Eddie Young Illustration & Design, Cartoon Illustration, Character Design, Humorous Illustration, Cartoon Artist, Freelance Cartoon Illustrator, Animation, Cartoons

The Eddie Young Five-Step Method: A Strategy for Creating Clean and Professional Drawings

Great drawings don't just happen. They are a result of planning, editing and refining. Over the years I have developed a process that allows me to transform a good idea into the great drawing that the client is anticipating. This strategy entails creating a drawing in five steps, each time taking the best lines and reworking the others until I get a clean, polished, professional image.

Use a piece of 8-1/2x11 bond paper to start the sketch. Recycled paper from the copy machine works well. You'll have plenty of this paper on hand because part of this process is using the copy machine to adjust the size of the images.

Divide the page into fourths to keep the drawings small. This way there is less detail and more design. Keep the drawings loose at this point. Use lots of sketchy, expressive lines. We're hoping for happy accidents here that you'll stumble upon and then end up using. Experiment with different poses, angles, and expressions. Explore. Experiment. Do what you need to do to get what seems like the best solution. If you're not having fun, take a deep breath, relax and let your imagination go. No one sees these drawings. It's just you and the great "Muse in the Sky" messing around.

Once you have a drawing you like, enlarge it in the photocopier so it fits on an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper. If you need to repeat this step, remember, these are quick drawings that are fun to do. Keep working at it. Don't cut yourself short at this stage.

Place a piece of tracing paper over your enlarged thumbnail. Use low-tack tape to secure the tracing paper to the bond paper. Use a "Light Blue" "color-erase" #20068 pencil or something similar.

At this point you should have lots of loose lines on your original drawing from which to choose. Editing is the key here. Don't just recreate the original drawing. Think of it as a starting point and look for ways to improve it. Periodically detach the tracing paper and move it around over the original drawing to see if you need to reposition anything. If you are doing a drawing of a person, this is a perfect time to place the head squarely on the shoulders or shorten or lengthen the legs. Continue drawing over your original. If it's not going well, rub a tissue over the tracing paper to remove some of the blue pencil. Then begin refining the drawing again.

Flip the tracing paper over and attach it to a clean piece of bond paper. You are now looking at the drawing from the back side or mirror image. This can be an amazing moment. You will really notice the imperfections by looking at the reversed drawing.

With a mechanical graphite pencil, trace the image onto the back of the tissue. Draw the lines lightly. You're still exploring and perfecting. Again, don't just trace what you see. Imagine how it could be better and draw it that way.

Once this drawing is done, flip it over. Attach it to a clean piece of bond paper. Take a tissue and rub away the blue lines from the front of the tracing paper. Now you are looking at your graphite drawing from the back, which is the original view.

Use a "2B" pencil at this point to draw over the image with bold, confident lines. Things should be looking pretty good at this point. If not, (and this often is the case) enlarge the drawing to 11x 17 and start Step 2 again. It's a good way to concentrate on detail. The bigger the drawing, the more detail can be added. Remember, good drawings take time.

For paintings, photocopy the image to the appropriate size and trace it onto your art board.

For ink drawings, place a piece of transparent medium such as vellum or heavy weight tracing paper over the image. Ink the drawing to create a finished black and white illustration that is clean, polished and professional.