Digital sketching after several months
It has been over half a year since I began sketching on the iPad, and thanks to the convenience and portability, I've been able to begin a new sketch in a moment's notice. As a result, I've been sketching nearly every day, often producing more than one sketch a day.
Here are a few of those sketches, all done with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Mini in Procreate.
All of my sketches have been done either in the classroom during fleeting moments when my partner teacher had taken over the lesson, or on the evening subway. In both cases the models were unaware that they were being sketched, so I had to sketch quickly before the pose vanished.
While several minutes could go by before a student changed his or her pose (or woke up), there was danger of the pose vanishing every two minutes on the Tokyo subway as we arrived at the next station. Someone would get off the train and leave a vacant seat for the subject to sit in, new passengers would get on and block my view of the model, or the model would suddenly leave.
If the pose looked promising and I managed to at least finish the underdrawing, I might keep the sketch and add to it as other people assume a similar pose.
The woman in the pink shawl below was actually three different people. I had barely completed the shawl when the model left the train, so I added the legs in jeans the next week from a similar pose, and added the head a few days later.
I also added highlights with a fairly opaque pencil tool. But in the sketch on the right I was able to start and finish the pose with the same model in a few minutes, and decided to not add highlights after the fact.
My style and method continue to evolve as the medium and the subject matter influences my way of doing things. One big change is how I approach the underdrawing. I've always used a pencil for underdrawing, and continued that habit with a digital pencil tool, eventually settling on red for the color.
But then I discovered that a versatile watercolor brush tool is better than a pencil for underdrawings because I can capture more in a single stroke, and also keep it very loose with broad strokes so I won't be compelled to slavishly follow the lines when I move to the actual rendering. It also helps me to draw faster and quickly to capture the essence of the pose so I can jump in and start rendering for as long as the model is in front of me, which can be only a few seconds up to a few minutes.
Here's a time-lapse video of a digital sketch that uses a red watercolor brush for the underdrawing
I've also been taking advantage of the time lapse video feature in Procreate. I won't put all those videos here because there are so many, but I often upload them to Instagram (@russellstutler) where most of the followers are my students (and I in turn mainly only follow my students), or to a special web page I created just for the students (all in Japanese) so they can see my latest sketches and time-lapse videos, and can download the sketches if they happened to be the models.
Here's another time lapse video of the quick and simple subway sketch I mentioned above.
After half a year I'm still excited about digital sketching, and how many sketches I'm able to produce now without burdening my daily routine at all.
