My Workflow for making a drawing is horribly convoluted, inefficient and neurotic.
First step is to bag on a friend, until they let you do a photo shoot with you - hard to describe psychological how this works, but it does. This also usually involves doing bizarre favors for them as well. Photo shoot commences in their extremely dirty basement bedroom.
Hundreds of pictures are taken, so more homo-erotic than others. Most look and have the quality of this picture:
and you wonder why you splurged for a $1,000+ camera. You realize that you are NOT a photographer by any means and it's just time to come to terms with that. You're only hope is to attempt to DRAW the scene you want to depict. You realize you're not much of a drawer, either - but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
You then take that ONE photo from the shoot that seems to barely past some sort of esthetics test and do you damnest to tweak, sharpen, play with levels, chop, stitch - whatever, so it passes as an actually - well, alright photo and then print it off on the cheapest black and white laser printer you could have possibly have found (you cheap bastard!) - thereby removing all traces of enhancement of the photo. Then you bring it to the coffee shop and do, "thumbnails" of the photo,
Trying not to spill too too much coffee on the original print out, your sketchbook or yourself. This is a way of wasting time, while being extremely focused on yourself, while being around others. The hip kids use laptops these days, but you're going old school with pencil and paper.
A person of less time and more brains would skip all steps above after, "take a photo and print it out" and simply, "trace" the photo and copy it onto drawing paper,
but you are not such a person.
Days go by.
You're finally psyched yourself up to draw the damn thing on some good paper - making sure to not keep a safe copy of the original penciling-in stage - since it gives what you consider a, "no turning back", feel and also gives you this intrinsic, "link" to the techniques and lack of technology of the Renaissance, which you've sadistically romanticized.
To add a few more insults, use a pen that commonly breaks and floods your drawing with ink, needs to be refilled every few lines, needs 5 or so minutes to dry to go over and hasn't any way to erase, if you make a mistake. And use it for hours with a shaky hand from too much coffee you seem to be able not to live without. You will soon use these burdens as a foundation for your, "style"
