Yup....I'm back with a brand-spanking new post as I promised........and as You can see I'm already brushing up on my referencing skills for my upcoming school projects......hahaha.....this is a completely art-related post........quite a few people have been curious as to how I do what I do......and I've posted some examples of Finished artwork on my blog......but usually I can't be bothered with detailing the entire long ,ardous process of getting a drawing done but now that I got some spare time in my hands...so I thought why the hell not? So for the very first time I'll breaking down the different steps in the creative process of completing a piece of artwork in substantial detail.....giving all you folks an intimate tour inside my head......and trust me my head is not a nice place to be.....remember to take a shower after you're done reading this post....hahhaha

Let me start off doing what I'm best at and giving you a brief(Yeah right...BWAHAHA!!) history of how I first dabbled with drawing....and what is it I'm best at you ask? Why being Long winded of course!!!!Ha!.....

I started drawing around the time I was in Kindergarten......and I did like drawing a whole lot but did'nt feel I was particularly gifted in drawing or anything...I was pretty much as sucky in art as any kid I knew.......and usually I drew out of pure boredom....my mum would be fixing dinner after She picked me from school and since she was busy...so I had to kill some time cos I could'nt irritate her........hahhaha......and I remember my mum enrolled me for art classes but I dropped out after my very FIRST lesson!!.......holy H Christ!! I think I set a new record for the fastest art class drop-out in 1988...haha....

After that time.....it all gets kinda blurry......Ihough I do distinctively remember that my chinese textbooks and PETS workbook were filled with drawings of Mighty Max,Galactus and the Silver Surfer from the front page to the back cover of the book...

Flashforward to 1995, My dad and my uncle set up a bike shop and everyday I would be at school till noon and then take a 10 mins bus to railmall and stay till around 10-11pm everyday......for weekends I would be there for 12 solid hours 10am to 10pm.........and since my parents were busy as hell.......my mum would give me a stack of A4 sized paper and just leave me to draw or watch TV..........and this was the period that I REALLY started to take drawing seriously........I would draw for hours and hours....with whatever tools I had...markers,highlighters,ball-point pens,pencils...whatever........and I would fill these A4 paper to the brim with crazy doodles and random stuff.

Problem was....I sucked. I sucked BIG TIME!! and I knew it..........I was folding A4 paper in half to make my own mini-comics, drawing the comics in pencils and color pencils and even at age 11........even then I was practical enough to know that I was no damn good.....because I was reading quite a few comics at that point ........and My art sure as hell did'nt look anything like what I've been reading!! My comics were drawn in ballpoint pen (!) and color pencils(!!) and those Pilot High-Techpoint V5 pens(!!!) that would bleed like hell on the paper when you applied too much pressure........

So One day I just decided I wasn'y any good and stopped drawing cold turkey......my parents said my stuff was great but PUH-LEASE....I knew better...hahha.....I was serious about wanting to get really really good at drawing and around age 14 and I decided then That I would self-teach myself human anatomy, sequential storytelling,pacing,inking and basically just learn the tools of the trade by heart.........so its either I improve dramatically or I do everybody a favor and refrain myself from polluting the local art scene with my shoddy drawings........ahhaha.....see if you think I'm harsh to fat girls and banglas.....I can promise that I'm 3 times as harsh to myself when drawing is involved..........hahha...

So for the next few years, I drew very little but I researched and studied a lot............I wanted to learn from the very best....from the masters of the comicbook medium itself.......so I would read up on these thick books on comics history from the 1930's till the present and I would select artists that I really liked from each era.....the cream of the crop.....artists who changed the medium,who were innovators, who pushed the envelope............and I would hunt down reprints of their work and just immerse myself in them,trying my best to learn from their work......from the Golden Age(1938 to 1955) I would religiously study the work of Will Eisner(Creator of the Spirit), Jack Kirby (Co-creator of the whole Marvel Universe) and Dick Sprang (Batman), from the Silver Age(1956- 1970-ish) Neal adams(Batman), Steve Ditko( co-creator of Spider-man), Wally Wood (Tales from the crypt), Alex Toth( Zorro) and from the Bronze Age (1970's to 1990's) I studied the work of John Byrne(X-men and Fantastic Four), Walter Simonson(The Mighty Thor), Frank Miller( Daredevil), the Kubert Brothers(Hulk and Kazaar), Darwyn Cooke(New Frontier) and Bruce Timm( The Batman animated series).....blah,blah

-The entire drawing outline of the character was inked by a combination of markers(thin and thick) and the 0.05 Micron pens for detailing

-The outline of the face was inked with a thicker marker to help it look distinctive when contrasted with the thin lines of the body...

-Every Single line and crack on the body has varying line thickness, so the lines gradually goes from thick in the middle to thin at the edge.....giving variations in line thickness and weight,therefore providing some "texture" and added craggy-ness to Concrete's body....instead of the flat marker lines used in the first drawing that added no depth to the lines.

-The edge of each and every line on concrete has been sharpened to a razor's edge......rather than the blunt lines evidenced in the first drawing...

-The Eye has been corrected and the inking and placement of eye reflections looks much better in this drawing

- An added background of splattered white paint has been added, a visual technique that I wasn't yet capable of employing back in 1999....

So the above is just a small look back and illustration in terms of the kind of advances that have been made in terms of basic fundamentals and some of the old mistakes that were committted in past work........but now onto THE MAIN ITEM:

I'm finally clearing my off and ORD leave in army and what better way for me to commemorate my new found freedom then to start drawing again?And what better character to draw then my all-time favorite character, the very central theme of my blog...........Gotham City's very own Knight in Blood-caked armor.....Batman.

This drawing will be drawn in an entirely different style from my usual stuff. .After going through the work of so many artist, I realized the one that I'm head over heels with is Frank Miller's work..........I personally prefer drawing in Black and white (B&W) and to me Frank Miller's "Chiaroscuro" style in Sin City Makes FULL use of the B&w Format............because most of the time Black and white art just looks like art that is uncolored....... Frank Miller's art completely POPS in B&W and adding color will only dilute and muddy its effect.....that to me is the epitome of Good B&W art.....when the drawing stands completely on its own and any coloring is a distraction rather then enhancement....

>I have set some guidelines for myself. This piece is supposed to be as close to the"Chiaroscuro" style of drawing featured in Sin City as I can make it. The drawing will be consistent with My take on Batman in that he's virtually a creature of the shadows, an almost mythic creature who is extension of the darkness, draped in the shadows......white,cold,inhuman eyes......I want the whole page to drip with black ink.....so the drawing will be unapologetically dark and gritty.

Anyway enough ranting,here now is a detailed,step by step breakdown of how I plan and produce a piece of artwork from start to finish..........and if I'm successful the final drawing should look like a page taken right out of Frank Miller's work in Sin City.

Pictured here is a stack of comics I read for >ahem<....R&D purposes....hahhaha....The most important thing when planning to revamp your current art style or understand the innerworkings of your favorite artists is to do extensive research. I've been studying Frank Miller's Sin City comics since around 2000..........so in preparation of this piece, I read through every single Sin City story he's done and tried to absorb as much as I could visually, I also read through interview books that Frank miller has been involved in.......interviews from 1970 to 2001 and sometimes in these interviews Frank miller may elaborate on the kind of tools he uses or his working style employed or the different flourishes he puts in his work and basically I combined this information with whatever elements I pick up through my own personal observation of his comics to form my own theories on the how his creative process works......

Ok here's a check list of the tools I use from right to left:

-Eraser

-Mechanical pencil (For stuctural drawing)

-HB pencil (For shading purposes)

-micron 0.05 pens (Detailing,inking)

-Red and Black Marker (For rough sketching and preliminary drawings)

-Uniflo Permanent marker( For inking the large areas of black)

-Pain brush,Toothbrush and white paint( For the various special effects applied to the drawing)

Usually either you have a clear image of the picture you want to draw in your head or you can just doodle various poses or concepts on a piece of paper until you stumble on something you like. This are just warmy-up practices for me have some fun and to pin down the pose I want for my final drawing so the drawings are very rough and unfinished........anatomy need not be correct at this stage......and anyway as you can see, I sketched out 3 different poses and I'm settling for the rough pose on the right of the paper.......and with the pose in mind, we can move on to the next stage.

For this stage I do a tighter,more detailed marker sketch of the final drawing I intend to do. Whatever important details is more or less worked out at this stage of drawing. I draw it using black and red markers because underneath any drawing,minus the armor or the costume and whatever....the figure needs to be proportionate and anatomically correct so it is always a good idea to draw a "naked" anatomically correct body before adding any details to it therefore the underlying basic figure is drawn in black and then I add his cloak and cape and gloves in red..........so that I know how the body works and the red allows me to know how the figure will look like with clothes,gloves and etc on him without obscuring the main figure.......

This marker sketch gives a damn good indication of the direction the final drawing will take and already I can identify some of the things that needs to be corrected for the final drawing like the placement of the figure(Too high and not centralized), his right arm (not properly foreshortened)and thigh(too fat and anatomically incorrect)............

5.) Structural Preliminary Pencils

With the marker sketch as a guide, I begin work on the actual piece itself. The basic figure,the placement and anatomical problems are ALL worked out at this stage.......any mistakes is corrected at this stage.......the problems with the thigh and arm have been corrected in this stage...also I marked out the areas that are supposed to be in black with these little infinity symbols(Shorthand for indicating areas to be inked) but don't shade any of the areas yet. Usually I can ink the drawings at this stage but for the benefit of you folks....I'll add another stage which is the tigthening up the Final pencils next.

I prefer my pencils to be looser and less detailed when I ink my own art because if my pencil art is too complete and every detail is worked out then inking is going to be boring and basically you just trace the image with little to add. But if my pencils are looser ....then I can have alot of fun and more spontaneity when I'm inking....adding different flourishes and additional details in the inking stage.Think about it..........when you are inking your own work why pencil so tightly and add so much details at this stage....everything is going to be covered in ink anyway!You take the fun out of inking......its best that you ONLY pencil tightly and super detailed when someone else is inking your work,so since everything is already worked out by you in the pencilling stage it helps minimizes of the inker misintrepretating your work and screwing up the final look of your work ....

6) Final tightened Pencils:

This is the final,tightened pencils and I will ink Directly over this pencilled drawing. As you can see, the difference with this stage and the previous one is that most of the areas that are supposed to be black have already been shaded with the HB pencil and all the different lines have been tightened and finalized in anticipation of the inking.

An Important note I like to make is that I regard Pencils as a structural tool/ a stylus......and I regard ink as the actual drawing medium. What do I mean? Pencils are used to provide the basic structure and foundations of EVERY drawing, however pencils can be rubbed off and changed.......while inking is final and so only when pencils are inked can the drawing be finalised. Without inking......pencils just provide an unfinished foundation and not a completed work of art.

Case In point; This Drawing above Completely does not work at all while in Pencil form. Look at it, in this current form, the drawing is a muddy mess and the main figure itself does not stand out at all.......in this pencil form...this drawing has zero impact......the magic behind it is that this drawing will only work when it is finally inked, when I start laying the inks in the next few stages you will see how this picture slowly comes together.........however looking at this finalised pencils, I am already mentally inking it and have a pretty good idea of how the final piece will look like in my head....so far I'm happy with it....

This is the stage where I ink the entire figure itself,the background lightning and the other more intricate lines and details with the 0.05 micron pen. I do not fill in the Large areas of black in the picture yet because that is done with a thick uniflo marker . I added the lightning in the background because firstly it serves as a homage of Frank Miller's cover to Dark Knight Returns#1 and secondly because it serves as a dramatic element in the picture that helps pop the main character out(rather then placing him in a complete black background) and it also serves as an explanation for the dramatic lighting of the main figure( I want it to seem that Batman is completely submerged in the shadows and this bolt of lightning behind him illuminates him just for a brief instant in the most drmatic fashion possible)

8.) Intermission( Resting and Reflecting)

Ok now at this stage all that remains is to fill in the large chunks of black and see the drawing take its final form. I detach myself from this drawing and return to it in a few hours because when you're in the middle of drawing,and you're in the heat of things.......you might not be able to spot some of your mistakes if you were to complete the drawing in one entire go. However by resting and reflecting for a while......you return to the drawing with fresh eyes and can spot certain mistakes you were'nt able to when you were in the midst of drawing....

The paper is of course weighted down by my Brand-spanking new King Leonidas helmet paper weight that comes included with every deluxe,boxed version of the 300 DVD!! GET YOURS NOW!!!

Yup those are my dainty fingers inking in all the areas marked with the infinity symbol with my uniflo markers...hahha...I ALWAYS start inking the face/head first and if i screw it up,I abandon the drawing completely because it'll be deemed unsalvageable....I generally use the 0.05 micron pens for inking the fine details and the markers are used to fill in areas that require large chunks of black.....after inking with the marker,I go back and sharpen everything up with 0.05 micron pen........the paper underneath my hand(overlapping the drawing) is to prevent my hand from smudging the pencils as my hand moves across the page....

As you can see here, the drawing is partially inked and you can actually start to see how the picture is gradually coming together. This "chiaroscuro" style is a super stylized and high-contrast sort of drawing and the positive areas(white spaces) is completely defined by the negative areas( black spaces) and black merges with black and white merges with white.....i bet my Frank Miller collection that y'all dunno what the hell am I talking aboutat all...hahaha...simple:

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Take a look at the part where the lightning makes contact with the figure. When I was drawing in pencil, I drew the figure first and then the lightning in the background afterwards but if you notice, when I ink it....there is no line seperating the white areas......the lighting is completely merged with the rim-light of the figure(lighted silhoutte).... whenever two white areas meet....They're merged as one in the inking process....no lines to seperate them

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Another example....Look at the head of the figure. when I was drawing, I drew the head as I normally would but when inking it....I erase all the pencil lines and let the shape of the head be defined by the black areas instead. I'm speaking kryptonian?hahha... well look at the lines of the cape..........they all converge on the head and they're all cut off by a circular area of white and extend no further......so as you can see the area where the black lines stop short actually forms the outline of the head and therefore the entire white area of the head is defined by the black area...and the white areas of the cape is merged into the white area of the head without lines to seperate them...this creates the pure black and white/high contrast look I wanted to achieve....

My father took some pictures of me while I was knee-deep at working on the drawing........and NO. I don't usually draw in such poor lighting. My Father wanted to light and photograph me in a more dramatic fashion...hahaha


Another shot of me at the drawing table with my scowl intact......hahaha....one important thing, I hate to draw with my spectacles on......the proximity of the page is close enough so I prefer drawing without any visual enhancement.....


11.) The ALMOST final drawing




So there you have it........The Drawing is completely inked and you can see how much more effective it looks fully inked as compared to the fully pencilled version. The Lighning and the figure finally makes sense once all areas of blacks have been filled in. BUT WAIT......the inking is done but the drawing isn't finished yet....one Final step.


12.) The White paint 'Splatter' test






I'm going to be applying some minor "special effects" with white paint to the picture to finish it off and I gotta say that white paint is an unpredictable medium. When you're flinging white paint on a drawing with a brush or toothbrush....You never know where the specks of paint are going to land on and how the final look is going to be like....but what you can do, is try your best to control the chaostic nature of the white paint.

Therefore it is best that you do a small practice piece first to warm up yourself .Diluting the brush with water before flinging the paint and using a dry brush to fling the paint produces different results.........what we're after its "Controlled Chaos"...where although you do not know how the final piece will look like.....you try to minimize the risk of things going wrong by doing trial tests.
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As you can see above, different paint splatter effects can be achieved with varying speeds of flicking your thumb over the tooth brush.The bottom two panels are something different......the bottom left panel is done by coating a brush with paint and just flinging it downward as fast as you can and the bottom right panel is a practical application of white paint effects on a test drawing... I never understood why artists drew blood instead of spraying some paint on the paper which will produce the most realistic spurts of blood that no hand can recreate....paint and blood are both liquid....a spray of paint on paper achieves the same basic look as spraying blood on paper...



Yet another shot of me finishing up and correcting some other flaws I overlooked before I let the white paint fly. The drawing is basically covered with 4 other sheets of paper and only the area I want to spray the white paint on remains exposed.




AAAAAND I'm DONE.This is me (in normal lighting) finally putting down my pen with the completed drawing on the table........with what is possibly as humanly close to a smirk as I can muster...hahaha


13.) The Final drawing






This is the FINAL completed drawing. As you can see I added a fine spray of white paint at the bottom right of the drawing just underneath his boots. Why??? What the hell does it add to the overall look?!
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Everything happens for a reason... Comic art is a static medium. Unlike film So we can only convey movement to the readers using certain stylistic tricks like blowing bits of paper or leaves to indicate wind being present for example. The spray of white paint is precisely located underneath the boots to indicate movement......look at the drawing: by adding the white paint the figure looks like he leapt out of a rain-swept pavement and into the sky instead of it just being a static figure in the sky.......AND the direction in which the lightning strikes is NO accident....the bolt of lighning strikes from the left to the bottom right,precisely where the splatter of white paint is...to enhance the explosive nature of the spray of white paint.
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