the process.....the warm ups

I thought I would post a bit about 'the process' as it were. I had some people ask here and also email me about this little known part of the drawing process.

The first thing when I sit down to draw is the 'warm up'. I guess like most things involving controlled parts of the body, ha, like a baseball pitcher or something is the 'warm up'. Same in drawing. The 'warm up' gets the arm moving so you can work on control, movement, and just generally working the kinks out. And of course the older you get the more kinks you have to work out. I find it also gets some of the images out of your brain you may have stored while watching tv or reading or whatever from the night before. It also serves as kind of an 'idea factory' for poses and other stuff.

Also after doing this I usually scan them with my 11x17 scanner and save most of them. I usually scan all my work. Even pencilled pages before inking. Sketches I like, finished work and all. My scanner is one of my most important pieces on my computer table. I paid a ton for it, but it has been worth every penny. I used to have a small scanner, and when I started doing Captain Spectre I had to scan each half of a page and put them back together in photoshop. What a pain that was week after week. Or whenever I got a page done. Now I can scan a full size comic page, they are draw bigger than the print size, if you don't know. The drawing field on a full size comic page is about 10 x 15.25 inches.

Anyway you can see the simple sketch of the Captain Spectre drawing I posted last week, in the lower right corner of the top page of sketches. That is where it started, and I thought it was a cool pose so I finished it up on the bigger paper of a comic page.