Category: Process

Hey there! For this Christmas I wanted to paint Vic a present, and why the heck not, share my process with you all.

After passing my sketchbook on to Vic so she could choose a doodle to get things started (yup, I’m not only cheap but also unimaginative) she pointed out this one.

I used it as a starting point and came up with the following sketch, about A6 in size. I love composing with big shapes, so the idea behind working so small is that I can really focus in the shapes, curves, overlapping and composition without getting lost in the details.

I knew from the beginning that I was going to paint this one with gouache, so doing a color key was a must. Gouache is one tricky medium, specially in the color department, so it’s better to know clearly where you want to go with it beforehand. I slapped some colors in a new multiply layer on top of my drawing.

I then enlarged the sketch in photoshop so it fits an A4 and printed it. I taped it to my lightbox and taped a white piece of paper over it (some really basic 300gm paper I think, it’s actually called Basik). Having the sketch below allows me to work directly with paint without having to somehow transfer it to the final surface, so it’s a kinda nifty trick. I turned the lightbox on whenever I needed to see my lines. I worked basically flat, no rendering or soft edges, some drybrushing here and there but nothing fancy, just kept my color key as a rough reference in my computer’s monitor. This is the result.

Here it is with some added photoshoppery and a detail just for funsies (click to enlarge)

Here’s the finished illo I did. I painted it with acrylics but let the colored paper I drew her in show in some parts. I gotta say it looks much better in person! Damn my crappy scanner…

Acá está la ilustración terminada. La hice en acrílicos pero dejé que el papel de color apareciera en varios lugares. La verdad se ve mucho mejor en persona, mi escáner no es muy bueno que digamos…

But once I had it in my computer I thought I’d play around with some textures on it. Here’s the result of that, I think it’s rather nice.

Una vez escaneada y ya en mi computadora, probé agregarle algunas texturas y ajustarla un poco. Acá está la imagen resultante, creo que no está tan mal.