Art Order Challenge.

So I've decided to participate in the Story Extraction Art Order Challenge for July. http://theartorder.com/2011/07/13/story-extraction-artorder-challenge/ I chose the steampunk scene of an airship coming upon a city set into the mountains.
After some thumbnails, a couple of my friends were gracious enough to pose for me.

So generally when I do drawings for paintings I'm not necessarily trying to make a beautiful drawing. Most of the marks I make are really just a complicated series of notes I've made based from the reference shots I took. If you'll notice, most of the dark shadowed areas are noted by dark hash marks. The detail level is extreme in the most important areas and the lines get more bulky or lighter the less important something is...or less "notes" I'll need when I start painting. Clouds and mountains need less notations than say, the airships, so there's a slightly higher degree of detail with those. Generally the notes include shadows, contours, plane changes and perspective marks so when I start painting I can make my brush stokes move around the forms, lending more depth and dimension to the objects in the painting.

The way these guys are drawn kept reminding me of 'Take On Me' by Ah-Ha. I had that song stuck in my head constantly while drawing....so....in honor of that... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914&ob=av3e