Figurative drawing with Carsten Mell

In this workshop, Carsten Mell shows us how he proceeds when working on a typical assignment. We already know that he has exchanged his sketch pad and pencil for a Wacom Cintiq graphic tablet some time ago so there is no scanning involved ? which would take time and reduce quality in most cases anyway. What?s more, Carsten can save various elements on different layers and scale, turn, duplicate or delete them during the drawing process. He uses Corel Painter IX as his favorite software. "The interaction between the graphic tablet and Painter is perfect," the illustrator says. "With the high resolution and, even more important, the pressure sensitivity of my tablet, I can do everything that I can do with analogue media ? from precise lines to soft paint mist ? only better, faster and corrigible at all times. It is virtually impossible to draw with a mouse and you cannot use the hardware to its full potential without a powerful software application like Painter. With this program, I can imitate every imaginable painting medium at all times."

Other software applications he uses are Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, but we will learn about them in the following workshop. So, lets observe Carsten at work!

Fig.1

Work starts with a rough sketch; this defines the pose and proportions. I usually do it in Adobe Illustrator right from the start and draw it in a medium blue hue. The color is partly due to old habit ? blue pencil used to be invisible when scanning and was therefore ideal for the pre-sketch ? but I also do it because the lighter lines don't appear as final as black ones do. I don't care very much for details here, but for the overall appearance of the pose and the composition as well as perspective and proportions.

Fig.2

As soon as I am satisfied with the sketch, I add another layer on top of it to draw the "real" outlines in black. I use a variable line that gets thicker or thinner according to the pressure I apply to the pencil. The light blue hue of the pre-sketch helps me to see which parts of the sketch are already done and which aren't. The black drawing will be visible in the final illustration because I will lay the colors below.

Fig.3

When the black outlines are finished, I may hide the pre-sketch layer, leaving the following result: A clean "ink drawing". As I have done it in Adobe Illustrator, it is entirely vectorized, thus only several kilobytes large and scaleable to any size I wish. This comes in very handy in case I would like to do a poster afterwards and the illustration that results from it is not created in a sufficient resolution. In this case, I would scale all the colors in Photoshop and lay the vectorized outlines on top. This makes the colors slightly blurred, but this would be hardly noticeable due to the pin-sharp outlines.

Read the whole article in the current issue of Art Scene International.

www.CarstenMell.com