Richard and Lady Sketch

Completed on June 16th, 2011

So, there's a bit of story with this one, both literal and figurative.

Digital edit of 4 inch by 4 inch graphite and ink sketch. About 5 hours total. Five... really painful hours.

So I had a nice little gesture drawing that eventually I decided to add on to and refine and detail and then ink to the point that it lost all of the "spirit" of the original sketch, and I'm left sighing that I didn't just leave well enough alone. Ah well!

Rather than consider the entire undertaking a wash, I decided that the cupper (the armor on a horse's read) was the one solid, redeeming part of the whole sketch, so I scanned it and took it into Photoshop and added a bit of color to it. What I uploaded is the scan in the "original size" as a 600DPI scan so it has some raw inking edges for sure. Here's how that ended up: [link]

Then, somewhere later that night I was in bed with my computer off, the whole deal, and I just couldn't stop thinking about how I'd "killed" the sketch I'd worked on, and I told myself "well, let's check out the silhouette and see if it's worth saving at all, or if I should just call it and move on to another piece."

So I fill in the outer shape and realize it wasn't half bad, and then after about 15-odd minutes of playing around I determined I'd try to work this as a renewed, more gestural piece. Certainly, the original graphite and ink lines were lost, but I figured at least this little piece might be salvageable yet.

The horse was stretched a bit to be more on-par with actual horse proportions since the original sketch didn't have any references, but other than that I've just painted over my original sketch and tried to improve upon it.

Somewhere tonight I realized I was zooming and detailing a bit too much (which started to kill the nice "loose" quality I had going for a bit) so I decided to consider this littler exercise "done," and while the graphite and ink scrawlings are gone entirely, at least it's done "enough." I'd probably consider it something like an evolved sketch or speedpainting. It's far-removed from a finished piece, that's for sure!

This is a fun little sketch concerning two of the characters from my series. The horse is supposed to be something like a Clydesdale, which is why the figure is a touch dwarfed. Also: I'm aware a person's waist can't comfortably turn like that. Believe me: if you saw the underlying sketch you would consider it a miracle that it came along even this far.