Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored
Original Creation Date: Ink Completed Mar 26, 2014
Color Completed May 2, 2014
It's fair to say that in the past, I have had a problem with detail. Things just weren't finished until I added in extraneous details and obliterated large areas of white space. Sometimes I would throw in the occasional Easter egg for a watchful eye, or an inside joke for my friends, but mostly I would just add in this excessive detail into my pieces. As if the blank page was just a hapless village just waiting to be razed and pillaged. I just couldn't help myself.
Let's call it "Compulsive Detail."
Of course, this is not a good thing. During the creation of this commissioned piece the issue really emerged as a problem. I couldn't stop adding detail in the inking, which only served to flatten the piece out, and hindered the magnitude of the focal point. For the colorist, also myself, it became harder to work with, and also stretched out the entire process. As I've said many times before, every drawing is a lesson to be learned, but this one really taught me much about what I do, why I do it, and the consequences my decisions make on other steps of the process.
I let the compulsion issues play themselves out here, and as you can see in the final ink above, the drawing lacks clarity. It's flat. Once into the coloring process, I was able to create distance between foreground and background with color temperature contrast, but the final result was still too bright, too splotchy (see bottom left). So I brought down the saturation in the background areas, which not only helped push the hero further towards the viewer but also added a nice gloomy feel which suited the Walking Dead nicely. I even considered doing some selective color (see bottom right), but thought the whole thing just kind of reeked of bad wedding photography; It might have looked nicer had I originally colored those areas as grayscale, but post-converting the original color job just didn't work out. In the end I employed a healthy dose of my old friend Gaussian Blur to the background areas, and the piece finally announced that it was complete.
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Lots of good lessons learned on this one. As I said, this was done over the course of the past few weeks, and many of the conclusions I'd come to on this piece benefitted other drawings already posted.
Yes, I've certainly been diagnosed with Compulsive Detail, and the prescription is Restraint Inking.
Also, who doesn't love Darrell? I'll probably do another one of him again, most likely more of a character study and less of an environment.