In class last Tuesday, I was talking real generally about goals for the class and what my students should be focusing on in order to improve. It’s a sophomore level illustration class about color theory and builds upon the previous level class, which was primarily centered on composition and drawing. One of the things I harped on was defining “skill” and how skill isn’t necessarily about encyclopedic knowledge (“if I knew everything about illustration, then I would be a great illustrator”) nor is it about tricks (“if I just knew how this illustrator did this certain technique, then I would be a great illustrator like them”). I defined skill as the solid execution of fundamentals, and then proceeded to tell them to build on all the basics that they learned in Illustration 1 for this upcoming class (perspective, composition, value, good craft and professional habits).
I’m a big proponent of backing up words with deeds, so I wanted to put up this process post for this goofy Adventure Time drawing, as well as upload a low-res version of my Photoshop work file to demonstrate my point about skill not being “trick” based. This is a process that I use fairly often, with a few variations. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best draftsman by a long shot, but I do fundamentally believe that for the most part, the illustrative process starts with a good drawing before anything else. If your drawing sucks, then no amount of photoshopping, expensive oil paint, cat hair clippings, etc. will save it. This is as true for guys who work exclusively in Photoshop on their Cintiqs as it was for Rockwell, Pyle, and Wyeth.
Every illustration begins as a little scribble to rough out the general idea and placement of elements within the composition. This thumbnailing process is crucial to editing out your ideas, as well as solving basic compositional problems (“what is the most important information in this piece and how can I show that?”). For this Marceline drawing, I did a super rough doodle in Photoshop (CS4) and then printed it out to do my lines. I light boxed it onto a scrap of whatever I had laying around (I think Rives BFK) and then penciled out the basic shapes— I don’t like to start with a super tight pencil drawing, because my inks tend to get static and it begins to feel more like tracing to me. Then I went to town on it with a Pentel Brush Pen.
After scanning the resulting drawing and cleaning it up a bit (changing it to greyscale, adjusting the contrast), I flatted it out with the polygon lasso tool underneath my lines. This is a real basic way of coloring linework in Photoshop, and simply ensures that everything stays neat. Using my flat selections, I laid in my basic color in a separate layer, throwing in a new layer here and there for highlights and darks. I think about general schemes in terms of warm and cool, and use contrasting colors to focus on certain areas (for example in this one, Marceline’s shoes and axe-bass) but for the most part, I tend to take the Herge approach to color (“For a child, for example, the Tintin sweater is blue, completely blue. Why would it be light blue on one side and dark blue on the other?”) If it starts getting too clean (as is the case with a lot of digital drawings), I’ll add in a little texture layer over everything. This is usually just a scrap of whatever is closest to me at the time. I don’t use a whole lot of layers, as you can see if you pull down my .psd. I find that it’s better that way for my sanity and for the sake of my computer’s hard drive.
Towards the end, I’ll throw a quick color balance adjustment layer to harmonize everything and get it closer to my original intentions. Sometimes, I’ll flatten everything and start a new work file to do this separately.
The whole process took me maybe 6-7 hours. The major point to take away is that the base drawing was the foundation for everything else to build upon; in a way, the illustration was “finished” by the time I set my brush pen down.
Again, you can pull down a low-res version of my work file here. Please ask away if you have any questions or comments!
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