Drawing with Mark part 1: The DP clan(Get your mind out of the gutter)

Greetings Brigadiers! 
Welcome to the first installment of what will be an ongoing feature here for all you folks that have a hefty $3 a month to throw my way. That's 10 cents a day mind you. I'll be damned if I don't make every one of those cents count! I'm going to take you deep into my process and show you how I come up with the work you see on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. In future installments I'll dive deep into anatomy, design, thought process, and color theory. My goal is to fill enough content to publish a book one day but, in the meantime, you're all my test monkeys...or parrots. Whatever, let's get started! 

If you're here you're probably already familiar with my D'fied X-men series. This started out as an exercise to warm up every morning but took on a life of its own. I've shown over 80 so far and have almost double that to go with more being created nearly every day. It's a departure from my normal style but is still grounded in the foundation of proper anatomy. 

Because I'm an attention whore, I decided to pander to you scallywags by adding four of Deadpool's alter egos to the line-up. Did I mention Wolverine/Deadpool comes out this week? So yes, I'm pandering. featured here are Lady Deadpool, Dogpool, Kidpool, and the head of Zombiepool. All created unique challenges, but every artist loves a good challenge to cause sleepless nights and a feeling of worthlessness. 

Every figure I do starts off with a rough skeletal type gesture drawing(fig A). I already have a rough idea what I want the pose to look like, but I keep this very loose. My lines are very quick with little thought to accuracy. No one is going to see this phase of the drawing(except you lucky folks) so there's no need to be precious with my lines. Preciousness kills drawings. 

The pose is called contrapposto. It's an Italian term that means "counterpoise". It is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane. And yes, I stole that from Wikipedia. In layman's terms it means the angle of the shoulders and hips counterbalance each other. SO, if the left hip goes up, the left shoulder goes down. This provides a sense of motion. 

After I've sketched out the basic structure, I move on to filling out the figure (Fig B). Again, I'm very rough here. There's no such thing as a bad line, just a bad line that goes along with another line. Be really quick and sketchy here. Draw, erase, and draw some more until you feel you have a nice form. Move your hand quickly and don't rely on short scratchy lines.  You should feel like you're flowing with your drawing, not fighting it at this stage. 

Now we get to the fun part (Fig C). We're going to start roughing in the details. In this case it's the eyes, seam lines, holsters, swords, etc. You know, all the things the modern woman needs. This stage can be frustrating because you're starting to see how the final drawing is going to come out but, if you've followed the first two steps, you should be seeing some pleasantly surprising results. Or be cursing my name right now. I'm cool with either. 

Finally, we come to (Fig D) which is our ink stage. If I was going to pass this piece off to another inker, I'd have a stage in between where I tighten up the pencils even more but I'm the inker which means I get to torture myself as much as I want. And I do. The important thing here is to keep my lines flowing smoothly and confidently. I'll even go as far as to do some practice strokes on a scrap sheet of paper before committing to the final line on the drawing. With animation style drawing like this, every line counts so take your time and practice. Not every line will be perfect, and they make white-out for a reason. 

Another example with the stages that went into Kidpool. When I draw characters that are more exaggerated like this the rules of anatomy get even more broken, but you'll notice the foundation of realism is still there. From the counterbalance of the stride to the body weight being centered to the ground, it still makes sense in a realistic way even though much of it is exaggerated. This is why life drawing is so important. You have to learn the rules so you can figure out how to break them properly using your own style. Pirates break rules but only the rules they knew in the first place.  

Finally, we have the full roughed out pencils for the finished piece. I draw each character on a separate layer so I can shift them around however I see fit. But draw them however you like, I'm not going to tell you what to do, I'm not your mother. I'm your friend.

And here we have the final inked piece accompanied by the colors. I've probably wasted enough of your time today, but I will be back with some full tutorials on computer coloring and painting. I'm even planning some videos so I can show you while I tell you. I'm a visual pirate soit's always easier to feed your eyeballs. So, fear not my loyal crew, I have so much more I want to impress upon and teach you. We're going to get pretty in depth so please let me know in the comments below if you found this helpful and what you'd like to see in the future. Your Captain is a bit of goofy smartass but in the end, I just want what's best for you. 

Now fetch me a flagon of mead! YAAAARRRRR!!!!!!