How messy are your sketches?

[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!

[MangoTango]

Wanted to post my latest one but its gonna spoil for something I have joined lol but yaa I have got this one tho;

Sketches can be a beautiful mess tbh sometimes the sketches are wayy different than the final product tho lol
I sometimes do messy sketches when I am in a hurry doing the product or clean one when I have plenty of time to go for it. Sometimes do a lot of sketch layers lol

But from my experience,,, investing more time, cleaning and editing the sketches will have a better and dynamic drawing/lineart for me. I did a confusing/ messy / fast sketch and when I did the lineart I did a lot of edits and erasures on the process : ^ (

So yep depending on the artist's preference tho ;o; My artwork gets more polished and more "satisfying" (than having the arrggggh it looks ugly) for me to look at if my sketch is clean, fixed and understandable to lineart with.

[kip]

ahh yeah im in the "mostly shapes" camp

[Kelheor]

Literary a mess, I should be ashamed Most of your sketches are so clean, guys, wow!
Well, it depends for me, but I mostly always going through 2 to 4 sketches before actual line art ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[LT1986]

Some of my sketches are messy when I'm drawing something easy. I sketch to determine the proportions of things in each panel. I don't do a lot erasing, when I'm making messy sketches.

Some of my sketches are clean when I'm drawing something difficult. I'm sketching to make something look a certain way in the sketch, because I'm having trouble expressing the idea. I do a lot of erasing, when I'm making clean sketches.

[delphine_wjenkins]

... All of those sketches are so so nice it's unbelievable. My sketches are absolutely rough; I only doodle quickly to figure out how the action is going to happen and the like.

[droidmonkey1]

My sketches are starting very rough and dirty that sometimes I'm the only one who can see the drawing line, then I use a kneaded eraser to remove some of the lines and do another pass with inks or a darker pencil.

[Swamp]

On the left is a first pass sketch where I was trying to figure out the pose I wanted
On the right is my actual on page sketch before I started doing my inks

[Reign]

My rough drafts for the actual comic pages varies. Usually they're pretty sketchy, and I draw them on regular printer paper and split it into fourths, so that I can draw four pages worth of thumbnails on one paper.

[seanmurphy1102]

I make my sketches pretty clean, and I erase sometimes to fix the proportions of my drawings.
With this though, I didn't worry so much about keeping the sketch inside the panels, I was mainly copying a page from the manga Happiness.

[Kat]

It's really cool to see your processes. Some of you are pristine beasts, and those of you who aren't have really expressive and clear work even in the beginning stages! My sketches are a complete abomination. I honestly just scribble. This one is actually super clean for me, but I tend to paint directly over my sketches in PS, so I don't seem to have a lot of my ultra-loose sketches around:

I kinda trace over my goopy sketches to get it where I want it to be:

When I'm thumbnailing/storyboarding for comics, it's pretty much pure expressive barf: