Hand-drawn town WIP

[palehorse]

Whenever I need a break from staring at the computer, I usually end up either grabbing my sketchbook or whatever musical instrument is closest at hand. I had a hankering to break out some drawing materials that I haven't used in a while the other day (and since this is a board for art and cartography and not recordings of sea chanties played on a ukulele or bad punk guitar), so I decided to do a map the old fashioned way.

I'm always interested in seeing how stuff like this progresses, and I figure that there are probably one or two others out there with a similar interest, so I'll be posting up the work-in-progress shots as I do it.

Here's where it stands right now. It's done on watercolor paper, since I plan on coloring it with watercolors when I'm done. The sketch was done with a plain ol' 5H pencil. I tried using one of my blue Prismacolor Copy-Nots, but it was just too light.

I'm inking over it with a crowquill pen. I'm using my favorite of all nibs, the Hunt 99 Drawing tip, which I prefer vastly over the more popular Hunt 102. (The 102 is a bit finicky for me.) The ink is Speedball Super Black.







You can see that I don't sketch in a lot of details; I usually don't when I'm inking my own drawings.

I should have the inking portion done in a few days, and I'll post up the finished b&w version before I start coloring.

[Gamerprinter]

Awesome - nice seeing hand drawn work like this! I'm too lazy to actually paint in watercolor, nice work.

[ravells]

Wow, this is beautiful! I can't wait to see more and must start doing some 'proper drawing' again.

p.s. you can post up sea shanties if you like!

[Redrobes]

Lovely - more please...

[palehorse]

Thanks all! My electricity was out most of the day, so I got a lot of work done on this one to while away the hours, and got caught up on some reading to boot! :-)

Awesome - nice seeing hand drawn work like this! I'm too lazy to actually paint in watercolor, nice work.

I'm probably going to cheat (well, it's not REALLY cheating) and use watercolor pencils for the bulk of the coloring. It's been awhile since I did any traditional watercolors, and I'll need a few months of practice to sharpen my skills before I try using them on anything I actually want to keep!

I picked up a Niji waterbrush (one of these: http://www.dickblick.com/zz051/33/ )a few weeks ago, though, that's made it a heck of a lot easier to practice with. I need to get a few more, actually, in different sizes, now that I know I like them! They're SO handy! I'd like to get one just to fill with something like a neutral gray or brown and add some washes to my ink drawings.

[pyrandon]

Great to see you here again, Butch--and that comment is underlined by me ten times more when you come bearing hand drawn maps! I can't wait to see the end result, and I hope it inspires others here (myself included) to set aside the mouse for a little while and remember how much fun it is to scratch on real-live paper!

[palehorse]

So here's the latest. I'm really, really unhappy with how fiddly I started making the fields. I let my mind wander while I was working, and my hand just sort of went off on it's own natural tendency to render the heck out of things. Chalk it up as a learning experience, I suppose.

I don't have a good way to fix it on the original (I don't have any opaque white that won't mess up the look of the watercolors) so I'll just try to clear up some the fiddly bits in the field in Photoshop later on. I'll probably go ahead and render out the rest of the fields, though, so the original will at least have a consistent look.

[ravells]

What...your pen doesn't have a ctrl-Z setting??

[palehorse]

What...your pen doesn't have a ctrl-Z setting??

I wish! I'd have needed a LOT of levels of Undo, though.

[Baziron]

This looks so awesome. I feel encouraged to draw some more, ever since I also tend to predraw with pencil and then ink over - but it'll take some practice before it looks like that.