Exercise 2.1: Limited line drawings

This exercise was, as the title suggests, to produce a series of sketches with as minimum lines as possible, just enough for the viewer to get a sense  of what’s happening.

I started out by drawing my flat mate who was having a nap. Used a Pentel brush pen which is quite challenging for me to use it to make thin lines and therefore I found this exercise useful to put that pen into practice.
I aimed to sketch the first subject (person napping) without lifting the brush away from the paper,  the alternative would be to make a few marks/shapes but I considered that this method wouldn’t be the best suited to portray the subject with clarity.
Once I felt more comfortable and warmed up with the method, my second chosen subject was my hand, inspired by the works of Henry Gaudier-Brzeska and Lisa Marie Lamb, I set out a variety of hand poses to sketch them and I ended up satisfied with the outcome in the sense that the last attempts ended up more expressive than the first ones,

The last two hand poses, I was happy with the result that I decided to polish the drawing a bit more by making the lines more elaborated and adding watercolour felt tips to add more depth.

Set of studies for Limited line drawing.

Finally I took a different approach to this exercise, I moved to a digital medium to work with since  I had a wide range of brushes, particularly ink brushes with some interesting shapes which I haven’t tried before and played around with the intention of creating, with minimal marks,  an interesting shape that would serve as a foundation to further elaboration. Below is a screenshot of this process.

In the first layer, I started off by adding some watercolour with an opaque  tone of red, yellow and blue.
On another layer, I picked an ink brush with an erratic shape and played around with minimal stroke input.
Similar to a Rorschach test, I identified some shapes within the shapes and ,by erasing, I started to carve similarly as a sculptor would do, to create a more detailed and familiar image.

To finalise the picture, I picked a brush that emulated a scrap of ink to add this sort of dead vegetation around the man and adjusted the colours to create a mood that would suit the picture.

Final Thoughts 

I think that limited line drawings can be useful when sketching people outdoors and since these subjects are generally moving, it is useful to use this method to capture the dynamic. Furthermore , this method can also be useful when creating thumbnails for more elaborate illustrations and/or to create a skeleton for an illustration.

This method as a way of producing a picture as the final product, I wouldn’t do it since I like to portray my subjects with a good degree of accuracy and yet keep the energy and dynamism in the picture at the same time. (E.g. Gary Frank, Brian Boland and Dave Gibbons).