to know about painting with your computer. Tonge’s tone and approach assume that you know how to paint already — me? paint? yeah, not so much, Mr. Tonge — and deftly dodge any specific lesson-giving. Lots of talk about “now add shading and more lines”, very little talk about how to shade or add more lines.

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics, by Freddie Williams

Read this one from start to finish in one sitting. (I skipped one or two chapters that dealt exclusively with prepping comic boards for printing.) Williams became a digital artist almost by accident, which means I can relate far more to this guy than to Tonge. Lots of detail in this book, with carefully-described workflows that include specific techniques of use in Photoshop. Extremely useful to me, and I learned about twelve new things just breezing through on my first read.

Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction, by Doug Chiang

Simply outstanding. Chiang’s a concept artist who works with Bob Zemeckis an awful lot. He’s also a very traditional sketch artist, and the book touches a bit on how to work digitally, but focuses far more on Chiang’s approach. Which seems to be: scribble roughs with Prismacolors, ink them, shade them with Prismacolors, ink them some more, finish coloring them with Prismacolors. Which is what I’ve been doing — though nowhere near his level — for years now. This book is so detailed and enlightening that it has inspired me to try all sorts of new things with my old art tools.