Did this during a couple of Livestream sessions last week. I guess I forgot to post it up here.

If you missed the stream, you can see the recordings here. A good 2h of my computer screen and me rambling on about stuff! Hear my rant about Captain Planet!

Also, I just realized that the last year of my life practically disappeared from under me. At least, it seems that way when I look at my previous blog entries for 08 and 09.

Santa Fe Reporter cover

Did this recently for Santa Fe Reporter, for their 2009 ‘Sweat’ issue. The art director wanted a kickboxing girl (since that is a feature article), and it so happened that I already had a girl in a kickboxing pose from an old illustration. I showed it to her and she was happy with reusing it, with some new elements in the background.

santa fe reporter, cover sketch

So this was the sketch for the cover. I was asked to do something dynamic, with Chinese dragons, so I came up with the dragon and various lines and elements behind the girl to make her look cooler. I asked for the masthead so that I could work the design around the main elements on the page.

This was the final art, without the masthead.

The finished ‘traditional’ artwork.

With a bit of Photoshop tweaking to the colors.

Illustration demonstration of a space girl in Illustrator CS3. Speed rendered in about an hour.

Here was the original sketch, and some other ideas I pitched to the editor. I quite liked the one with the words going into the head, but the one they picked was nice too. The article was about basic financial terms for people in the human resource industry.

pencil sketch for illustration

So like everything else that gets finished, The Hunted started out as a pencil sketch. Since this was a test, I sketched it straight onto my Stonehenge paper. Which is a bit silly because it’s nice expensive paper that, like all nice expensive papers, is prone to lose some of its niceness due to erasing, which is pretty much inevitable if you’re not doing a prep sketch.

But since I’m a bonehead – oh well. I did the sketch in blue pencil and then went over it with a HB. At first I was trying to make the lines look good, to see how the pencil would react with the paper. Ultimately I knew I was going to ink over it anyway so it really didn’t matter, and you can see that halfway through I decided to just rough out the outline (towards the bottom). Scanned it in before I inked it.

color rough

Here’s the color rough. It was was my own reference so I just did a really messy job with throwing in the colors I wanted to use. The paper texture was also dropped in to see how it would react with the colors. It did a really good job. I saved a small version of the file so I could easily pick the colors for reuse later.

inking the artwork

Here is the inking in progress. I used a brush pen, as well as india ink with several brushes, and a dip pen. I probably could have done it all in brush, but again I was testing how the paper reacted with the various things. It did too good a job (to me) of soaking up the liquid from my brush pen, but it had a nice bite for the india ink, so I’ll probably use a brush next time with this paper. The dip pen didn’t do so great, maybe I need a more fluid ink or something, but it just wasn’t flowing right.

final illustration

After the inks were done it was back to the scanner. Scanned in the inks at 600dpi, reduced the file to 400dpi and added the colors and textures. I did another pinkish version (see previous post) but this is really closer to what I wanted to achieve, so I guess I’ll settle with this as the final version.

Hope it was a fun read!

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.

Here’s the final image, Illustrator and Photoshop. Below is a process snapshot; not a tutorial but gives you some insight to how I work.

This is the base sketch. I sketch in blue, then go over it in graphite. I scan it into Photoshop, remove the blue lines but then turn the sketch blue anyway. I like working over blue lines, I find it easier on the eye.

This was the initial render. I started rendering at 2am after drawing stuff all night. I wanted to do a speed render in an hour, but the unusual color scheme took a bit more time. I have preset color palettes for general work but I originally thought of doing a duotone pink-turquoise picture. You can see a closeup of the details on the face, hair.

So I quickly took the 1.5h render into Photoshop, changed the color a bit, slapped on some texture just to make myself feel better for the day.

I got up today and decided to finish the picture to get it out of the way. I abandoned the idea of doing a duotone color scheme as it really wasn’t working out. I know many artists stick to color schemes once they establish them, but I find it rather restrictive to work that way. Maybe it’s the lack of formal training, but I find I don’t like to get locked into a palette if the feel of the picture is not right. This is the Illustrator render export to Photoshop in 2 pieces – the background and the girl/ chair. It looks kinda flat and there’s banding going on in the background.

Photoshop is good at helping soften the images, so I threw on some blurs and soft highlights behind the girl and added noise to the background to break up the banding.

Additional color tweaking of the girl to bring out the color and soften the edges with slight blurs.

Final art again. Painted in the highlights in Photoshop with a soft brush to give the extra shine. It’s much easier to do that in Photoshop than Illusrator and it gives a more natural look as opposed to the highly controlled shapes in the latter.