Sketchbook 2 - Arctic Air Strip Study

I’ve been reading Hellboy graphic novels for months. As I’ve been making my way through the entire series, I’ve picked out panels that I thought it might be interesting to study. This panel features a plane landing on an arctic air strip near a research station.

I mainly wanted to use this a chance to study perspective. Aiming to do this without the perspective assistance in Procreate, I took measurements from the original and loosely set up my own perspective grid.

I couldn’t draw the plane myself very well. At one point I traced the original and dragged my trace down into my panel. I didn’t feel right about that especially since I decided to post this in my blog, so I erased the plane. There’s an entire chapter about drawing planes in How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination. Hopefully, once I get that finished, I can revisit the plane in this piece.

Another thing to note about the plane is that while it’s silhouetted due to the low night light. It’s still very detailed. Each landing gear has at least two struts depicted. The starboard propeller has the rotation of the tip rendered in white to give it presence. There’s cabin lighting and two wing lights, and the tail number is slightly visible. While inspecting the plane, the detail that I thought was really neat is that the starboard flap is positioned to tilt the nose up slightly for landing. I think Stephen Green did an excellent job on the details for this plane.

I really don’t like my texture for the night’s sky. I think I could have blended the colors better. My sky looks unfortunately splotchy. I also have much larger and more clumsy attempts at stars.

As for the inking, I made the horizon line way too thick. Probably should have used a thinner setting on my pen in Procreate. I think that made my line work on the run way too thick and busy as well.

I got some sense for the texturing of the lighting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to do this without color dodge. I have a book on lighting sitting on my shelf. Hopefully, I’ll understand more of how do do this without color dodge as a crutch.

The original panel was illustrated by Stephen Green and colored by Dave Stewart. This is from Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1954 - Black Sun.