Tag Archives: pencil

31 January, 2013

Creating the Cabin

It’s been a little while since I’ve done any posts about my process, so I thought I would remedy that here. The image above shows the various stages of development for The Cabin in the Woods illustration I posted yesterday.

Illustrations like this start with a pencil sketch. Truth be told, they start with a lot of pencil sketches. It sometimes takes a while to come up with a direction I am happy with. The final pencil sketch does not have to be perfect, it just needs to be close enough for me to have something to start working with. I will often add or refine details in the next stage.

Once I get a pencil sketch that I am satisfied with, I import it into Adobe Illustrator to use as the basis for a vector drawing. The pencil sketch is placed on a separate layer and then the I start re-drawing it using the pen tool. A lot of people don’t like using the pen tool, but I actually feel somewhat comfortable with it (as long as I don’t have to draw something from scratch with it). At this stage, I try and get the shapes exactly how I want them. I am less concerned about the colors. For those, I try to block in the basic color direction I want, but I leave a lot of room to tweak and finesse when I get to the next stage.

The next stage is done in Photoshop. I export the drawing from Illustrator as a PSD file. This option allows me to retain any layers I set up in Illustrator. This is extremely helpful in dealing with separate elements in more complex illustrations. I open the exported PSD in Photoshop and then set out to “un-vectorize” the illustration. While I like many of the advantages that the vector tools bring in Illustrator, I don’t like the “raw” vector look of those tools. This Photoshop stage is where I can rough up the illustration a bit, and make it look more like it was done by human hands. I had some tone, shadow and texture to give it a slight painted feel. I also fine tune the colors to give them a little more pop.

And that’s pretty much about it! The whole process takes a bit more time than I would like, but I like the results I get. It’s a totally different feel from my brush and ink stuff.

10 July, 2012

Drink N’ Draw N’ Doodles

Yesterday, I posted an illustration I recently did for the Facebook page for the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw group. Today, I thought I would post some of the rough sketches that went into the creation of that illustration.

The dimensions of the Facebook cover images are extremely horizontal, so I thought is presented an opportunity to cram a bunch of Drink N’ Draw participants partaking in the kinds of revelry that occurs at these events. Compositions that feature multiple subjects are not my strong suit, so I saw this illustration as an opportunity to push myself a bit.

The first thing I do with any illustration is to do some rough sketches. At the early stages, I am not generally concerned with the overall composition, I am more concerned with exploring ideas and elements of the drawing.

After the initial brainstorming doodles, I start to focus on firming up the composition. For this illustration, I ended up doing a lot more of these sketches than I typically do, because I really wanted to explore different combinations of characters and actions that they are doing. My rough drawings tend to be pretty rough. A lot of times, I am sneaking these in while I am out and about. Many of the drawings below were done in bars and during a business flight down to Florida.

Finally, I got a rough sketch that I (sort of) liked. While it was far from perfect, I thought it had the elements I wanted to move forward with.

As I said, the sketch wasn’t perfect so I brought it into Photoshop and made some rough corrections to get it close to where I wanted it. Some of these corrections involved pasting in elements from other sketches. With that finished, I printed out the cobbled together rough drawing and used a light box to re-draw in onto a sheet of bristol board. Typically, I use a India ink and a brush to do my linework, but for this one I was in the mood to ink it with my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. The final inked drawing can be seen below.

Next, I scan the inked drawing into the computer and clean up the linework where appropriate. I knew I wanted a limited color palette for this so I colored it with the two colors from the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw logo. Check out the final illustration in action at the Newburyport Drink N’ Draw Facebook page!

 

26 December, 2011

Rough Christmas

Here is the rough drawing for the illustration from my Christmas card that I posted yesterday.

3 May, 2010

Figure Drawing 05.03.10

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Recently, I’ve begun working watercolors into my drawings and I am really having a ball. I am not at all experienced using them, so it has been an interesting challenge. Plus, adding color into the mix has really added an interesting wrinkle to things.

The drawing above is from a recent figure drawing session. For this drawing, I lightly sketched in the figure with pencil and then added color. The linework was added last with a Sharpie Pen (which is waterproof, so it works great in this application). After this drawing, I dropped the pencil stage and drew directly in pen before adding the water colors (which you will see when I upload subsequent drawings).

My watercolor kit is comprised of a Raphaël Aquarelle Watercolor Travel Set and a set of Niji Waterbrushes, which seemed like an ideal setup for either taking to figure drawing or using out and aboout. I have been using the Niji waterbrushes for a while, mostly for applying tone to non-waterproof pen drawings. They make a really great portable watercolor solution.

Stay tuned for more adventures in watercolors.

16 March, 2009

Curvy

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Here’s yet another figure drawing from the “short-handed” figure drawing session.For this one, I wanted to go with a stylized cartoon approach, similar to the one I use in my commercial work. It really forced me to approach things much differently than my usual figure drawing. Typically, I attack a drawing with wild abandon, letting the figure emerge as I’m drawing. Here, I was much more deliberate, planning out how I would abstract the figure before I got into it.

I like how the four drawings I posted from this session are all so vastly different in style. It’s really fun to shake things up to this extent in such a short time frame.