Art Process

15 posts

9 Before & After Sketches of IllustrArticles Illustrations

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:

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

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

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

BeforeAfter-CallOfNature
“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“)

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

BeforeAfter-ThePigeonWhisperer
“The Pigeon Whisperer” from Average Heroes

BeforeAfter-TheHygieneGenius
“The Hygiene Genius” from Average Heroes

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

BeforeAfter-DrinkingGameForColds
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.

Tattletail illustration

The Tale of Tattletail

I’m excited to be a part of the SPECIES Showcase by Animal, coming soon to New Delhi, India. Artists were asked to create artwork of an animal. The only rule is that it had to be in the shape of the Animal logo. So, I created “Tattletail” inspired by parakeets.

Tattletail_500x300

The title of my Animal artwork is Tattletail, emphasizing the long tails of parakeets. When I was a kid, I got an aqua-colored parakeet named Kesha for my birthday. He was a sweet little bird, who learned how to talk and even tried to compose his own phrases. Eventually, he passed away. I missed him a lot. Years later, I did what any well-adjusted teenager would have done: I got a new aqua-colored parakeet and named him Kesha. But this one had a completely different personality and didn’t talk. That’s when reality hit me like a ton of bird droppings: No matter how similar the characteristics, each animal is unique and tells its story in its own way.

Additionally, here’s a tiny video I made that shows the drawing process and close-ups:

(Song: “I Like Birds” – The Eels)

The Making of “Brainstorm” Illustration

Brainstorm
Brainstorm – 11×14 Watercolor & Ink for IllustrArticles 3 Easy Steps To Total Mind Control

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain” – Vivian Greene

This might be one of my favorite illustrations I’ve done because of the spontaneity behind it. Most of my “brainstorming” happened subconsciously! It was created for IllustrArticles “3 Easy Steps to Total Mind Control.” The idea for the illustration came from a mix of a million things, such as:

– A thunderstorm that unexpectedly drenched me as I was walking down the street one day
– An apocalyptic dream I had, in which it was very windy on a field near a beach (similar to the one I live next to) and the sky was changing colors every few seconds (probably prompted by walking into that thunderstorm the day before).
– The Stepford Wives movie I watched
– I’ve been noticing cloud formations for about 2 weeks straight.
– Stress I’ve been dealing with around that time

I pretty much saw the gist of it the image in my mind before I even started doodling it, and kept making small changes as I went along. See if you notice them. These are some of the thumbnails and sketches I did, first:

IMG_2543IMG_2545IMG_2544IMG_2542IMG_2541IMG_2538

And then I scanned them and arranged them in Photoshop, and traced my computer screen on tracing paper. This is the tracing paper line art and the finished art:

tracing paper lineart & finished illustration

I should have photographed this step, but I forgot! Basically, after that, I attached the tracing paper line art to the back of a blank watercolor paper sheet, and placed them on top of a lightbox. From there, I went straight to inking with a brush. Then, I used watercolor for color. Last, I scanned the finished illustration and corrected the colors in Photoshop so that it looked on screen just like the original.