Actually sketchy business this time.

When sketching I prefer mechanical pencils to wooden pencils because the sketch itself is not the finished product. My only real requirement of my implement is that it be sharp and mechanical pencils are good for that sort of thing. I start with some light establishing lines just to get some marks down on the paper. The hardest part of any stage of drawing is to get over breaking the visual tranquility of that smooth white sea of paper. Once this is done the image begins to take shape and it becomes easier to do your thinking on the paper.

The early stages of the drawing are also the place to introduce perspective. There are two ways of going about this. The first is to simply draw the perspective points and lines directly onto the sketch. This can create a lot of visual clutter and is only advisable when the perspective needed for the scene is going to be simple and direct. The other way of going about perspective, recommended for shots with complicated angles and intricate detail, requires a light box and a perspective template. This allows you to simply place the perspective lines beneath your sketch and work from there. This keeps the clutter down and allows you to see the "clean" version of your sketch simply by toggling the light box on and off. The down side to the second approach is that perspective templates are so exact that they can be intimidating. You can often over-do the perspective in a simple view that didn't need very much perspective to begin with.

I won't go into the mechanics of perspective now, and probably not later either. People have written whole books on proper perspective and the subject is simply to large to cover adequately in any fashion here. I can recommend "Perspective! For Comic Book Artists" for those who are interested in knowing more. It has been very useful to me.

With perspective established and some simple layout lines down it becomes easier to concentrate on individual areas and flesh them out as you go. I find that the sketch, clutter or no, becomes very messy at this stage and I find myself erasing a lot. I often make the same line several times, gradually getting closer to what I want each time, shelling my target like a battleship. I then go back in and clean up my mess with an eraser. I recommended a simple kneaded eraser for this process as it leaves behind no residue and usually erases cleanly. Sometimes the drawing has simply turned into one block of graphite and I feel more like a sculptor carving away my lines like a two-dimensional Michaelangelo. The effect produced is hardly displeasing however. The better the sketch is the better the finished piece will be.

That idea should hardly be revolutionary.