A soldier in Vietnam

I’ve been inspired by Karl Kopinski lately so I’ve started drawing soldiers and astronauts. I had a couple things I wanted to practice with this type of drawing:

• Get better at drawing bags, cloth, accessories, etc.
• Start with a very loose sketch and then tighten it up in pen, like Kopinski often does.

This resulted in a drawing that feels loose and has come nice character. The tradeoff would be making mistakes from using pen at an early stage of a drawing, but since I’ve practiced drawing in pen before I was able to manage nicely. Only doing a loose sketch also has the benefit of finishing the drawing much faster, since doing a tight ink onto a tight pencil can be exhausting.

Here are a couple other soldier drawings I’ve done with similar aspirations, but these had tight pencil sketches or were not inked: