The Interview – Process
Righto. So here’s the final image again. I didn’t crop it this time, and I toned down the white highlights from yesterday. I guess it does pay to let the eyes take a break from artwork. I’m happier with this version. While not perfect, I think it draws the eye correctly now.
As with all my illustrations, this started off with a sketch. I drew the people on a couple of different sheets of paper and tweaked the composition in Photoshop. The guy in the middle was supposed to be a flat silhouette at first.
Usually I don’t work with color roughs, but in this case I had a color scheme in mind so I quickly hammered out some color in Photoshop. I exported it as a jpeg to Illustrator where I made a color palette based off this. Don’t pick colors off jpegs in Illustrator, the swatch always turns out icky.
The vector work took quite a long time, about a week though I was working on it on and off. I tried to keep the gradients more subtle, which took longer, plus the details like the cameras were annoying to work in as they were all turned at different angles. You can’t really see the details in the finished piece so I’ve included a closeup of some of the people here.
The people were on separate layers in Illustrator and they were exported in groups as EPS files and recomposited in Photoshop. The composited initial PSD file looks exactly like the original Illustrator file.
And so begins the evil of Photoshop. Added a lightsource in the middle and some glowing bubble things to indicate flares from the cameras.
Effects were added to the layers of the imported people. Some were blurred more than others in an attempt to create depth and motion. I guess it was alright, not a huge success, maybe needs more practice.
So now the people on both sides are blurred, as are the people in the background. The background folks also have a soft halo of light around them.
Final touches – added more light particles, and a blackish band at the bottom to unify the picture. I actually worked in the details on the guy towards the end, despite what these pictures show (I deconstructed the final file in order to show the layers). The flat silhouette thing didn’t work out so well so I added some details in Illustrator and the wings and imported those back to Photoshop.
You can see the difference between the image now and my first ‘finish‘ where the highlights were too strong.
Tags: Illustration, Illustrator, photoshop, Process, vector
