In this episode of Draw with Brian, I take a look back at two early digital drawings — including my very first digital piece, “Power Pole,” and a Halloween-themed Derrick and Max coloring page.
Transcript
Hello, welcome to my channel. I’m Brian, and welcome to Draw with Brian.
I thought we’d do something a little different today. Halloween is coming up, so I thought I’d look back at a couple of my more holiday-appropriate drawings.
The one we have up on screen is simply titled “Power Pole.” This was actually the very first digital drawing I ever did. I was really just learning the tools and learning how to use the tablet. My family bought me that Wacom Bamboo that I’ve talked about in other videos. I wasn’t sure how well I’d make the transition from the analog world to the digital world, and that’s when I discovered ArtRage — I think version 3 at that point. I’ve been with them ever since.
It’s a very natural tool coming from analog into digital. For me, it just works. It’s a very comfortable place. There wasn’t a huge learning curve.
As I was learning it, I had this idea for this drawing. You’ve probably seen it before — a pair of shoes thrown up over a power line or telephone line. In the neighborhood we lived in in Florida, we had above-ground power lines, and I had that thought, but with something a little more macabre — a pair of skulls hung up over those lines.
So I started working with that idea. I began with the pole. I use reference images, and I know some people have strong opinions about that, but I certainly don’t always have perfect images in my head. A lot of professional artists use reference. Disney animators use live actors. You hear about artists going to the zoo to study animals — they’re looking at real life.
Norman Rockwell, probably one of the most prolific painters of the 20th century, painted all those almost photo-realistic Saturday Evening Post covers. He worked from live actors, photos, and later even projected images onto his canvas and charcoaled over the top as roughs before painting.
This piece dates back to 2012. I had a couple of different images I liked — one of a pole with a raccoon on top, and another of an old-style power line with the glass insulators and the line running across.
I also had the idea to add a crow, which reminds me of James O’Barr’s The Crow. I loved that first movie with Brandon Lee and the original graphic novel. Instead of two skulls, that gave me the idea to use a skull and a comedy mask. In real life, I’m not sure those would actually stay wrapped around the line — the skull might just pull the mask down — but in our world, it works.
One big thing I learned here: this piece defaulted to 72 DPI. If you know about dots per inch, 72 DPI looks fine on screen, but when you go to print it, not so much. It prints okay if you keep it small on an 8.5 x 11 sheet, but it’s fairly low resolution.
After this, I always made sure I was working at least 300 DPI, especially for my Derrick and Max work, so it would look good in a printed book.
I may have gone a little overboard with layers here. Now I typically have a rough layer, an ink layer, and a color layer — more like a comic workflow. But here, everything had its own layer, including the right wire, the left wire, and even the square bolt. It was all part of the learning process.
One of the things I really liked was the atmosphere effect. Originally, I just had a plain white background. It looked fine, but it wasn’t very atmospheric. ArtRage has a stencil tool built in. It was a small stencil, but you can resize it, so I resized it to cover the entire canvas and used the airbrush over the top of it. That gave me this interesting textured background.
The atmosphere bleeds into the pole and the crow and everything else. Then I went back with the eraser to clear it off the mask to keep that part white. To me, that’s what really brought the whole piece together.
This has actually been my most popular drawing on DeviantArt, so I guess we did alright for a first digital drawing. It was a nice introduction to the tool, and I’ve been hooked ever since. One of the great things about digital art is that you can take chances. When you’ve been working on something for hours and think, “I don’t know if I want to try that and risk messing it up,” you can experiment without fear.
So that’s a good overview of Power Pole. Thanks for taking a little walk down memory lane with me.
Let’s talk about the other one, which is also appropriate for the holiday. This one’s from 2013.
I was working on the first Derrick and Max book and decided to make a Halloween scene. It’s a little inspired by Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, where Garfield and Odie were pirates. I thought that was great, so I had Derrick and Max dress up as pirates for Halloween.
I intentionally made this like a coloring page — no colors, just the inks — so people could color it themselves. I’ve uploaded this to my kids’ website at kids.bdcrowell.com. I’ve taken images from the books and stripped out the color to create coloring pages that are free to download.
Just for fun, I printed this one out and colored it myself. I added a little tree and a ghost, put in a sidewalk and some leaves, and made a fun, spooky Halloween scene with crayons. It was good enough that my wife hung it on the fridge — which is the ultimate honor.
Alright, well thanks for joining me for something a little different than usual. I hope you enjoyed hearing about the process. And I hope everyone watching has a fun, safe Halloween.
Until next time.
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