Illustration How To

My Method

The Initial Drawing

The first step is usually 2-3 pages of very rough sketches or done without any references just to get the concepts and poses down, after that I take a fresh sheet and block out the general forms of the drawing, references are fairly important at this stage, and I tend to use a variety of sources but mostly I fall back on a large number of pose books, old calendars, and the Hobby Japan EX: Garage Kit Catalogs for references. Once I get part of a drawing down I make photocopies and work on those to get my options straight.

Computer Art

Most of the CG art work that I've done is the end result of a fairly long process that I've worked out, which starts with a pencil sketch and ends with a 200-300 dpi multi-layer Photoshop picture.

Cleaning Up Once I've got a finished sketch I load the drawing into Photoshop and cook it until I've got a fairly clear B&W image, which I save as a 72 dpi PICT file. The image then gets booted over Illustrator where I trace over it using the pen tool.	I then clean up the lines and eliminate extra points in the drawing, I then go through and vary the line weight to give the drawing some depth. Sometimes with a shaded drawing or good lineart I'll skip this step to get a better
Coloring Once I have a good copy of the drawing I import it to Photoshop as a 300 dpi grayscale image which I then bring down to a B&W drawing. I save the drawing in a channel and bring it up to indexed color, I then fill in the various color areas with flat colors.	Once the drawing is colored out I bring it up to RGB and selecting area by area I shade it with the Dodge/Burn tools and then do any filter work that's needed.

Final Steps

Backgrounds,and other parts of the beyond the main character I draw separately and then put into the drawing as different layers, giving me some options for final prints, When I want to run off a print I'll copy the initial file and then flatten the image before saving it as a max quality JPEG to take to the printers. While I find that my work comes out best on a Dye-Sub, usually I run off prints on a 6 color inkjet on glossy paper.

Return to ILLUSTRATION

Reccomended Books

I'm a voracious reader and I draw inspirational from a wide variety of sources, and use a number of reference and technical books in my work. I've collected the best of these here...

Burne Hogarth: A classic series of artist's how-to and reference, a must have for any serious artist

Photoshop Magic: Books by Greg Simsic and David Lai: a series of Photoshop how-to book that give easy step-by-step instructions for a variety of image effects

Pose Books: This is a series of Japanese artists reference books showing an artist model in a variety of poses.

How To Draw Manga: An excellent series of drawing books

Costume Refrences

Fantasy Characters

Tech Drawing

Drawing Techniques

Anatomy and Posing

Character Development

Palladium Books: While primarily designed for roleplaying, this series of refrence works, provides detailed information on a variety of weapons, arms, and armor from all ages, and around the world.

Return to ILLUSTRATION