scarygoround

The Clovis kitchen

Added 2020-10-14 17:25:57 +0000 UTC

Upcoming pages require me to draw Mrs Clovis' kitchen over and over again, sometimes from mad angles. So I modelled it in Sketchup from photo reference. It's taken me a long time to get to grips with Sketchup but with practice, I'm improving. I don't need anything perfect, just a good sense of dimensions and props, and a few depth cues.

I got the original cottage from Rightmove - always my first stop for character homes. Maybe you live in one of my characters' houses and you do not even know it and I am not even joking.

Then I cobbled together a replica.

This is a very useful way to deal with backgrounds and an aid to composition if, like me, sometimes you wake up in the morning not very good at it. It's also a way to draw some really stiff looking backgrounds that make your wobbly, cartoony characters look odd if you're not careful. I love Sketchup and what it has enabled me to do, but it has put demands on my drawings that completely changed the nuts and bolts of how I draw. In searching for angles that my characters' "shape language" did not contain, I've had to learn a lot in order to preserve the aesthetic I want my comics to have. Working background-first calls for stronger anatomy.

I'll talk more about this another time because it has been a real learning curve.