Blender: SKETCH WITH THE GREASE PENCIL

James Lewis-Vines uses Blender’s acclaimed Grease Pencil tool to help him quickly visualise an immersive underwater environment

- James Lewis-Vines

Drawing has always been one of the most useful communication skills for creative minds. Henri Matisse once said: “Drawing is putting a line around an idea.” Every master painting starts out as a doodle, a way to bridge the gap from the imagination to something real.

With technological leaps in digital drawing tablets, innovative software and virtual reality, drawing has transcended pen and paper and can now exist as a digital creative outlet. I’ll show how I’ve started to use the free software Blender, specifically its Grease Pencil tool, along with other basic modelling tools to sketch out environments and then explore them in 3D.

In this workshop, I’ll sketch out an idea I have for a future deep-sea cruise ship with multiple tiny tourist submersibles scouring a surrounding coral canyon. After creating the environment I’ll then explore it, like a photographer, and snap some interesting compositions and angles of the digital world.

This workshop assumes basic knowledge of traditional drawing fundamentals such as contour line work, as well as an understanding of basic 3D terminology and familiarity with Blender’s native tools.

1 Visualise my ideas in an initial sketch