Day 23: Machine Man #tzadvent

Not all these grand experiments work. This drawing is maybe 80% of what I wanted it to be. It's not bad. There's a fair amount of Kirby in it (as it should be, since he created Machine Man for, of all things,the Marvel Comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey) and I like the pose. But what I was really trying to do was make custom rulers to ink the bands and the extending arm on the character. The rulers are great because they let meuse pressure sensitivity to add that directional weight.Check out how the telescoping arm lines go from thin to thick. That went well.

I was less successful with the arm and leg bands. What I did was ink the figure without those bands, and then create rulers to put them on a second layer. I had a hard time creating the right shape rulers.Years of working in Illustrator make me expect pen tools with bezier curves to work a certain way. They don't. I know I'll figure it out eventually, but three iterations of this drawing and I just said "Let's do what I can with what I can work."

That's partly a failure, but it's also a decent work habit, I think. I could have spent another co

uple of hours or more figuring it out, but I decided to use the tools I did have in my toolbox to finish it. You don't always have the the luxury of infinite time. Sometime deadlines don't allow that. So you have to figure out a way to finish with the things you have and still make it appear in your acceptable percentile of professional.