Here is a quick and dirty artist history of the Tyrannosaur for the A-Z book. First it starts with a simple sketch. Well, not simple. There are usually a few sketches done before I can nail down the facial expression, body positioning, etc... all into one drawing. With the T-rex, for whatever reason he was drawn at the bottom of a page and by the time I got to his belly there wasn't any room left. So technically this guy has the distinct honor of being two sketches grafted into one. Lucky little tea sipper!
Next, the sketch is scanned andc the image is imported into Adobe Illustrator. A lot of artists like to do this with actual pen/brush and ink, but not me. From previous entries you've seen first hand what I do to a nice looking drawing with ink. It looks like an 5-year-old in the backseat of a moving car did it. With Illustrator it takes a bit more time but I have the flexibility of moving lines and changing their widths.
Next, the sketch is scanned andc the image is imported into Adobe Illustrator. A lot of artists like to do this with actual pen/brush and ink, but not me. From previous entries you've seen first hand what I do to a nice looking drawing with ink. It looks like an 5-year-old in the backseat of a moving car did it. With Illustrator it takes a bit more time but I have the flexibility of moving lines and changing their widths.
Once the vector line-art is done it is then imported into Photoshop and the color is added. The basic T-rex skin tone (in this case: Salmon) is added beneath the line-art. From there a couple more layers are added on to it, a shading layer and a hightlight layer. This process is the most tedious because light hits each part of the body in different ways. To emphasize that each part of the body has to get masked off so it doesn't receive shading where a highlight should be and vice versa.
One of the nice things about working with Photoshop is the great amount of detail you can fit in. Most of which you wouldn't really see when it goes to print anyways. It just gives me greater flexibility if it had to get made in a large format down the road.
When it's all done we now have a colored dinosaur to be placed into it's natural habitat... a little girl's bedroom where it will be attending a tea party. There is no text added to this page, just the final layout for the imagery. The fonts will be added in post when everything else is done. Maybe someday I'll actually show you another dinosaur besides the T-rex, or other art for that matter. Sometime soon, I will go into the vault and pull out some old treasures and show them off. Would you kids like that?
2 comments:
I would like to see the process of cartoon Bray!
That's doable... I was going to show off the Star Wars parody cartoon of Mike Bray and co. in the coming days. I'll sneak another one in of a how one of the old Mike Bray cartoons were done.
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