WSJ Ask Teri / Charlene Chua illustration

This was done for the Wall Street Journal’s Ask Teri column for Thursday Jan 20. It was a very quick turnaround (same day). The column is about a man who lost weight and so got his suits remade to fit. He was asking if he should get his shirts remade as well since the necklines were still uncomfortable. The art director originally asked for a picture of a tailor working at making a suit, and I supplied him a sketch of that. I also supplied an alternative sketch for an idea with a pair of hands with a measuring tape across a businessman’s neck, which I thought had related more to the text. The team at the Journal liked the idea and we ran with that. I ended up making the guy look older with a bit of a heavier neck. It was a nice, quick job, and it was great working with the folks at the Journal again (who are simply amazing with their response time!).

These were the sketches I provided:

This was the original tailor idea.

This was my original alternative. I adjusted the guy to be older.

Did this recently for Lucid Media. It’s the cover for the issue featuring Canadian director Atom Egoyan. The illustration is  portrait of him, with characters from his various movies woven into his hair. the watermark background is based off Armenian patterns in recognition of his heritage.

Here’s the work as it appeared (the inner black and white spot was another cover concept that we decided to use for the article instead):

Here were the roughs I did. I normally don’t do color roughs, but decided to for this one:

This is another brush image I’m working on for myself. I have an on-again, off again motif of girls with swords going through them, and this is the latest incarnation of that. Final colors to come, depending on when I get the time.

inked sketch on tabke

Another view of table

Closeup with pencil. You can see the original brushwork is not complete black.

Finshed inks, scanned and cleaned in Photoshop.

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

I’m reorganizing the blog, and so I’m re-porting the work in progress sketches for the HR Professional article.

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.

This is a pic I did for HR Professional some time ago. It’s in the current issue I believe.

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!

Keep6 gallery is having a show called Eco-Bag, Eco-Life which features eco friendly tote bags painted and customized by artists and designers. Here’s mine (a bit of a rushed job, but I think it turned out ok). The bags will be on sale at the gallery and will also be on tour around the world – see the gallery for details.

I just drew straight onto the bag with a HB pencil. I have been rather busy lately so I didn’t have that much time to work on this, so I decided to do something simple and funny. Oh Noz is a funny expression to me.

I painted in the colors with acrylic paint. I was wondering if I could get away with not using an outline but it didn’t really work out.

Finished adding the black outlines. The waves seemed too bare, so I decided to put in lines with a white acrylic marker.

Here’s the final bag!

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.