Snowboarders

[Si]

Following my recent trip to France I did this drawing of some snowboaders stopping to admire the view.

Si

[pauland]

Fantastic image. What is your technique?

[sallybode]

Great illustration, yes, tell us about the technique.

[TimS]

Man I love your style!!

[Si]

thanks for your kind comments.

What is your technique?

This drawing was done almost exclusively using the freehand tool. I use an Intuos2 tablet as this enables speedy creation of abstract shapes - ideal for drawing snowy mountains.

I had photographic reference for all the elements here. I don't trace the photos (manually or automatically) as I find these techniques don't give enough control, I just have the photo open and draw from it.
This was not a drawn from a single photograph -- I don't have such a wide angle lense on my little digital camera. In fact I took a set of photos of the scene and used these as a reference. This was necessary to convey the sheer scale of the scene.

Some elements had to be sacrificed in the name of composition (two more people which I had painstakingly drawn in the foreground I could not place in the scene without unbalancing it completely). The key here is to plan the drawing well before you start -- something I neglected to do.

Another mistake I made was not to save frequently - I ended up redrawing a lot of this after the application crashed due to lack of memory. I now keep the number of photos I have loaded in the bitmap gallery to 1 or 2 to try and avoid this.

I hope this is helpful to people.

Si

[pauland]

Yes, thank you.

[a4hire]

Great!
A very nice minimalistic, realistic kind of style. Thanks for sharing this.