Art Process

Hey there everyone! Hope your summer is going well, no one has been fried like an egg or anything have they? Can not wait until this heat wave has passed. Summer is really not my favorite time of the year. It has however allowed me to get caught up on things since I refuse to go outside. I was working on a commission last night and decided to make a post out of it. I am going to share a bit of my art process with you guys. Ready, here we go!

First, I draw a sketch of what I am going to draw and then I scan it into my computer:

It is just a quick pencil sketch done on some white paper, nothing fancy at all. So after it is all scanned in I open up Adobe Illustrator and get my layers set up. In the first layer I place the image I scanned in and lock it. I use the layers above it to draw the linework and color and shade. The next three images show you a bit of what I mean:

 

This takes about and hour or so to do, depending on how bad of a perfectionist I am being. It really is a lot of trial and error and finding out what works best for you. Now here is the final product after I have smoothed out lines and added shading and all that fun stuff:

 

Pretty cool huh? There are a ton of tutorials out there in internet land. I learned a lot from them and also just messing around with the program. I prefer to use Adobe Illustrator to draw with instead of Photoshop. Still messing with the whole digital painting thing in Photoshop. But, this is mainly how I do most of my digital illustration stuff. Hope you like my little show and tell, I know it isn't very detailed in information but I wasn't writing a tutorial.  Until next time, stay cool and try not to melt!

Author:

Kiamichi

I hate coming up with titles to things

I really do. It never goes well. If I could leave everything Untitled and then just put a number after it I would. It's agonizing to me. I mean, it took me a 8 years to think of a name for my daughter (mind you I started thinking of it when I was 10) and my oldest son was almost born nameless cause we couldn't figure out what to call him until three days before he was born. I suck at it. Same thing with blog titles, art piece titles, facebook status updates, the list can get quite long. Don't even get me started on usernames for forums and other things. It makes my head want to explode. I think this is why I can't make my mind up on a decent logo and banner too. I have loads of them, just can't decide which one fits me the best cause I am really all over the place. I am a creative hurricane. I have a point in all this, I really do. It has to do with the vector painting project I am doing this week. I have another one to post today. The title sucks. Fair warning has been issued. Beware. This one is another random image pulled from some random image search I did when researching Japanese Harajuku fashion, cause I really just love it, so much insanity and cute, I adore it. Anyhow, the image is a girl with a large stuffed doll. Hence the mindblowingly awesome title of "Doll Girl", yeah, amazing isn't it. Ok, enough with the sarcasm, on to the art!

Original Image:

Cute huh, I also obviously have something for girls with pink hair. I think it may be time for me to rock the pink hair again myself. If anyone knows the source of the image, let me know. I don't have it.

The Vector Painting:

It was particularly fun drawing the tights. I love stripey things. I think I am getting the hang of this pretty well. I paint like this with acrylics all the time. Not much difference with the drawing tablet other than the fact that it's cleaner and I don't have to worry about my kids dumping my paint on the floor as they run screaming through the room.

Well, that's that. More to come. I have at least 3 others that I want to do. Then I have some original illustrations I need to finish up and get posted as well. I am having some fun with these at the moment though. Enjoy!

Vector Painting Practice

I am going to be practicing my vector painting this week so I will be posting my efforts here when I am done with them. This is the first one I have done, took me about 7 hours. Found the image on tumblr and will try and find the source, if anyone knows alert me so I can credit their photo. It is a very colorful photograph and that is the reason why I used it to practice on. So here is the original image:

Pretty isn't it. I really love her pink hair, I had hair that color once. It's fun! Now, here is the image I drew in Illustrator:

  I think the hair and the decorations in it took the most time. Also you have to remember to draw things in a certain order, or rearrange your layers after you group your paths, it is a lot more brain work doing digital art than people realize. You really have to think out each step, not that you don't have to do that when doing art by traditional methods but I think you realize it more when you are working on the computer.

Now the reason I am doing these little practice runs, I am going to start selling portraits and taking on commissions to do digital portraits for people through Etsy and Deviant Art. I decided I needed to do some dry runs before I worked on any for money. Always good to hone your skills. This should be an interesting week!

Sugar Shock

Here is what I have been working on the last two days. It took me so long because Adobe Illustrator was being a pain in my butt and crashing. First time it crashed before I could even save anything. Next time I saved things every 5 minutes! So, yeah, those of you out there who are just now delving into the wonderful world of digital art, save your work every few minutes or end up screaming at your computer for your own stupidity. I was so upset at myself the first time that I just went to bed. I posted the line art to this in the previous post, so I am just going to put up the finished piece here in this one. Prints are available on my Zazzle site. This is one in a series I am working on for weird holidays. I think this is for National Candy Month.

I especially like the bon bon and the gumballs. They are my favorite out of the whole thing. This took me about 6 hours, mainly cause I do a lot of back and forth and I had about 17 layers. Each piece of candy was its own layer and group. Plus, I am still just not as quick with digital art as I am otherwise. Mainly because of the whole saving issue I spoke of earlier. Still not second nature to me yet. Really I am just a perfectionist who redoes everything at least 3 times before I am semi happy with it. More to come in this series, next is this cute little ice cream freak or the bubble gum girl, haven't decided yet. Plus more to draw out. Have a really fun Star Wars one I am working on.