After four years of neglect, my "Drawing through the Bible" project has gained another entry!
What prompted the return to my old Bible Illustrations Project:
Last year I primarily did digital art for my commissions and projects. I definitely learned a lot through focusing only on digital illustrating, but in the back of my mind is a persistent niggling desire to know how to do "real art," or more accurately, traditional art. So this year I picked up ye old sketchbooks again, and I picked up this dusty old project again, too! It's been really nice to return to lo-tech art tools and enjoy the tangible feel of the process, though it comes with its own set of challenges!
Lo-tech challenges
My favourite thing about traditional art is that you cannot zoom in. This is also one of the more challenging things about traditional art, but I find that the limitation of my own hands and eyesight on a fixed width paper actually helps me focus on what to draw. It prevents me from getting swamped in the details.
I can actually show you exactly what I mean using my most recent Genesis illustration as an example. A while back I chose to try to do a pre-drawing in Procreate, then trace it onto the physical page. I spent a total of eight hours drawing this column on Procreate - fussing over wrinkles, crowd scenes and other tiny details, only to realize that when I printed it out the details became absolutely lost!
It is a bit painful for me to compare the two, now. However, doing this did teach me a good lesson - though it is a great idea to plan out a drawing with a sketch, I should stick to paper and pencil next time. (I am thinking specifically on how much time I took to draw the wagon in the last panel, only to end up cropping it away!)
Another drawback to digitally sketching and then tracing the illustrations is that it added two to the whole process - namely printing it out and tracing it. This made the whole process much longer, and since the scope of the entire project is so big anyway (illustrating the whole bible, hello!) adding nit-picky little steps to each page strikes me as a waste of time.
So, from now on I will return to an entirely traditional approach. No more digital planning - just good old fashioned drawing, inking and colouring. I hope you enjoy seeing a bit of my process, and I hope my illustrations prompt you to read the stories!