The Butler Did It!

Hey there,

I've been so busy lately with wedding invitations ('tis the season!) that I've completely neglected my illustrations... and I miss it terribly. So, I decided to post a little walkthrough to an illustration I made a while back, in case any of you are interested to know a little bit about the work process.

Here is the final illustration:

As you can see, my aim was to practice a bit of character design.

It all started when a friend once showed me this following image, with the shapes of Disney's Aladdin characters:

It really made me want to design characters based on different shapes. So with a brand new canvas and my loyal Wacom companion, I jotted down the following shapes:

Then my favorite part - sketching and coming up with interesting features for the characters. The features just kind of flow and I never quite find myself where I expected to be when I finish sketching:

After the sketching, I decided to ink over the lines with the pen tool, which makes the lines much more precise and clean. In retrospect, I could have skipped this stage, as I wasn't planning to keep the contour lines anyway, but never mind. It's always nice to practice my inking:

It's coloring time! Need to choose a nice pallat and make sure all the colors work well together. Basically this is a flat layer of the base colors, which will serve as the basis. I went with dark reds, browns and greens. I actually made a different color layer for each color, which is kind of crazy, but it makes everything much more flexible, as I can play around with the colors until I find the right combination. 

And then the long and exhausting part of adding shading, highlights and textures. I really enjoy this part when working on the character faces, much less when working on their cloths... So you can kind of tell I was losing patience at some point :) And... done!

My favorite part of this drawing is definitely the chubby lady's furry scarf (no animals were hurt while working on this illustration, I assure you!). Least favorite part - the right guy's boots. I get so bored with objects like that... 

That's it for this time, hope you enjoyed it!