Project One (con't): blue pencil Island and Tree

Wally's little island is interesting.  Here I sketched quickly and sloppily... do we really need perfection?  I added some gentle, wavy lines around the little island to suggest placid water lapping gently around its edges.  I added jagged little expression lines on the top of the island to suggest grass.

I used 2 or 3 different brushes in SketchBook Pro to suggest a solid tree with Art Lozzi type foliage.  I love the bark lines in cartoon trees... they're so expressive but also comical.  Imagine if the bark had no lines as if it was perfectly smooth.  Would that make for an interesting tree?  Not on my little island, nosirree.

Here is where digital art leaves the paper variety behind.  I superimposed the image of the tree on our little island and... viola!... we have Wally's Island.  Cute little place; nice and cozy.  But Wally must find it terribly constraining after a while.  Poor guy.

For the most part I use the pencil that comes standard with SBP.  No variation of line; very sketchy.  But this suits my purposes in striking out and creating the shapes that will become our Golden Book example.

Here's my thought: you draw with shapes.  Think about that.  You don't draw with expression lines or sketch lines or lines of any sort.  What you convey are shapes.  That's why you and I will never draw exactly alike... our shapes will vary, not matter how hard we try to remain the same.

That's not a bad thing; it's a good thing, really.  How we convey our shapes reveals our style.  Our style.  Everyone draws shapes a little differently.