How messy are your sketches?

[Maps]

They're absolutely dreadful. Somehow I end up from this:

to this:

[Kittosaurus]

I would say varying states of messiness...

[Mari]

The first sketch pass (bottom half) is literally just sticks and balls and triangles, plus some simple expressions, and the second sketch pass is almost the same as my lineart

[gh0stcr33p]

it usually depends on how much time I have. if I have to get it done in a few minutes my sketches get kind of.. meh. but otherwise I like to take my time on them.

here's an example of a rushed sketch:

and then the "good" ones usually look something like this

I know my page sketching methods are a bit different from the usual ones.. I feel kind of embarrassed

[qwerty]

Tbh I envy how neat those are, even the "rushed" one ^^

[imiogri]

I basically only mark where everything's supposed to be, so they look... Bad.
But it works!

I vary a lot though, for more important things I add more care.

[silverraven0]

My sketches are pretty much unregconizable, it's so bad I can't differentiate between which lines I'm suppose to draw sometimes. XD

I have several steps of sketching. First the actual mess of lines of me trying to draw and make shapes, this one I barely touched my eraser, the next one is a more 'refined' messy sketch, use a lot more eraser, and then the deletion. I use eraser heavily there to make a note cleaner lines on this step.

Still messy to look at sometimes. XD

[charliesackett]

Oh boy, depends on what I'm doing. But it's just varying degrees of sloppiness. The worst is comic pages.

For comics, here's the layout

sketch

And here's the ink of that idea

[simplykit]

mine are really messy

just the way i like it

[JeanGuillet]

pretty messy. I ink directly off of this. maybe that's my problem?

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Most of the time, not at all. The majority of my drawings aren't even inked, because the 'sketch' is clear enough as is. I don't enjoy having to redraw things, so I make each line as clear as I can when I put it down.

However, when I'm doing a weird perspective pose or just trying to force myself to finish a comic update, the paper can turn into a real madhouse. When I'm drawing in aggravation, I go crazy; sometimes I don't even touch the eraser until after the inks are done. 'Just get it down; if it takes 50 strokes to get the torso shaped right, so be it! You can get rid of the garbage after you finish!!'

[ZakuruJay]

Usually start with this

[Raven_C]

i try to keep my sketches polished -- not too polished, it's still very sketchy. But detailed enough so that the image is very clear to me.

[ble]

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[Tanako]

Heres mine. I make my digital pages slightly smaller in width. unfortunately I do not sketch my comic paged digitally. I prefer traditionally then scan it in and work on it. Link Below
STRINGS AND TIME (BL)

STRINGS AND TIME (BL)

[Wumbl]

Apparently my sketches are surprisingly clean - I get remarks about it. It's normally fairly detailed and clear. What's most important is that they're clear, so when you're finishing you don't miss any important things and all the anatomy is not a problem.

It's not as if it takes me long - I just have a really steady hand I guess because these sketches take me a handful of minutes or so. Other than the very loose panel layout + thumbnail, this is the only sketching I do. Sometimes I don't even do thumbnails if I don't feel like it.

[VibrantFox]

i like to think of it as a controlled chaos but honestly they're a big ol mess. i do everything digital but i rarely bother with a second sketch so whatever i work out in the rough sketch is what i draw the lineart from.

like for foxtales (my more "detailed" comic) the sketch looked like this

gekkering (the simple one theyallare) like this

and (like any drawing) a thing i'm working on now looks like this

if there's any unity in all the junk it's that i can at least glean the basic forms and simple details from it to flesh out from other than that i think they look kinda ech

[AmysGames]

It varies! Sometimes they're pretty close to the final product:

Sometimes they can get pretty messy:

...And sometimes they're this.

(The last one's pretty old, granted—these days I try to be more detailed than that, haha.)

[Hexigate]

My sketches are fairly kept tidy, but I guess that's cause I do most of the sketching in my head. I stick to it quite a bit, with only minor changes within.
Here's an example.
Sketch:

What comes from it:

I'm terrible with lines. (Which is pretty much all of drawing.) What should be a single stroke becomes 500 mini-strokes for just one line. An Example:

A close-up:

[TheFalseVyper]

I usually start pretty loose and messy so I can help prevent making the anatomy look too stiff! Once I get the general idea down, I'll clean up the sketch until I'm satisfied with enough to start lining it.

Here's an example of an up and coming page of mine where I just want to get the general idea of the text box shape and how I want to place the people. Most of the time I won't even bother with expressions yet as I'm only looking for the best way to make the page layout flow.

From this point, I'll clean it up on the same layer to look something like this. (I don't have the picture done above so I'm showing an example of a cleaned up sketch before I would line it.)

In the end, I honestly think that my messier sketches come out better! They feel so much more alive and less stiff. Have fun with it!