Sketchbook: Cartoon Wolves
Pencil on paper
As a child, I believed the best art looked "real," and for years I worked at making my drawings accurate. Many years of art school and life experience later, I'm still trying to avoid duplicating reality. Art should spark an observation, an emotion, an awareness you wouldn't have had otherwise. If it just portrays 100% reality, you might as well study the scene directly.
To draw these two wolves realistically, I'd use thousands of tiny pencil strokes. But for a comic, I'm limited to mere hundreds of lines. So which lines will make them look fierce, or friendly, or mystical, or dog-like? Compare the noble wolves from Disney's The Jungle Book to the snarling, hungry ones from Beauty and the Beast. Both have about the same level of detail, but look remarkably different. Their appearance tells the viewer something about their role in the story.
Of course, because cartooning distorts reality, you have to know the rules of life drawing in order to break them. But I'm amazed at how often my brain critiques a drawing with "It doesn't look like that!"
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