Dracing
In August of 2014 our dear Cassie passed. She was the fifth Malamute to join our family over the years from 1973 to the present. In an effort to make a tribute to her, I created the sketch above. I wanted the sketch to be a good representation of here image, but my drawing skills were not good enough to suit my wishes for this image. So I devised a scheme I call Dracing (a combination of drawing and tracing). The objective was to get the proportions just right but to use my freehand drawing to make the bulk of the image. I did this by bringing a photo into Adobe Photoshop and using the image as an underlying layer over which I could draw a few faint lines to represent the basic structure. Then I printed out just the faint lines (without the photo). I subsequently drew the sketch you see above using the faint lines as a guide.
Here is the drawing I started with…
Then I used these images to produced a web tribute to our dear Cassie girl which you can see here…
Here is another sketch I produced in the same way that I did the sketch of Cassie…
Recently I got a new smartphone, a Samsung Note 8, which comes with an
s-pen… This tool allows the user to draw on the smartphone. I subsequently discovered an app called Adobe Sketch that allows me to approximate the process I described above in a much simpler way, and I have produced several images using the smartphone process.
I have been a bit reticent to post these images because I fear others will see this technique as “cheating”… perhaps something akin to coloring in a coloring book. Even so, I feel good about the creativity I am imparting on these images, so below are some of my “dracings” made entirely on my smartphone (or maybe Trawings). You may recognize some of these images because they appeared as photos in some of my earlier articles.
