I recently bought my first ever light box, and I am thoroughly pleased with how much it has helped my working process so far.
This is a quick process tutorial on how I used it my first time.
While visiting a friend, we were discussing how I draw from my imagination, without a reference in front of me, and how long I usually take to create ‘a sketch’ or a finished piece, alongside the difference between a sketch, a finished piece, and a finished piece which looks like a sketch, or is a sketch.
This was my demonstration of freehand drawing from the imagination, in under 5 minutes with a nib pen (which I dropped in the jar of ink.) She wanted to keep it, and I said words to the effect of: ‘not on your life, its awful, I’ll make you a proper one.’
So, next day, when I was home and thought I’d try out my new light box, I slapped the drawing down (backwards, because I could easily see all the very obvious faults that way, and it was a better composition.)
I began sketching over it with more layout paper, roughing in, findingbetter anatomy, limb placement and facial angles. One of my friends comments the night bfore had been ‘she looks so SAD’, to which I answered, ‘I dunno, that’s just what’s coming out at the moment.’
Another sheet of layout paper, I started sketching in the outfit, and small adjustments to the neck length, shoulder width and hand gestures.
I then got out a piece of cartridge paper from my sketchbook (it was supposed to be a sketch after all!) and started the final piece, and in keeping with my sketchy, messy, frenetic style, kept the line quality rough and energetic. (Proof, in a way, that even finished sketches, ready to sell, aren’t always fresh off the book, because it takes practice and skill to make sketches come out polished enough to sell. I’m not at that stage yet, but maybe one day.)
When it was drawn in, with coloured pencil scribbled over the top for contrast, I call it done, several hours later. Whoopsy, well it didn’t take five minutes, more like two hours, but there you go. My first lightbox experience. I thoroughly enjoyed using it, and the dimmer switch is so useful, for getting different levels of ‘how much you wanna see the through’ or ‘really I’d rather see the top layer most of all, and the under layer not so much because you’re distracting me.’
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