Kicking off the month of July, shortly before making my way to Atlanta for 311 live on the 4th of July, I wanted to put out another “Process” post—the first being Sophisticated Jazz Monkey a few posts back. This time around is a little bit different. Where before I took something and worked digitally early on in the process, this time digital it the final process and the more traditional approach is the workup.
The final composition is one of the advantages to creating illustrated characters digitally: one can take different aspects, make adjustments, and change overall scale for a number of different applications.
The fully digital recreation was done using Adobe Illustrator CS3 with different layers making up the character, the clothes, and the color. Notice that the final digital version has had some tweaks and adjustments compared to the original drawing—the main benefit of this process. Characters such as this seem to work stronger in a clean digital format.
Going from the original to the digital, I first used a transparent overlay to trace out the line work I would need to then scan and trace over with the pen tool. Doing this gave complete control of line weight, depth, etc. where using a default stroke does not.
Here again is the original/starting point for this process post.
Thank you all for coming by and checking out the blog. Feel free to pass it along whenever you see something that you like, and we leave it open for anyone to comment as well. If anyone has any suggestions, questions, or ideas we could use to make our projects better please drop us a line at our email address or hit us up on Twitter and Facebook.
Have a great 4th everyone,
—Jim
Turned out really good. Im liking it!
Cool, thanks man. I appreciate your feedback!