This coming Sunday, my project IllustrArticles will have been running for 9 months. For fun, I put together a bunch of before and after sketches of some of the illustrations I’ve created for the site. The left side is the initial sketch of the idea. The right side is the completed illustration:

“Fool’s Gold” from 4 Awesome Reasons Why Thinking INSIDE The Box Gets You Ahead

“Bag of Chocolates” from 4 Awesome Reasons Why Thinking INSIDE The Box Gets You Ahead

“Pick of the Litter” from 4 Awesome Reasons Why Thinking INSIDE The Box Gets You Ahead

“Call of Nature” from Learn Your Life Purpose By Drinking Coffee (It took every fiber of my being to stop myself from calling this one “Call Of Doodie“)

“Flooded Basements” from 3 Reasons Why Your Flooded Basement Is A Great Thing

“The Pigeon Whisperer” from Average Heroes

“The Hygiene Genius” from Average Heroes

“Cups Of Royal Tea” from What Does Your Halloween Costume Reveal About You?

Drinking Game For People Sick With Colds

So far, I’ve managed to speed up my drawing process by cutting out some steps that I used to do. I used to draw the entire sketch with a non-photo blue pencil onto the watercolor, ink it, erase any showing pencil, and then do the watercolor.

Now, I just scan the small sketch, printed out a larger size of it, and then put that printout on a lightbox, and put the watercolor paper on top. From there, I ink out the lines right onto the paper with brushes. After that, I paint the watercolor. Sometimes watercolor goes on before the ink. Cutting out the steps of drawing in pencil on the watercolor paper has made the process faster and makes cleaner illustrations in the end.