Sealion Gig Poster - Process Diary 3

Alright!  On to transferring the drawing to Claybord!  I'm going to include Blick Art Supply links along the way here so you can look further into any of these materials, should you be curious.  Feel free to write me if you have questions beyond that.

Once the Ampersand Claybord arrived at my door, I was ready to roll with finalized pencil outlines on newsprint.  Fortunately, my roll if Saral graphite transfer paper was 12" wide, exactly the right size for the claybord.  So I laid it down quick without needing to trim anything, facedown, with my newsprint drawing over it facing up.  I then layered some tracing paper over that, which is totally unnecessary, but does help to identify if you've missed any spots while tracing.  With some strips of masking tape to hold everything firmly the the board, I was ready to start.

Any hard tipped writing utensil will work here, but I used my favorite ballpoint pen, a uniball vision micro... these are the darker grey barreled pens that you can get at any office supply store.  They're super fine, cheap, and totally reliable in my experience.  They lay down great on bristol board or any paper for that matter, but unfortunately, they don't lay down quite so well on smooth hard surfaces.  


My claybord inking is done with handful of Micron pens.  A lot of people prefer the super fine tips (005 or 01), but I'm most happy with the 03 generally.  I also have some 05 and 08 sizes for doing fatter outlines, but I find I'm happiest just going to town with the 03s.

finished tracing the original pencil drawing

At this point, I'm basically just tracing the drawing as closely as I can.  I might make tiny adjustments here and there, but for the most part I fixed the stuff that was bothering me in the pencil stage.  Once everything's been traced, I can tear that sucker off, check my transfer, and start tracing THOSE lines with my micron pens.

starting to ink on the actual board

After all of the outlines have been inked, I start shading the forms directionally with hatch lines... which means short strokes in the direction of the form (around curves, across flat shapes, etc).  From the minute I got home yesterday at 5, all the way to midnight, I was constantly tracing and shading.  All in all, the inking process here has taken me about 15 hours.  


Here's a sneak peak of the almost finished drawing.... it got a little dark in the bottom right, which I subsequently fixed.  But more on that later...





Next Post: refining outlines, balancing values, and tweaking the poster design,