For the three nursery themed illustrations I made sure to take a lot of print screens so that I could document the process in full detail.
It is also weird to see my images stripped back in this way and it was good to see the full transformation as it looks totally different before it makes it's journey into Photoshop.
Here we go!
The print screens start at the digital process, for sketches refer back to sketch pages.
Okay so I start off by throwing the line work into Sketchbook Pro, I then start masking out the rough shapes. For this one I thought it best to establish the outside boarders of the old lady character first so I could fully see the shape that I am working with.
This is the colour reference doodle I have opened in another window so that I can colour match as I am blocking out the shapes. I find it is in good practise to rough out colours in this way because then I am not going into a busy illustration completely blind. I also manage to recycle this image later on in the process.
So yeah there are a lot of screen grabs and some sections are self explanatory but I will highlight crucial moments in the process, my brain does tend to jump all over the place when it comes to these busy illustrations.
Here I am just starting to fill in the characters.
Again here I am just messing with the colours to make sure everything is working, wasn't too sure about the red inner stomach at this point.
At this point most of the shapes are finished and I am starting to add in the details such as the legs on my spider character, once the bird went in I felt a lot better about the image as a whole, I was worried that it wasn't going to work but I powered through!
Now all of the characters are in and I added in decorative details and additional colours. This is the point where the stitch and dot lines start to take shape on my illustrations.
Brushing in more shadows and adding stitch lines.
Reviewing previous shapes and lightening parts to make them pop more.
Okay so the after all of the artwork is shaded and the basic details are added in I then move over to Photoshop for the addition of texture and layer masks, this is my favourite part!
First I throw and overlay across the entire illustration, I do this to understand the quality and variety of my original colour swatch, it is here that I start tinting my image with darker shades to bring the overall brightness down.
Once happy with a basic palette I move onto adding textures, to start I throw one across the entire image to see how texture interacts with every element on the page. This part is important because in the past I have made the mistake of just dropping a texture on top of the entire image and it just throws everything off balance, texture should brush up against the artwork and overtake some sections but never dominate the piece.
Here I am making layer masks and dropping certain textures around specific parts of the characters. The middle screen grab shows the selective texture, the orange areas are the areas that I wanted to target with the effect.
I really loved this texture I made for the bird, It was made by throwing ink down on some paper and then covering it with cling film, after it dried the film peeled straight off leaving a cracked shiny layer which had a lovely range of opacities.
At this point I am just finalizing the image and playing around with the opacities of each effect, one of the last things I do is throw another colour layer over the whole image and then add a tint to the entire piece which gives it this ages Victorian look which I think works really well!
The last thing to go in is the font and the distressed edges, and that's a wrap for that one.
From start to finish they take me around 2-3 evenings to finish. I think that is a fairly good pace to work at, this skill could prove to be a life saver if a client ever wanted something done with very short notice.
This is also a skill that I would hope to improve, I want to be faster but I wouldn't want it to hinder the artwork in the process so I must be careful.
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