From the start, I knew the drawing I was working on was going to be the best one I had ever created.
I had scratched out a rough concept at four in the morning at an all-night sale in a department store, and it was nothing special. The lines I completed the next day while my parents watched a vintage Bollywood movie, and it looked pretty good. The following evening, I scanned the drawing into my laptop, zoomed in, and gave it a good, hard look.
And it was actually really nice, I thought. Maybe even better than anything I had ever drawn. There were no glaring anatomical errors, no stray lines, nothing that could possibly mess this one up. This was going to change my style forever, I thought as I shaded in the skin, putting effort into every shadow and …show more content…
How smoothly I could shade the skin with my new technique, how I could capture every rough thread in the bodice, the shimmer and gleam of the smooth gold fabric lining the overcoat. So I kept telling myself it was worth the effort. Every second I spent on this would make it that much better.
And finally, one night, there was nothing left to render. I had shaded in every last detail; I had a near-perfect grayscale drawing in front of me, and all there was left was to add color.
That’s where things started to go wrong. Midterm exams had just come to a close, and I was exhausted; I just wanted to relax and finish my drawing. In the exhaustion-induced rush, I barely took two hours to paint brown over the skin, pink and orange over the cloak, deep indigo on the overcoat, and gold over the trim, and I finished just in time: my mother called me to bed just as I was starting work on the background. I barely finished it before she forced me to shut my computer down; I told myself I would finish tomorrow and look over the big picture at the very
I had scratched out a rough concept at four in the morning at an all-night sale in a department store, and it was nothing special. The lines I completed the next day while my parents watched a vintage Bollywood movie, and it looked pretty good. The following evening, I scanned the drawing into my laptop, zoomed in, and gave it a good, hard look.
And it was actually really nice, I thought. Maybe even better than anything I had ever drawn. There were no glaring anatomical errors, no stray lines, nothing that could possibly mess this one up. This was going to change my style forever, I thought as I shaded in the skin, putting effort into every shadow and …show more content…
How smoothly I could shade the skin with my new technique, how I could capture every rough thread in the bodice, the shimmer and gleam of the smooth gold fabric lining the overcoat. So I kept telling myself it was worth the effort. Every second I spent on this would make it that much better.
And finally, one night, there was nothing left to render. I had shaded in every last detail; I had a near-perfect grayscale drawing in front of me, and all there was left was to add color.
That’s where things started to go wrong. Midterm exams had just come to a close, and I was exhausted; I just wanted to relax and finish my drawing. In the exhaustion-induced rush, I barely took two hours to paint brown over the skin, pink and orange over the cloak, deep indigo on the overcoat, and gold over the trim, and I finished just in time: my mother called me to bed just as I was starting work on the background. I barely finished it before she forced me to shut my computer down; I told myself I would finish tomorrow and look over the big picture at the very