From Sketch to Scene

You start with an idea.  Someone has been murdered.  First of all that requires a corpse. Which then needs a setting – a room of some sort. There must be people around. Police, maybe a private detective, an official police photographer, finger print technician. A doctor to determine the corpse really is dead.  Now you put the idea on paper. With a pencil you lightly start to sketch in outlines: a body on the floor; doctor kneeling next to body, police officer leaning over the body; more people standing around. These are very rough outlines in very light pencil because eventually they will have to be erased. You look at the kneeling doc. It doesn’t look quite right. You erase it and redraw in a different position. Still not right, erase and redraw. Eventually it looks right. You erase and redraw some of the background figures.  Finally the layout looks good. Next you start to rough in detail – still in light pencil.  You decide which animal features each figure will have, the doc will have long floppy ears and a more or less beagle face, cops always look good as bulldogs, especially the one in charge.  You decide the detective is Rocky. You have drawn him so many times it is easy to rough him in.  Various characteristics are assigned to the other figures in the room.  One will get bird like features. Another German Shepherd features, etc.  The next step is fine point ink pens. For each figure a basic outline drawing over the pencil sketch, adding more detail. As each pencil sketch is over drawn the pencil is erased. You use a non-smearing ink so the ink lines remain. Finally comes shading. Back to pencil to add depth to each figure varying the levels of darkness using darker or lighter pencil leads. Finally the pencil shading is softened using a blending stump to merge the pencil lines together. Final last bits of detail, eyes, Rocky’s nose, someone else’s hair are added with a very fine point pen. And the sketch is now a scene.