Enough boxes; it is time to put away the 3D Box tool, arm yourself with the Calligraphic pen, and start sketching on top the 3D blueprint. Create a new layer so you can show and hide the 3D boxes and the actual drawing separately.
Of course you don’t need to trace the edges of the boxes precisely. For nongeometric objects, such as the sofa and the humans, this is hardly possible, but even the walls and windows will benefit from some hand-drawn roughness and imperfections. Use the edges of the 3D boxes as general guides to keep an eye on, but otherwise draw as freely as you would draw without any guides at all, using your own manner and style of sketching. You also don’t need to trace all of the lines; some can be omitted, and some just hinted at by short partial strokes.
You will discover that the 3D boxes make it much easier to keep in mind the overall composition and space relationships in your drawing while working on the details. I have described my own sketching style with the Calligraphic pen in another tutorial (20.6 Hatching), so I won’t go into much detail here; since the focus of this tutorial is the use of the 3D Box tool, in this drawing I am even more sketchy than usual. Don’t try to copy me; you should try to work out a style which is most natural for you. After you’re done with the basic outlines, you can turn off the 3D layer to see how your image stands on its own merits, as shown in Figure 21-8.
Finally, I colorize the drawing, again using my favorite approach with wide blurred colored strokes underneath the dark crisp outlines:
