Trust the pencil
How to produce quality work in a tight deadline
If you’re wondering how little Pencil popped into your mailbox, it’s because Loddelina newsletter that you are subscribed to has now moved to Substack, a brand new platform from where you will still get my free Loddelina newsletter, but also much more.
So here is More No. 1, a monthly prompt from Illoguild, an international group of picture book illustrators I joined a year ago (and will talk about some other time, in More No. 2 or even 3…) - July’s question is as follows:
How to produce quality work in a tight deadline?
I’ll let Pencil explain: Make. Lots. Of. Pencil. Sketches.
I mostly draw digitally, on iPad in Procreate, and when I’m in a rush it’s very tempting to grab my stylus, pick a pencil-like brush in the app and start drawing, after all, a sketch is a sketch, digital or paper, right?
But tapping on the screen is not the same as drawing on paper. Yes, pencil doesn’t have “undo” button or any of those endless possibilities of reshaping, duplicating, enlarging, shrinking, transforming every shape or line as you go, but by drawing on paper, starting with softer lines and slowly getting bolder, more confident, carefully building your sketch, lets your hand more accurately transfer that elusive idea that you’ve had percolating in your head.
That is why I find that when a deadline is tight, the only way to save time drawing is to spend time sketching, and sketching on paper. I’ve realised that the more time I spend sketching my subject, with a little help of real life or photographic references, and the more detailed and researched my sketches are, so much easier and faster it will be to finish the piece in colour and detail.
I still sketch with my iPad, of course, but I prefer the energy and life in pencil drawings. Trust the Pencil!
Here are some of the many pencil sketches I drew researching a cockatoo and a kookaburra, two feathered friends throwing a cheese party. One sketch made it into the final coloured illustration, done in Procreate.