"Paris & a .45"

"That's Very Funny. A Fly Marrying a Bumblebee...."

Artist's Notes:

Foreground and character design drawn on Nov. 10th

Background (sky, ground, Eiffel Tower) rendered Today

I'm digging through old designs, concept art, and illustration, and adding things like backgrounds and perspective to them, adding a richer sense of compositions. I always did like full compositions more. I know I tend to draw the opposite of that way (with just the character in the foreground with white or black background, but even I tend to like full page compositions better than compositions that only have 1 character on them and nothing else.....

Story behind it:

I've been wanting to add more detail and a fuller, more dense and crowded composition to NUMEROUS older drawings I've done. In truth I've done a lot of different drawings, but often a lot of them look almost too simple for me to be happy with them. Either they're not polished or truly fleshed out, or they lack textural variety, or they're flat with no perspective or depth in the background. I've wanted to go back and "remaster" and touchup old sketches I've done for YEARS now. But it was just today that I DID go back and add some depth and density to a handful of them..I don't know whether it was laziness or artist's block, but I always felt some kind of heavy and negative energy field interfering with me reconnecting with older sketches and adding density elements to them, like perspective, hatching, effects, backgrounds, and a dense composition (i.e. what Katsuhiro Otomo and Moebius do), because truthfully, once I stopped working for one day on a 10 to 30 minute sketch, I'd add it to my pile/stack of sketches, and would never hear from it again. Left me with a big sense of incompleteness on the bulk of my work. Now I seem to have entered some kind of "Revisionist and Polish Mode" where going back and "correcting my compositions with more depth and perspective IS possible. Which is considerably less depressing.

Secrets of How He Did It:

How I got the likeness of the Eiffel Tower's details right: Simple. I used 2 things: Cross hatching for the metal, and a ruler on the proportions. I was looking at a photographic reference of the REAL Eiffel Tower when I drew its architecture. I used a construction line that was essentially 1 vertical line drawn WITH a small ruler I own to size up the proportions of the tower. If you want your backgrounds and costume to look REALLY good, don't always draw EVERYthing by hand. Most, if not all realistic architecture in Japanese anime and in detailed animation and comics is drawn with a ruler, as are swords and other props. Don't be afraid to "Draw with a ruler for your backgrounds". It's how you make your backgrounds look professional.