Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Record Day Process

After finding the old process sketches and work on this illustration, I thought I should show and explain how I went about producing it.


The job was to illustrate Record Day, so I basically had to have a record shop. I like drawing people (and monsters) so I planned on putting a person in a shop and trying to make it look sweet. As you can see I got the final idea early on and did some different variations on it.


During the thumbnail process I drew this sketch. It sucked. So I kept going with the other thumbnails.


After I settled on a composition, I messed around a little drawing the character. If this was going to be a series of images, I probably would have done many more of these to work the character design out. If you notice, I tried a guy and a girl, but settled on the guy (I don't remember why.)


So I started the sketch. As you can see I draw in blue line first. I was working out which album covers would go where in the composition. Once I did the whole thing in blue, I used a mechanical pencil to draw darker lines. I did this to chose which lines I want to use and to make it easier to trace.


With blue pencil again, I traced the drawing and did a more refined version on another sheet of paper (I use regular computer printer paper). Then with a brush and ink, I inked all the big lines. After that, I used the mechanical pencil again to draw the small little detail lines. Because of the album covers this illustration had more little details than I often do.


Next I scanned the inked drawing into the computer. I took away the blue lines and colored everything. All of my lines are still there, I just colored a lot of them to blend in with the color of it's shape as well.


Here are the lines without the shapes filled in. I like working this way because I'm using the ink drawing I did, so the edges of my shapes and lines have a hand-drawn feel, but I can also spend time adjusting the colors of the lines and what lines I keep or take out.


Next I added some shadows. Some of my illustrations have a lot of shadow, but this mostly was under the guy's chin and on the legs of the table.


At this point I thought that the back wall was popping out too much and I wanted to bring focus onto the guy, so I lightened the color of the wall and added a grayish gradient behind him. I wanted to make the wall a duller color than the guy holding the record.



This is the final drawing cropped the for the paper. I had always planned on cropping it like this which is why I never finished the drawing of the Ramones or Rancid album.

I hope this has been instructive and/or interesting. If you have any questions just shoot me an email.

7 comments:

dang said...

great to see!
thanks for posting this (found via illustration mundo)

Cory Godbey said...

This is so awesome! Glad to see your process.

The Gross Uncle said...

Loving your work, Mike! Thanks for sharing.

G

mike said...

very cool to see your process, mike!

Unknown said...

That was great! I love the attention given to the bg records.

Mark Fullerton said...

Connected thru Mundo--have always loved ur work. It's great to see the process of other artists.

In the life of DREW said...

Wow, know I know and knowing if half the battle.