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Tightening up the final drawing.

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Fig. 01	Fig. 02	Fig. 03	Fig. 04

The final drawing starts with reviewing what was good about any of the early drawings, looking for little interesting things in even the roughest drawings. I re-check my reference sources and narrow them down to one or two images I like, and put the others away.

The early rough drawings are done with things that I can draw with quickly, brush and ink, charcoal, white-out pens, china markers, whatever is lying around. As I get closer to the finished drawing, things get more controlled and I mostly draw with sharp colored pencils, HB lead pencils and fine or medium markers. For me, the idea is to get the drawing and the process of drawing, tighter and more precise until I'm tattooing, at which point things should be super-resolved and super-controlled.

This final stage of drawing and re-drawing takes me days... about twenty hours for Luke's drawing. A fair amount of which was spent on the scale layout. There is just no easy way to draw a convincing scale layout for a dragon - you have to draw each scale. It seems obvious to say, but if you draw each scale they should turn out well - if you just start scribbling and putting down fast, sloppy marks that's what they will look like.

I resolve the final line drawing well enough to use as stencils. I still meet with my client one more time to make sure the drawing fits, and to make whatever changes are needed or the client wants. I then book the appointment to start the outline. At that point I've got almost forty hours into prep time. I generally don't do a resolved, clean color study. I use bits of influence from the early rough drawings. I've found if I have a precise color study the tattooing becomes too much of an effort to reproduce the shading and color of the drawing exactly.