I now knew what toys I wanted to include for my final piece book, which meant that I was ready to move on to the sketching stage. As I had twelve toys that I wanted to get done in approximately ten days, my goal was to quickly draw out each toy to make sure that these were what I definitely wanted to do. I used a black colouring pencil, giving myself a time limit of max. 5 mins and no rubber to complete each drawing, resulting in some drawings being less thought through proportionally. I was really happy with some of my toys such as the train, matchbox car and tonic truck, as they were fun to draw due to the mechanisms and less boxy nature. I then moved on to the iPad, and used a thin brush to repeat this process, however I focused more on proportions this time. I had a bit more difficulty with this, so for some of these designs, in order to speed up the process, I used the image as a background in procreate to make sure everything was spaced out correctly. This meant that when it came to doing the final line art and colour, it was historically accurate and didn’t look lopsided. I also quickly wrote beside or below each toy some quick mental reminders based on the ideas that came to me when drawing, focussing on getting the idea down rather than the neatness of the handwriting (evident by some of the more illegible sentences that made sense at the time, and less so two days later).
With these drawings done, and the proportions mapped out correctly (if roughly), I was ready to do the final line art. I had originally planned to do these with a pressure controlled digital pen, however I found it difficult to do that quickly, and with digital art comes a lot of wrist pain, and pressure control would have exacerbated that. I was worried if I went down that route that I either wouldn’t be able to get them done, or I would get them done and not be able to do the colour or lastly that I would get it all done but not in time for printing. I settled on a textured pen that imitated a sort of crayon-pencil line as it added a bit more texture than the rough sketching brush, but also was slightly pressure controlled due to the stabilisation. I spent quite a while on these as line art is my favourite part of illustration, although I am super lucky to be able to have access to an iPad rather than a drawing tablet, as it meant it was similar to drawing on paper rather than a drawing tablet where you can’t see it on the screen, only on a connecting monitor. My rough sketches were very useful as I was able to put them on a lowered opacity on a lower layer so that I could draw over the top. Some of them worked better than others, such as the symmetry tool coming in handy for the crayons, and the duplicating sides on the radio for even spacing. However there were some I really ended up disliking, such as the cozy coupe car and the simplicity of the Rubik’s cube. I decided to keep going and saved all of my line art in preparation for adding colour.
