luck of the draw: my first illustrations

// June 20th, 2009 // Design

I can’t say what these are for, or why, when and how…just yet.  But I have really enjoyed working on my first “real” illustrations lately!  When I can, I’ll post more details.

For now, let’s just say I was looking to create a sort of cute and cheeky guy with a bit of a super hero feel, especially in the jaw.  Having dropped out of college before the life drawing classes, and since I am not much into realism when it comes to the human form anyway, I am lacking in anatomy-for-artists department.  I resulted to the look and feel of some graphic novels, as well as drawing techniques featured in cool book that I picked up recently, and this is what I came up with.

I realize this is not the greatest illustration ever – not by far.  But it’s more than what I thought I could do, and for that, I am happy.

I use Adobe Illustrator on the job constantly, but I have never really used it for its intended purpose.  There is a considerable learning curve in going from Illustrator-for-print-job-mechanical to actually creating a hand-drawn illustration digitally.

I busted out the Wacom tablet, which also presents a learning curve for me, since I bought it not long ago, after years of salivating over one, but have never really used it enough to get the hang of it.  I’ll say this – the ability to use something like a writing utensil to get imagery into a computer is fantastic!  But the muscles are really quick to let you know just how much the mouse has replaced the pen in my life.  I guess I shouldn’t complain too much…it’s not like I don’t have constant shoulder pain from mousing all day long.  But after a few hours of Wacom-ing, there were other muscle groups that started to take notice!

I wanted something comic-ish with simple and clean lines.  The Google search for “simplified anatomy” returned the book, Simplified Anatomy for the Comic Book Artist, with which I was pleased.

So I did some sketching, following exercises in the book, which I scanned in.  I placed my sketches in Illustrator and traced over them, then colored them in, then copied and pasted into Photoshop where I had created backgrounds.  These images are a couple of the results of that process.

Am I an illustrator now?  Certainly not.   I’m just happy to slowly enter the process of learning a new skill.  I don’t know if I’m going about it the “right” way, but so far I am content with what I’ve been able to churn out and am greatly looking forward to doing more – and hopefully getting much better at it.