Tracing and Creating Paper Dolls: Refining

I'm continuing on my tracing journey this week, although that's not quite accurate. At this stage, I'm sketching on paper then refining digitally.

For this, I'm using the tools I have - a color printer, tape, ruler, and a sketchbook. I printed one of the dolls with the heads measurement scale and added it to one side of my sketchbook. Using a ruler, I drew lines in the sketchbooks so that I could draw the doll with better accuracy.  

 Here's the drawing of my doll using the traced image on the left. 

 

I can already see that there are some issues. The tilt of the arm on the left and the tilt of the whole torso is a bit off.  The legs and feet are a bit odd. I'm not really worried about the face at such a small scale. 

At this stage, I'll scan it, tinker with it in Photoshop, and then draw it in Procreate. Is it a lot of steps? Yes. I really need to draw more. Some of this is because I've gotten a little rusty! 

 It's a little tough to see, but the image above has my trace (blue lines) with my transferred drawing (black pencil) over it. My stupid scanner keeps cutting the bottom of my drawings off!! You can see in this overlay that the proportions are ok but some of the angles are off. I could leave it like this and it would probably be fine. But let's go that extra bit and see what happens.

On the left, my adjusted sketch and on the right, the traced image. Now, it's ready for Procreate. I didn't spend long in Photoshop - maybe 15 minutes - but I think it'll make a difference in the doll.

 Here's the image from Procreate. I took the adjusted sketch and drew over it in purple. Why purple? I don't know. I just like it and it's an easy way to tell my sketch layer from my line layer. I kept the negative spaces between the arms a little bit larger than in the trace layer so that they better accommodate tabs. Her face needs some work! I really like drawing, taking a picture or scan, and then walking away and coming back. I see things differently. Once I sort out the face, I'll line this and work on the second doll, which will be the same process.

Feel free to drop me a note! Love it? Hate it? Wanna see more??