What Happens When You Mess Up Drawing a Hobo Riding a Can of Shaving Cream

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Hobos? Shaving cream?? Just another day at the office here.

I thought it might be fun to give you a peek behind the scenes at Mark Armstrong Illustration.

I recently wrote up a little incident that occurred back when I was in high school. A Halloween story which I’ll share in my next post.

I needed a header image. I decided on a naughty teenager riding a big can of shaving cream. Hopefully that’ll make sense when you read the story.

I still do all my line drawings by hand. Here’s how this one turned out.

Naturally you’re wondering: Why the extra disembodied head?

I make mistakes in line drawings. There are always things that are a bit “off.”

Here, the placement of the features in the original head say “adult,” not “teen,” and the upper body’s a little too long for the lower body.

I drew a corrected head/face off to the side. I knew I could “change heads” using my image-editing program (Apple’s Pixelmator Pro) after I scanned the line drawing into my computer.

Here’s a compare of the original line drawing and the corrected version.

The red arrows spotlight the changes.

I swapped heads and moved the new head forward. I shortened the torso, reduced the size of the hands, and changed the angle of the reins.

The resulting posture looks a lot more correct: someone hunched over in the saddle, riding a bucking bronco.

I also moved one of the devil’s eyes– it just bugged me.

Next step: adding color to the corrected line drawing.

I kept it simple. Just flat color, no special lighting effects.

I often lay in a temporary solid color background layer. It makes it easier for me to see if I “colored outside the lines.”