Illustration Demonstration - Conan

I started out with a rough sketch. I used an HB pencil an I work on 14 x 17 inch smooth bristol board. It's important to stay loose at this stage; the polish comes later.

When drawing the rough sketch, I resisted the urge to render it tightly. I forced myself to do this by the way I held my pencil. I used broad, fast strokes in the beginning as the idea half-formed in my head took shape on the paper.

The rough sketch is typically too rough to be a guide for ink. To clean it up I erased it so that I can faintly see the sketch as a guide for a tighter rendering. You can also accomplish this by using a light table to trace your rough sketch onto a clean sheet of paper.

Using the faint guides, I redrew the image more carefully to establish detail and style. I held the pencil more traditionally at this stage.

I inked the outlines first and worked my way in. I was careful to move the paper around in order to push the brush strokes away from my body instead of pulling the brush toward me. This helped me keep a smooth line that I could more easily control.

Rendering tightly requires a grip different than the one used for loose drawing. When drawing the detail and inking, I used a more traditional grip.

Once I had the basic linework fleshed out in ink, I added the dark shadows, called "spotting blacks."

The comment I most get from people when they talk of their lack of artistic talent is, "I can't even draw a straight line."

Let me divulge an ancient artistic secret: Artists use rulers to draw straight lines. Here I used one with a sharpie marker to ink the sword.

I needed more contrast between the lines that define the detail and those that establish the form. Since my sharpie was already out, used it to strenghthen the line weights around the body and head. I then used a # 1 round brush to add some detail and shadow around the face and other parts of the drawing.

To finish the inking, I used bleed proof white and a #1 round brush to add highlights to the hair and lift out white highlights to Conan's fur trunks.

I scanned the image as line art at 600 DPI. I then converted the image to grayscale and downsized it to what size I usually work with for T-shirt art which is 188 DPI. This is just a habit for me, but if it where for print I would work at 300 DPI.

After the image is scanned I placed the line work on its own layer in Photoshop. I then turned the layer attribute to "multiply" (see image below.) Since I wanted to keep my line work pristine, I colored in underneath the image in layers. Scroll down to the bottom if you would like to see what the final layer setup looks like.

In photoshop, I blocked in the basic color of the drawing. I separated each color into its own layer to make it easy to adjust a color if I needed to.

Using a Wacom, which is a pressure sensitive digital brush that you use like a pen, I brushed in my shadows. Like before, I kept colors on different layers to make editing easier.

Using the Wacom, I brushed in some highlights.

Using the wacom, I added white highlights and made a few corrections to the color blocking of the sword.

Conan is a dark character so I placed him on a black background with an arbitrary shape that I simply thought looked good.

To make Conan interact with the background a little, I added the shadow. I ran out of ideas to make the image better so I abandoned it.

I prepared my Photoshop file a certain way because I wanted to preserve the ability to make changes. If I put the shadow and hightlights on the same layer it would be difficult for me to edit them. This is preference though and you may find that you like managing your layers differently.