Creating this piece took many long hours, an unhealthy dose of the Redbull, planning through several different steps of production, each to be reviewed and approved by my teacher and some good ol’ gut feeling.

Starting with very rough Sketches, and doodles, I try to keep composition and loose perspective in mind. As I doodle I’m also trying to find within the lines interesting forms that could be developed further. I keep this stage of development for my eyes only, and it’s used for my own personal inspiration. It is from the ideas I gather from these loose doodles that I will then translate to the thumbnail phase of the given project.

The following images are a small collection of thumbnails generated for the project. I had my heart set on doing something futuristic, but I still tried to change the thumbnails enough for them to be different from one another. It is important to explore many different compositional ideas so that you may have many to choose from. Most times then not, you’ll always find one better then the last. With that in mind, the more thumbnails generated the better.

I did try experimenting with vertical compositions for variety.

Ultimately, I decided to develop the above horizontal thumbnail.

The Following image is the rough image that was drawn directly from a blown up copy of the final thumbnail. I will blow up the thumbnail with a copy machine, put a sheet of paper over it, turn on the light table and redraw the thumbnail elements on a new larger sheet of paper. This stage is especially important as it is here that I will correct any perspective issues from the thumbnail and correct them, I was fortunate that the thumbnail chosen used a 1 point perspective setup. So there where very little perspective mistakes to correct as I was able to have the perspective pretty much nailed in the thumbnail phase. None the less, I will still determine my vanishing points (or in this case vanishing point), draw all perspective lines and ensure that all elements are true to the scenes perspective. As you can see, in the rough image below, I have drawn in all perspective lines leading to my vanishing point.

Rough Drawing with perspective construction lines.

Having completed the rough, the next step is to tighten up the lines and create a rough/clean version of the image using a clean fresh sheet of paper and the light table. Adding more detail where necessary. At any step before this stage, I’m free to erase parts and redraw elements I’m not happy with, as I try and figure out the design. When all that has been done, it’s time to set it in stone (or final line to paper) and begin the final clean drawing. When I’ve hit this stage, all elements of the scene have already been figured out. I threw a new sheet over the Rough/Clean drawing and begin painstakingly putting the final line to paper. With all my composition, perspective and designed elements already figured out in the Thumbnail/Rough/Rough-clean stages, here I am free to clear my mind of all these elements and focus purely on line weight.

Rough/Clean in blue with final clean drawing overlayed over using photoshop

Final Clean Line drawing of drawing.