Illustration Method (in 10 steps)

Some people in class asked me how I did my illustrations. My method isn't exactly rocket surgery, and is actually pretty methodical. To whom it may concern, this is pretty much the method I used for every page (although time spent on some pages was more than others).



Step 1: First off was just drawing the bulk of the picture with good ol' paper and pencil. I tend to draw pictures like this with a pacer, which every art teacher I've ever had hates. Hmmm... I just like having a sharp lead for hatching, and forever sharpening a regular pencil wears them down too fast.
Normally if I had time I'd use ink at this point, but there wasn't really time for this project. This alone took anywhere from 4-6 hours
Step 2: Once the picture is scanned into the 'puter, it's just adjustment of white and black levels, and deleting anything that's not the drawing (in photoshop).

Step 3: next, I just duplicate the layer and Gaussian blur it to get some smoother shadow tone.

Step 4: Multiply the blurred layer over the top of the pencil lines.

Step 5: Draw in the pure black that was used in varying ways throughout the book. In this case it was the ground, and a couple of spirally background "trees".

Step 6: digitally paint in the characters' colour. I'm not much of a matte painter, and kind of average with colour as I've said before, so with these pictures I'm relying kind of heavily on my pencil lines. I did some mild dodging and burning on the colour, mainly to just enhance the pencil shading.

Step 7: Most of the colour were just multiply layers on top of the pencil image. The girl's skin was a color layer, as it gave it more of a glow. At this point I burn some of the outer pencil lines to mimic a poor man's "inking".

Step 8: Paint in the backgrounds. This part was what I found looked the most "photoshoppy" in some images. Makes some of the pictures look like desktop backgrounds.

Step 9: Paint in background details, such as clouds. This was about the extent of my matte painting technique.

Step 10: Add some overlapping foreground clouds and some dark green under the character. These are the "grounding" details, which makes the foreground, midground and background all look part of the same image - rather than a bunch of layers on top of each other. This was definitely done better in some images than others.

And then, 8-12 hours later you have your illustration ready for your Indesign layout - not including the 30 - infinite or so hours you will spend nit picking over tiny imperfections.