Doodle Beasts

Ink drawing used to fill me with dread. I mean, proper, hide in a corner, swear I was never going to make art ever again, kind of dread.

It was the permanence of it you see…It’s that moment when you’ve got a picture half finished, after hours of work, and you get a splatter, or a smudge or some other catastrophe and you feel like it’s ruined.

In fact, the fear that it’s all going to go horribly wrong is the bit that puts a lot of people off drawing in the first place. The truth is though, that artists never really stop making mistakes, it’s just that as you get better, you try to learn from your mistakes and you figure out ways to avoid making them in the first place…It’s all about experience, some of which I’m hoping to pass on in this tutorial.

I’ve deliberately picked a design that is (I hope) fairly simple…so if you find yourself disappointed with the final image feel free to come up with your own bits of machine and funk it up in any way you see fit. On the other hand, if you just want a nice steampunk inspired drawing that you can copy, to get you into shading with cross hatching and ink, then this one shouldn’t be too difficult.

First things first…

Equipment. I decided for simplicity’s sake to do this drawing in ball point pen. Basically, because they’re relatively permanent, cheap and easy to come by; most people reading this already have one to hand.

Also, because biro is a good starting point for exploring the shading techniques that you can use in any ink drawing…without the splattery, smudgy mess you get with standard ink and dip pens.

As well as that, if you can master making cool looking art with a ball point pen, then you can pretty much get hold of one and doodle to your hearts content where ever you find yourself. You can’t plant yourself on a long train journey with a full set of dip pens, markers and bottled ink…but a half decent sketchpad and a biro…that’s much easier. I suggest getting a new ball point pen for drawing though if you can, and it helps if you have multiple of the same make in case it runs out before you’re finished. It’s also a good idea to have a spare bit of paper or tissue to clean the pen tip with every now and again, just to prevent build ups of blobby ink that might mess things up. I picked a black pen, but there’s no reason why you can’t use other colours…blue looks more obviously like biro ink on the page which is kind of cool, but it’s really up to you.

For paper, I settled on a fairly thick water colour paper because I decided I’d want to finish the drawing off with a coloured wash and I didn’t want the page to wrinkle…but if you choose to draw just in biro and leave out the wash, then any decent quality sketching paper will do, it’s really down to personally preference. My advice for anyone new to drawing is to head down to an art store where you can buy sheets of paper loose, and experiment with lots of different sorts…you’ll soon find a sort that you like for your own style of art.

This is where I start with any art work that I want to get right first time; with a big, ugly, scribbly, rough sketch. It doesn’t have to be pretty, and you don’t have to do just one, in fact it helps to do a few.

I usually do these on any cheap paper that I have to hand…office paper, lined writing paper, whatever you’ve got. First I sketch in the main body of the subject; in this case I started with the round middle bit of the machine. From there I could work out how to arrange the umbrellas in a vaguely plausible manner, and end up with something that hopefully looks like a balanced and pleasing composition. Until I started really planning things out, I found that I had major problems with proportions, perspective and things just not quite looking ‘right’. If you plan everything out in a rough sketch first, then you avoid wasting time shading and finishing a picture that doesn’t look right because of some other error. It might seem like a pain, but in the long run it pays off no end.

Once you’ve got your rough sketch you can trace it on to your good quality paper, very lightly with a pencil, taking care of how you position it on the page. For tracing these days I use a light box, but I used to just use a window…being careful obviously not to fall through it. The old style computer monitors with glass screens where pretty good as well, but not many people have them anymore, and LCD screens don’t take as kindly to being poked with a pencil.

When you’ve got your faint outline you can start shading. It’s a good idea to work moving way from yourself, left to right for right handers, right to left for lefties. It’s not such a big deal with biro ink as it doesn’t smudge as easily as pencil or standard ink pens, but it’s a good habit to get into regardless. Generally I tend to start somewhere in the middle and work outwards, rotating the page, but you might find it easer to start in one of the top corners and work down towards the opposite bottom corner.

The most important part of shading is figuring out where your light source is coming from. In this case, the light is above and slightly to the right, meaning that the heaviest shadows will fall underneath objects and to the left. Most of the shading in this drawing is done with hatching and cross hatching; i.e. a matrix of lines which are built up to give darker and lighter areas. I tried to design our machine so that it could be broken up into distinct areas of shading; this makes it easier as you only have to concentrate on a little bit at a time, and also means that it’s easier to use the direction of the shading lines to give the machine ‘shape’. On the round cylindrical body, the shading follows the curve of the outline to give the 3d cylindrical effect…on the umbrella sections, the lines originate at the pointy bit and fade out towards the flatter areas.

In my experience, the best way to learn how to do this is to look at other people’s drawings, and really pay attention to how they arrange their lines to give something a 3d shape. If you find yourself really stuck as to how to give an object ‘shape’ try thinking about how it’d be drawn at its most basic. Once you break something down into simple spheres, cubes and pyramids it often becomes much clearer as to how it should be shaded.

The final thing once you’ve got the hang of the basic shapes is to add in a few details. In the case of steam punk machines, that’s usually the odd scratch, tear or riveted plate. Rivets are easy to show with a small circle drawn with a fine tipped pen. For maximum realism, I find it’s best not to use lines that are too dark when adding details, and let the side that’s in shadow be just a little bit darker than the side of the rivet that would reflect the light. Similar thinking applies to scratches and holes, keep them fairly faint so that they don’t stand out too obviously, vary the way you draw them slightly so it looks natural, and be sparing in where you put them…every machine is going to have a few dents, but it’s unlikely have to have a dent or scratch on every surface.

To finish the image off, I decided to cover the white ground around the machine with a couple of water colour washes applied with a brush, and a splatter effect done with a spray bottle…purely because I didn’t like it left hanging in white space.

That’s it for now…I hope I’ve imparted some useful knowledge and given an idea of how I go about producing a drawing. Next time I’ll focus on drawing with dip pens and ink, which is what I usually use. Any questions can be stuck in the comments below, or emailed to me at doodlebeasts@googlemail.com . No spam please, I don’t need drugs or enlargements and I’m pretty sure my bank already know my account number.