One artist's journey into the world of Illustration
Here’s the breakdown for a piece I created along with a little story prompt.
Simon runs to his family's store after school. There, he solves cases with his trusty assistant, Mittens, who paws and scratches at everything to unearth clues. Office space for gumshoes isn't easy to come by these days!
Some colour studies.
Trying out values.
Thanks for looking!
This project was for a Schoolism class I took called Starting Your Journey with Cody Gramstad. Our final assignment was to create three images to tell a story using what we learned throughout the course.
I was hesitant to take the class at first, thinking much of the subject matter had been covered in others I'd taken. I'm glad I took this though because it filled some gaps in my knowledge. For example, I already use adjustment layers but never thought to use them to change up time of day in my scenes. I'm very much looking forward to creating images using this process as a guide.
A young wizard’s studies are, yet again, interrupted by heckling outside his home.
After months of enduring this, he finally has had enough. Time to put his studies to use.
The wizard sends a murder of crows to "encourage" the offenders to leave. 😄
Some lighting comps to test which time of day worked best to match my story's intent. In this case, I chose a noon scene to enhance the uncomfortable feeling I wanted to convey.
While this wasn't necessary for the assignment, I created this turn-around for my main character just to practice.
Different colour compositions using colour harmony for one of the images. I did this for each one.
Some of my thumbnails. Thanks for reading!
I’m finally able to share some artwork I was commissioned to create for an investment firm last year. The exhibit was to feature their employees’ kids’ artwork alongside a professional artist’s interpretation. I was told the event was inspired by the Monster Project, a project I participated in back in 2019. I really enjoyed working on these and I hope these kids keep creating as they have such a great imagination!
The exhibit was delayed until recently which is why I’m just sharing it now. Unfortunately, some of the work I do never sees the light of day (NDAs, projects getting cancelled, postponement, etc.) so it’s great when I do get to share.
What I recently learned from a workshop seems to have crept into my workflow: like those fun textures on the colourful dandelions!
Back in March of 2021, a friend of mine, Sam Noir, asked if I’d be available to help out a mutual friend, Matthew Tavares, on a graphic novel. Sam was lettering it and Matt had his hands full with the pencilling and inking. A lot of the colouring was still outstanding so I offered to help out where I could between my own client work.
The colouring, as it turns out, was all in greyscale but I figured it would be a great workout nonetheless, maybe moreso than if it were full colour. Matt sent some of his completed pages as a guide. In a case like this, I think can be useful to mimic someone’s style, for learning and as a production skill.
In the end, I completed the colouring of 65 pages. Of course, the curse of continual learning is looking back on something past and seeing things you would change. Still, it felt good to have contributed to this.
Below are some of the pages I was most proud of.
Check it out if you get a chance. Matt did a great job with the visuals! The book is also getting some great reviews: Buster, A Life in Pictures written by Ryan Barnett.
I recently completed another course through Schoolism: Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu. I’ve had access to these courses for a while but between personal and client work, the challenge has always been motivating myself to actually go through them. In the past—when I did have time—I’d just skim the videos to try to apply it to my own work. However, I am encouraging myself to put in the extra effort to do the assignments and pay more attention to the lessons.
The lessons start off with foundational greyscale studies of objects and people, most of them timed. In one lesson, I drew the same girl 8 times in different orientations using the provided photo reference, then ultimately from memory. She definitely was burned into my brain by the end of it. Repetition is a great way to get to know your subject. In another of the timed lessons, a photo of Kim Jung Gi’s was referenced. The one on the left is Bobby’s where he prepared the under-drawing, curves and adjustment layers for us to paint in the highlight and darks; the one on the right is mine, drawn from scratch in about an hour.
Subsequent lessons focused on adding colour on top of the greyscale images Bobby created (you’ll probably recognize his iconic style in the fungi man and lizard creature). These were lots of fun to practice on.
I completed all of the lessons and, like in some of my posts, I will show only some of the results so I don’t give it all away.
Lessons 1 and 2: greyscale studies using a hard round brush with low flow and opacity
Lesson 3: Timed photo studies of Kim Jung Gi (the image on the right is mine done from scratch) I’m a lefty so placing the photo on the right was much easier for me.
Lesson 4: Applying colour to Bobby’s greyscale characters
Lesson 6: 20-minute greyscale studies from provided photos.
Inspired by the lessons I decided to take one of my character sketches and apply what I’d learned in this class. I may make a collection of these plant creatures.
As an illustrator I’m often asked to draw or paint a variety of things so continual learning is a must.
Backgrounds are a skill I always felt I could improve so I decided to finally put my head down and try and plow through the 21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes offered by Schoolism, an online subscription-based artistic education. It probably won’t be my last as it was definitely an eye-opener to all the different approaches of backgrounds Nathan showed.
With the exception of a few lessons, each video was approximately an hour long. Nonetheless I found it took me much longer to paint, sometimes 3 to 4 hours or more. Following Nathan was a bit of a challenge for me as he flit about the digital canvas, rapidly changing brushes, and following along the applied adjustment layers. I found myself pausing and rewinding often.
While Nathan doesn’t provide the brushes themselves, he walks you through most of his settings. When the opportunity arose, it was easy enough to take a snapshot of the brush on screen and duplicate the configuration. One thing I noticed that would occasionally throw me off was brush strokes suddenly appearing as if some frames leading to them had been dropped although the narration did not suffer from it. I would rewind to see if I blinked but I chalk it up to creative editing.
While the style is different than what I’m used to, I found it to be quite educational and will definitely incorporate some of the things I learned into my own work. Below are a handful of the studies I did of Nathan’s compositions. I don’t want to spoil it for others taking the course. I painted these all in Photoshop.
On September of 2021, Snack reached out and asked if I’d be interested in designing some characters in scenes for a series of instructional posters they were putting together for one of their clients, Reena.
I was given a design guide to follow. The challenge for this design was to limit lines and and shadows while also following their strict colour palette. Luckily, the images I sent back were on-brand, so, yay!
Below is a selection of the clean illustrations, approved sketches, and what I’m assuming was one of the final posters that Snack put together.
Around the end of May 2020, while I was in the midst of designing icons, Almex came to me with their idea to create a series of collectible T-shirts. They wanted something fun with a vintage feel to help promote their products; something that would harken back to the early nineteen century with a bit of a cartoony pinup style.
By a bit of a strange coincidence, I was, at the time, helping another artist colour their graphic novel based on Buster Keaton, a historical figure of the same era. I love historic imagery so this was right my alley.
One of the things I like about being an illustrator is the whole exploration process: looking up reference—poring over clothing styles, typefaces, etc., whatever needed to fit the image best—and learning enough about what I’m about to draw (the equipment). Hopefully, I was able to make the things happening in my illustration be somewhat believable for the intended audience.
Below is some of the process I went through for a couple of the tees.
Some character iterations.
These were rejected but I had so much fun coming up with these that I wanted to share.
Working through colour options.
Some earlier rejected concepts based on their suggestion of super-heroine figure possibly stopping the rip in the belt.
During the reference collection stage, one of the artists I felt most inspired by was Duane Bryers. His poses and expressions were so comical and well-executed that I felt an instant connection.
