Wednesday 25 February 2009

Weird-wolf - Process

I'm doing some illustrations for Cambridge University Press in Madrid.
The illustration below is one a of a group going into a book called Tasty Tales which is part of the discovery readers range aimed at teenagers who are learning English.


I thought it would be interesting if I showed something of my process for an illustration like this.
It all started with a nice, fairly specific artwork brief and a proof of the text layout for each of the illustrations. I went back with a couple of rough pencil sketches to show different approaches for the illustration.


The design team and the author decided which option they would like to progress with and I produced a tighter pencil at 150% of the final dimensions.


After comments on the tightened pencil - I blocked in the rough colours I intended on using and started getting the forms defined... I tried to iron out anything that seemed obviously wrong at this point - and I also made the minor adjustments that had been asked for.


When I was happy I'd got the basics roughed in - I turned the whole document into blue-scale and printed it out.


I then did a quick bit of pencilling over the top of the blue - lightly picked out the things I did't want to miss or that I thought still needed a bit of defining - then I inked the sucker in.


I scanned my inks back in and used the channel mixer to remove ALL the blue - this left me with some inked lines that I could then re-composite with the original coloured version... I tidied up any stray bits and mucked around with some effects until I was happy!


Then I just cropped it down to the correct dimensions.

I hope that was interesting for the lovely people who follow my blog - and not just me wittering on about my bonkers approach to making pictures.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

gosh, it really sounds quite laborious. now i know why you're so busy all the time, x

matt dawson said...

Fascinating insight into your work practice sir. Always interesting to see the nuts and bolts of how others go about things. That's a surprising but really lovely and effective colour combination on the final image of the salmon table cloth v's violet/purple background . Great work...great blog fodder sir! Will you be posting the rest sometime...? Look forward to seeing them, and any other tit bits from your plate as it were...

Verification word: "forki" ... just needs the T on the end :)

ooops had to verify again: gasma .. just needs an S and K :) I like this verification collecting game :)

matt dawson said...

Fascinating insight into your work practice sir. Always interesting to see the nuts and bolts of how others go about things. That's a surprising but really lovely and effective colour combination on the final image of the salmon table cloth v's violet/purple background . Great work...great blog fodder sir! Will you be posting the rest sometime...? Look forward to seeing them, and any other tit bits from your plate as it were...

Verification word: "forki" ... just needs the T on the end :)

ooops had to verify again: gasma .. just needs an S and K :) I like this verification collecting game :)

matt dawson said...

sorry for the TWO posts... blogger went screwy there for a moment... OK, sorry for this wasted post too... I only did it to collect another verification ;) A bit boring though... "glesten" ... think it's a town in Wales (ala Meaning of Lif :)

Something V screwy... had to verify AGAIN on this one too : "chiper"... keep your chin up eh...:)

Lee Townsend said...

Great drawing Kev,and allways really interesting to see how different artist work, on the various stages!

Bee said...

Great illustration and scene and thank you for sharing your process so fully...really interesting :)

babbler said...

Love your process, I did not know so much went into it!

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