DRAWING BRUCE LEE

            

     The past week I had to work on some concepts for some Bruce Lee illustrations. For people that know me, they know that Bruce is my hero whom I loved ever since first seeing THE BIG BOSS (released in the U.S. as “FISTS OF FURY”) some thirty-six years ago.

              First thing I did was to make screen grabs (picture from a dvd) from my copy of ENTER THE DRAGON for reference. I made as many shots as I could.  Even though a Mac comes with a built in program called “GRAB”, you can’t use it on dvd’s.  In that case, there are programs you can purchase that work on dvd’s for image capturing like SCREEN SHOT PRO. 

              Once I had all the images I needed, I started to sketch out some poses and then compositions. I used my Wacom Cintiq to do the job. (see an earlier blog on Wacom Cintiqs) The drawings came out “okay” , but something was missing.  The resemblances were really kicking my ass.

              My friend Lawrence Christmas suggested that I NOT draw everything on my Cintiq from scratch, but that I pencil the initial sketches. I find that using a Cintiq is great, as I draw directly on to the screen and I don’t have to scan drawings. The problem is, there is a textural feeling that cannot (or at least not Larry and myself) be duplicated when working with a pencil first on paper to sketch things out.

 

              Doing resemblances to real people is enough of a task. A pencil can get sharp and yet have tooth. The glass of the Cintiq, is just that, glass. There is no tooth and no feel. There is that finite bit of control when doing something extremely fine that I can’t replicate.

              When I do storyboards, I can do detailed work in terms of the amount of detail I put in.

              When I am doing extremely fine work, (like an illustration)or something that takes an effort like a likeness done in small details, the best thing for me to do was to pencil a few Bruce heads, scan them, and then ink and add them to the bodies I had done on my drawings I had done on the Cintiq in the Photoshop program.

              There are people that can do anything on a Wacom tablet or a Cintiq screen, but for my purposes, I will now start my illustrations with the old fashion paper and pencil.

              Bruce deserves that.