Our original sketches are made on good quality A4 tracing paper, using a fine-point mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencil is great for this type of work, because you don't need to keep stopping to sharpen it.
But why tracing paper?
Well, to successfully produce anything, you need to keep the end product in mind. We know that we want to scan these pencil drawings so they can be coloured in Photoshop - and to avoid endless hours of digital clean-up we'll need to keep them as clean as possible.
With tracing paper, we can make all our mistakes, try different outfits and poses, fix all the problems, and then transfer the sketch to a clean sheet of art paper for scanning. And if something goes horribly wrong, we can transfer it again and start over.
For this tutorial, we're going to work through the creation of a brand new schoolgirl: Risako-chan. Here is our original sketch on tracing paper:
Risako-chan: pencil on tracing paper
While Risako-chan looks basically complete here, you'll probably notice that we changed a few parts of the picture many times to get them right (such as the shoes), and we've also left some things unfinished. The eyes, the eyebrows and the hair, for example, are only basic outlines. These features require a lot of fine detail, so we prefer to leave them for the final drawing stage. We've only drawn one of her fancy hair ribbons as well, because they're symmetrical, so we can use the tracing paper to reproduce them exactly.
Once the sketch is mostly the way you want it, the next step is to make a final version of the line art for scanning.
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