Q:Hey man, big fan of your work. Love the style! Do you have any samples of your workflow? what software do you use?

mv12

Thanks Id love to share my process.

HOW YOU DO DAT MANG? Episode one.  Line art and coloring

I use a Wacom Tablet Intuos 4 Large, and photoshop CS5. Here is how i drew the pirate shopping cart girl First I sketch out in solid forms a nice fluid figure that has the motions and dynamic life that i want. Not shown is photo i was refrencing bj Mjuramn stock

Time to ink.  new layer.  set sketch to 20% opacity or so.  its like a light table or seomthing.

using a default hard brush probably 45 pixels wide on a canvas 16 by20 at 300DPI. making sure my lines don’t suck and have a nice fluidness to them as well as interesting variation and calligraphic strokes. this is the most painful and rewarding part of a drawing. but its worth it. a lot of “artists” out there who don’t care about their lines and would rather sculpt some nasty chicken scratch line art with their eraser than learn how to ink properly

lazily slop color on a layer underneath line art, and fuck around with the hue sliders until i setter on what i want.

this is your god

This is your god

After the colors appear to me. I clean them up and get read to add detail coloring. the details are not really nesesary. but they do ad a certain amount of zing that people like. ideally the drawing should be able to stand alone with out these effects.

but i fuckin love photoshop magic so lets go all out. soft red brush to apply sexy redness. we want her to appear flush, alive, voluptuous, post orgasmic,cliche pin up girl trope, and all those other thangs.

Coloring line work Select line art layer and toggle locking transparent pixels. then i can paint over my line art layer with any color i want. Brown lines have a lot more life than stiff black ones.

some times i add subtle gradients by burning large areas of the color with the burn tool. very softly though, as the burn tool is a terrible means of coloring for amateurs and colorblind deviant artists. Also my illustration teacher.

I’m gonna drop on the huge piece of old paper i use some times. to add some texture for this peice i have set the opacity pretty low and the blending mode to color burn. there are more options than this but i felt this combination worked best for this piece in particular.

Tune in next time for Episode 2,  Vector Shapes and You, a guide to not sucking at illustrator 

5 Notes/ Hide

  1. zebrasectomy said: Do you stick with the 45px brush or do you vary the size a lot while inking? I’m asking because I feel like my line work isn’t varied enough and I’m not sure switching brush sizes like a crazy person is helping. (Also love the intuos 4!)
  2. brent-tumbles posted this