I'm So Glad I Didn't Give up on This Drawing
- Preston Cram
- Nov 5
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
This drawing, now titled Memories of an Ageless Expanse, nearly didn't see the light of day. Despite becoming one of my favorite things I've made in recent years, there was a moment when I was seriously questioning whether or not to clean up the line art and do color. I ended up making some pretty huge revisions in order to keep my enthusiasm going and get it across the finish line, and I'm glad I did.
I'll focus on the drawing itself today and then talk about color in a dedicated post later. So I'll start by sharing the final ink art and then chat through the series of edits (as well as some changes in my art process) so you can see what this one had to go through to reach its final form.
Memories of an Ageless Expanse was the fourth in a series of six small drawings I did this year on 5.5" x 8.5" paper (I talked about all six of those drawings in a dedicated post last month), and it marked a transition in my drawing style from a chunkier, looser style into an approach with more detail and crosshatching.
The two drawings I did immediately after Memories had a very different feel than this. I was excited about that new direction, and the result was this one ended up feeling a little... erm, plain? But I also LOVED the general imagery in it, so I found myself in a bit of quandary: should I spend time finishing color for a piece that isn't a good representation of my new drawing style? Or should I just allow an image that I was excited about to slip into the dust bin?
To see how far this one had to travel, here's the original pencil drawing.
Oof.
You can probably already see some huge differences between this and the final ink, not just in the overall level of detail but especially in the woman's head and face. I did the initial drawing quickly and honestly kind of rushed it, and then when I came back to it I was like, "Whoa. That kinda sucks haha."
So I initially inked this the old-fashioned way – with brushes and a crow quill on the actual pencil drawing. But then I edited the heck out of the ink in Photoshop to get her head and face to look better. So, here's a look at both versions: the first is the original ink scan, the second is the edits.
So this was a little better, but two important things happened at this point: the first is that I started using a mechanical pencil with a finer point to dial in the details and cross-hatching in my new drawings. The other is that I bought an iPad and started inking my drawings digitally.
Prior to this (as on Moments After the End) any time I did digital ink it was with a plastic Wacom Intuos tablet, the kind that basically functions like a mouse. I had never done any drawing directly on a screen before.
But I LOVED the iPad. I actually loved it way more than I expected. And a combination of the finer mechanical pencil and the iPad caused the next drawing I did to have a very different feel to the line art. For reference, here's what that one looks like (keep in mind this drawing is the same exact size as Memories):
So, yeah...way more detail and hatching lines in there.
Feeling uncomfortable with how chunky Memories felt by comparison, I decided to completely re-ink it on the iPad. I knew this wouldn't be 100% effective because the original drawing wasn't made with the fine-point mechanical pencil, but I believed it would still help, and it did.
Here's another look at the final ink version done on the iPad (which, if you're counting, is actually the third version of the ink) along with a couple comparison images.
That digital ink job was juuust enough to get me excited about the image again and feel good going into color. HOWEVER, once I started color I realized a few more edits were needed, haha. I don't actually have a good comparison to show of this last change, but I'll briefly talk through it because it involves something new and fun I've been learning.
At the time I made this, I was still very new to adding linear perspective to my art. The only real attempt I'd taken at it was last year in 'Tension and Reverie," and even so, it was for two small, isolated areas of the art. (The castle in the upper right and the factories in the lower left.)
But it's become a huge part of my art since then, and I've learned a ton in the process – not just about linear perspective (which determines the angles of the edges of buildings) but also atmospheric perspective, which causes things in the distance to appear a little foggy. I particularly learned a lot recently working on this larger, still unnamed drawing which I've just been referring to as "the industrial landscape."
One element of atmospheric perspective involves the fact that that particles in the atmosphere are denser closer to the ground, so the base of distant buildings or mountains appears lighter or foggier than the tops of them. I really tried to push that in the industrial landscape.
As I was doing color for Memories of an Ageless Expanse, I realized there were opportunities to add some better atmospheric perspective. So I specifically removed a lot of the dark areas on distant buildings and near the bases of them. And once that was done, I called it good enough.
I had actually begun color separations at that point and then needed to clean up those separations because of the new line art.... yeesh. So yeah, not the most efficient process in the world, but I got there eventually haha.
On a side note, all of this demonstrates an odd by-product of my process where the ink and color stages lag behind the pencil drawings. And because I'm always pushing myself to improve my abilities on new art, I notice all these things I can do better when I come back to a drawing to do ink and color.
I used to debate the value of reworking things this much, for example I remember questioning it in this post about the ink work for Ascension, but I've learned to actually embrace and lean into it. I believe it's in those moments when I'm struggling to see things in a new way that I'm developing and getting smarter.
And I know I'm always happy with the revisions I make, so the occasionally long series of edits ultimately feels worth it to me. And that was certainly true for Memories of an Ageless Expanse. Color is done now (I'll talk about that soon in its own post) and I'm very happy I stuck with it. I think it will make a nice addition to the gallery and I'll always remember it as a pivot point into a new creative style for me.
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I'll leave you with some comparison images of the original pen and ink work I did on paper and the final ink work I did on the iPad. Cheers until next time!
It's so cool to catch a glimpse of your creative process