A Wall of Inspiration

A few weeks ago I came across a How To video on youtube by a professional manga artist called Mark Crilley. In this video he showed how to draw an old crumbling wall as a background. I found it amazingly cool and simple enough for me to try out. So I watched the video did a quick google search for cracks in walls and found this. I looked at a few other ways cracks are made and then proceeded to shamelessly copy Mr Crilley.

   A few things that I noticed while drawing it were that cracks are pretty easy to freehand. You just need to go from darker in the begging to light towards the end. After that any old crooked line can pass as a wall crack. Next important detail were the bricks - their lines don't touch when you draw them.  The lines between the lines end up looking like brick mortar. I first drew them out with a ruler using a very thin line and after I went in with the pencil and did the rounding of the edges.

  When it comes to the wall itself a good tip is to make it splotchy. Randomly darken here and there then go over with the finger and make a nice big mess - that seemed to work for me. The rest of the details are shown really well in the video so I won't bore you repeating them.

For the foreground unlike the video I decided to draw sidewalk tiles. So again I did my google search and looked at a couple of pictures. I think by now you get how this goes. The problem here was the depth of the picture. I can't just make parallel lines because the picture would end up looking flat. So I enlisted the help of Mr Crilley again and watched his perspective video and more correctly his one point perspective video. So I put a dot on the very edge of the page and tried to make a 3D image. I was mostly successful but failed on some of the little details.

  My biggest problem with this drawing came from the background, which I decided needed something more than clouds. I'm pleased with the way the crane came out but the rest of it is a bit of a mess. Starting with the building witch in the beginning had an impossible perspective ( that was corrected thanks to helpful friend) the size of it doesn't match anything in this picture and it basically looks out of place. And don't start me on the tree - I have no words to explain that one.

  All in all as a first try I'm a proud mama of a slightly deformed and quite ugly baby hippo, but like a good mommy I love it nevertheless.