Chapter 5 pencils (Deg Illustrations)

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Fri, 24 Mar 2017

After getting the first two finished, and being sure that I could do several more in the same style for the rest of the book, I went away and made notes for all the remaining illustrations before sketching another line.

I probably spent a week or more in the evenings just re-reading chapters and picking out images and objects and settings I could potentially draw in the background of each chapter’s illustration.

Once I had all these notes I could pick any chapter to draw next. I wanted to avoid drawing them in sequential order in case my style changed or developed over the course of the project. I didn’t want the illustrations to get steadily better - or worse - as the reader progressed through the book. I figured drawing the illustrations in a random order would hide any inconsistency in my work. It’s a trick often used when designing levels for video games, as the designer usually gets better at designing levels throughout the project, but you don’t want the first levels in a game to be the worst when you’re tying to hook the player - it’s best to scatter the weaker, earlier designed levels elsewhere in the game. I wasn’t going to redraw chapter 1 though!

This illustration came together pretty quickly. I felt like I knew what I was doing now, and there was a fair bit of empty whitespace / blackspace in this background (well, compared to the first two at least), which meant less to actually draw compared to some of the others.

Click the 'Follow up post' link below to see the finished illustration.

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Tags: deg, chapter5, drawing, illustration, book, novel, pencil, clip studio pro

Follow up post: Chapter 5 final (Deg Illustrations)

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