During Inktober 2019 I did a sketch of a frog wearing a crown for the prompt ENCHANTED:
It’s perfectly cromulent for a quick sketch, but it exhibits one of the issues I had when I started drawing again after many years: uneven, wobbly lines.
There are two things I did to change this:
- In the primary drawing program I use, Procreate (iPad-only), I have turned on smoothing, which automatically smooths out lines as you draw them. The smoothing effect is kept low, because it gets weird and laggy as you crank it up, and I only need a little smoothing to balance out my hand’s natural wobble.
- The other thing was just draw better. I used to draw lines in segments, then fix each segment if I erred, resulting in ugly, blobby lines. You might generously call it a style if it was intentional. Over time, I learned to just draw longer, more balanced lines. If I messed up, I’d redraw the entire line, not just a section of it.
I recently did a simple coloured version of the same sketch and ended up redoing all the line work, so it’s effectively ENCHANTED 2.0. Because I was rushing, there are a few little bits that should probably be cleaned up, and I may do that at some point. Mainly, this is just another chance for me to take an older piece, and show how just a few minutes with a more practised hand can make a noticeable difference. To my eye, anyway1Yes, in a way, this post is the world’s longest way of humble bragging about how much better I think I can draw now than in 2019..
Colour frog (I lost the original reference, so the colours are just my best guess for something frog-like):
Eventually, I’m going to try more experiments in line thickness, so I can get a result somewhere between the wonky lines of the first sketch and the rigid uniformity of the colour update. Still, progress!
