Two Suit Jackets.

First off, this drawing isn't about Zombies. Well, OK, there ARE two Zombies in the picture, but that wasn't my main reason for doing this drawing. This drawing is really about the suit jackets those Zombies are wearing. Quite often, I find myself wanting to draw something but needing to find a good excuse to do it. In other words, a drawing of two suit coats would seem pretty stupid and pointless in and of itself. However, I really felt as though I needed to practice drawing them. Such a dilemma! Enter, the "Zombies". Now, I definitely don't need an excuse to draw Zombies. Hell, I almost need to find an excuse to NOT draw Zombies. My second reason for doing this drawing was that I really wanted to try out my new Niji Waterbrush. This thing is pretty slick. I got to play around with one at the Chicago Comicon last month, and I really like them. You fill it up with ink (quality ink of one's own choice, mind you), squeeze it lightly to get the ink flowing down into the brush and you're off to the races. What I like is that you don't have to keep dipping the brush in a bottle of ink. Which is great if you don't like to constantly stop and start. Stopping to dip that brush in the inkwell just makes me stop to think about my inking, and that's never a good thing. I need to keep it moving or I start to overthink the damn thing. Now, my third reason for doing this drawing was to test out my new digital camera. I decided that I wanted to work from photo reference and so put the camera on a tripod and set the self-timer to 10 seconds, stepped in front of it and said, "cheese". I then converted them to black-and-white and adjusted the contrast and printed them out. Using them for reference, I was able to make the drawing pretty fast (I thought about posting those pictures but decided that it would just be too embarassing). Basically, all I had left to do was "zombify" myself. That was the easy part.

Now, this is when the trouble began. As soon as I was done with the pencil drawing I started to fuss and fret over it, as though it were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I couldn't decide how to go about finishing it. I kept going over it in my mind as though I could solve all of the inking problems beforehand, without even putting brush to paper. I stared at this stupid thing for days, frozen and unable to bring myself to finish it. Finally, this evening, I decided that it wasn't that good to begin with and just attacked it, not worrying about how it would turn out. I needed to just FINISH it and move on, for God's sake. In the end, I'm somewhat pleased with the results, but still not completely happy with how those damn suit jackets turned out. I'll just have to keep working at it, I guess. Now, I just need to find another excuse to draw them.

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