12/03/2024
Thanks for joining me. In this video, I’m going to be discussing the whole process I went through to illustrate my book. Now keep in mind the process I talk about may or may not work for everyone, and to be honest I already see ways that I can improve it for the next book. None the less this is what I did.
First I had a hard copy of the book and jotted down all the points that I thought were visually interesting or important to the story. The good news was that there were a lot of good moments that would make for some good illustrations. The bad news was… that there were a lot of good moments that would make for some good illustrations. I had a massive list and not being an illustrator it looked like yet another daunting task. I went through the list and got it down from the original 200 plus potential illustrations to 125. 125.
After having the list completed I started to think of the best way to actually get them done. One approach was the most natural and that is to hand draw them. I tried that for a very short amount of time and realized I just wasn’t at the skill level that I needed to be in order to end up with really clean drawings with confident lines. So, I decided to rough it out in photoshop with bluelines.
As many of you know in the world of comic books, artists would tend to draw in blue graphite and then ink directly on top without having to erase because the blue graphite wouldn’t show up in the final printing.
The pencil roughs of this book were really fun and a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t spending too much time on them, as you can probably tell. The challenges I faced were what you would expect. I actually had to draw what was written and what was written was a lot of stuff I had never tried to draw before. That’s where the internet comes in handy. I was able to look up certain things and get references very quickly.
Once the penciling was done I moved everything over to Clip Studio Pro and used their vast pen nibs to ink what I had penciled. This gave the final line art a lot of clarity though I do still prefer hand-drawn art I was pretty happy with the results.
Feeling pretty good about the illustrations I couldn’t help but feel that the art felt a little thin and without any weight or substance. That’s when I decided to add a little shading, and wow. What a difference! That was the key, and from then on I added shading to all the illustrations on a multiply layer.
Once again it was a very long process but like anything else, you just have to keep going and soon you’ll be over the mountain.
That’s about it. Thanks for hanging out and as always, be like water my friends.
https://youtu.be/4d4eN7gPRqQ
Today I’m going to talk a little about the drawing process for the book. This was easily the hardest and longest part of the whole process, and the reason fo...
