Rich Lee Draws!!!

I was going through some old drawings to revive and I found a bunch of sketches for the Muay Thai drawing I did a year or so ago. I think these sketches of the fighters show how much I wanted to make sure that the drawing worked well overall. I borrowed a Muay Thai book from a friend to look up some kicking styles and all the mechanics involved. I think there are tons of drawings out there that show fighters hitting or kicking or whatever, each other, but I feel as if a lot of those don't have impact. Like, I see the fist hitting the face, but the rest of the body isn't reacting to the act of hitting or getting hit. I think with body mechanics, a kick or punch will affect what the rest of the body is doing. From the actual fist or foot doing the kicking to the facial expressions to the stance, everything should look connected.

The first few sketches were done in my sketchbook - I was trying to figure out how to position the feet and how it'll look with foreshortening.

So with that in mind, I sketched over and over how to best show impact, anatomy, and composition and all that fun stuff. Looking at the final piece now, I can see there are things that I would've done differently, and I think, better. But, as with these things, I don't want to be stuck revising and revising over and over ... maybe my A.D.D. is kicking in or some shit, but gotta move on!

Anyhow, I played around with different poses and eventually settled on one that I thought would've worked best. After I got the figures down, I took some tracing vellum and played around with different styles of inking - at this point I wasn't sure how I'd color it, traditional or digital. In the end, I decided to go digital, as it was quicker and I also wanted to try out some stuff in photoshop.


While I was working out the details of their boxing trunks and stuff, I was also trying to figure out background and how detailed I wanted it. A few years ago I did a similar theme in charcoal - but the details were real limited and it didn't have the sense of authenticity I was looking for with this one. The perspective and everything was all off - didn't want to make the same mistakes:

Did this a few years back - charcoal on 18x24 drawing paper

In the end, I went with some banners and shit to make make the surrounds a bit more authentic. I looked for photos of the interior of Lumpini Stadium, but didn't find anything that I could've used, so I just made up the backdrop from a mix of references. The writing I looked up and had a friend double check to make sure I wasn't completely off. I also added the IBerry ice cream franchise logo as well as the Vespa logo (in Thai).

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it - I may do another along the same lines, but nothing really planned yet. Need inspiration!

And here's the final final -