A Tumblog by Mark Jardine

The Tapbots version of the Twitter bird. (excuse the crappy backdrop thrown in)

I’m no professional illustrator by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil and always wanted to do it for a living. I know it sounds crazy, but I truly don’t have any talent in drawing (as you can see from my first sketch). What you see today is a result of years and years of practice and hard work (and it’s still not that great IMO). Anyways, I just wanted to share my process for creating a piece like this. I’m always figuring out better and more efficient ways to render artwork and this has been working well for me as of late.

Just like design, iterating is very important for me. I always plan to draw a showcase piece of artwork at least 3 times. Everytime I redraw over the last, I become more confident on how things should look. My very first sketch is usually on paper (not shown here). It’s very rough and at this point, I’m just trying to figure out the pose I want. When I know what I want, I draw my first few revisions in Sketchbook Pro. Once I have something decent, I’ll bring it into illustrator and retrace the lines as vectors. I use illustrator for my artwork for 2 reason. Live Paint and the ability to enlarge my artwork if I ever needed to. I can’t go into the power of live paint right now, but just know it’s extremely handy and very efficient. I might do a post on it sometime.

The final effects are done in photoshop. I add soft light glows of gaussian blurred circles to certain areas to give a sense of gradual light falling on the subject. It’s a very quick way of adding a bit of appealing depth to the character with very little effort.

That’s about it!

Another drawing. Sort of a sneak peak of what’s to come.

I posted this last week here, but made a few updates to the illustration. This was drawn in Illustrator and the gradient lighting effects were added in photoshop. Click-through takes you to the full-sized image.