Kaine + sketch + thoughts

Hey, all. Here's the Kaine art I whipped up today along with the sketch as a small bonus.

 I've been thinking more about the initial stages of art and the "proper" way to draw again (spoiler: there isn't a proper way). Earlier this year in a patron only post I talked about doing lineart on a new layer over a finished sketch vs drawing and erasing on a single layer until the final lineart is achieved. At the time, I came to the conclusion that the former was "better" as it separated the steps thus making it (in theory) easier to focus on just clean lines during the dedicated lineart stage. Now however, I find myself leaning back to the "single layer" method as I feel it more accurately reflects how I'd draw on paper, just with the added benefit of being able to draw and erase with perfect black ink.

Of course, sometimes if a sketch is particularly messy I will opt to create a fresh layer instead of having to erase a bunch of junk lines. Though I try to keep the same mentality of drawing loose since aiming for perfection tends to just lead to lines that are boring and stiff.

What made me originally start to spend way too much time thinking about this was seeing artists with amazing sketches and then proceeding to do lineart overtop. I couldn't help compare this to some of my initial sketches for arts that were basically very simple guides. The part I overlooked though was that these artists sketches were much more rendered but done with pencil on paper (or some other traditional material), and thus a redraw overtop was needed for the clean, solid black line look I get directly drawing digitally lol. There's also a big discussion about what exactly is a sketch but... I won't get into that.

Regardless, either method does work and sometimes it's more the particular artwork that decides how you go about it. I just find with my style that treating lineart as it's own segregated thing ends up a bit redundant sometimes, or I'll jump into clean lines too early. What's more important than looking nice with early sketches is thinking about the gesture and construction of the character along with any major shapes so that you have that jumping off point.

As always, I hope at least half of this made sense!

Note: even when I use "one layer" I'll often make a copy of the original sketch at a point so that I don't completely lose this. I recommend doing this as it's a safeguard from huge mistakes!