The Elusive Fish — Creative Services

This is another of the images of mine that bought the biscuit in committee. This work is entirely digital, being produced in Corel Painter using my trusty whack-um tablet.

I like crowd scenes. A crowd scene is a whole collection of individual stories frozen in time. Like why is that fella in the red neck-tie got the slightly annoyed expression? What’s mom saying to her daughter that’s getting completely ignored? Is the Indian chap and the redhead an item, are they friends or did they just happen to end up standing exactly side by side with one another? And what Cosmo article is the guy in the blue tie guiltily reading over her shoulder?

One of these days I would love to do a web-comic that takes a crowd scene and then one by one allows you to track backwards and forwards through each of the individual stories. One of these days.

One of the benefits of working digitally is that many of the steps in producing the work are preserved in the various layers. So I thought I might take this particular illustration to show my process. Click on any of the following illustrations to see a full-sized image.

I begin with a quick blue-line illustration. There really is no reason for this to be blue. The blue is a holdover from my days of working in print, where a particular shade of blue was used for pencil work, as it would not be picked up by the camera. I do find, however that working in multiple shades of colours for the base-line work allows me to better distinguish different aspects of a work. So I may do characters in blue, but the background in green and props in red, as an example.

Next I tighten up the illustration with a red pencil. I’ll be inking this work later so I need to have enough detail to produce strong bold lines … but not so much detail that I lose any potential spontaneity that may still lie in the work. It’s a fine balance.

Next come the inks and the colours. I’m not entirely happy with the inks on this work. I’m most comfortable working in real media when it comes to pen and ink. There’s a certain rythem you build. Dip the pen. stroke, stroke, stroke. Dip the pen. Work on the thin lines first, then move to the bolder lines as the flanges begin to widen from use. The digital crow quill is just not the same, and the monitor resolutions make thin lines impossible to judge accurately.

While I think I’m fairly competent in my painting techniques, as mentioned before I think I still need work in my choice for overall colour pallet. I did an acceptable job here, but it’s far from ‘knock ‘em dead brilliant’, which is what I always hope to achieve on a work I’m charging money for.

Finally comes the background. Multiple layers resting behind the characters with use of the line tool coupled with eraser to build a tile-like look.

And there you have it. From conception to finished illustration, my brain to your eyes.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 12:24 am and is filed under Comics as Communication, Illustration, Creative Services, Clients, Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.