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It’s time to write a tutorial about vectorial illustration. In this post i’ll explain the process i
followed at the time of designing by order (from SOSFactory) the mascot in vector format of
Twisted Monkey Studios, producers of horror films.
www.twistedmonkeystudios.com
Ingredients:
Briefing
The first thing to do is know our client. That’s why we have a tool called Briefing, which is a
serie of key questions to know the company and it’s needs. We can do it in a more or less formal
way.
In this case we’re going to design a character for a horro movies producer; they wanted a
monkey as the mascot, but the tipic nice monkey. We thought in the idea of making it’s clothes a
straight jacket and to have a knife with blood… a lot of blood. It had to look nice, but intriguing
at the same time.
1
Traditional drawing and Photoshop retouches
I always advice to start any design the traditional way, with paper and pencil, specially if it’s an
illustration. As good as your Wacom tablet may be, it’ll never be as accurate as the normal
pencil.
Traditional drawing. The image at the left is my pencil drawing, i start to sketch with a red
pencil, and when i’m happy with the results i remark the lines with a graphite pencil. As you can
see, is more a sketch than a finished drawing, unfortunately my line quality isn’t as good as
comics professionals, but you don’t have to worry because that’s why we have the computer.
The important thing is to have the concepts well assimilated, and to apply them to the character
we want to design.
Photoshop Retouches. When i get something decent as a start point, i scan it from Photoshop and
start to move things, play with the face expressions, the pose… until i get something i like (right
image)
Take a look at how the character changes during the process, when you don’t have very clear
what you want to do it’s better to start with anything and then retouch until you get what you’re
looking for… don’t get sad if you can’t do it from the first attempt, it’s the most common thing
to happen.
2
Cleaning and inking in Photoshop
Cleaning. I already have the base for the character, now with my digitalizer tablet i start to clean
the sketch from Photoshop, asigning different line weights (explanation down).
Cleaning with digitalizer tablet at the right, inking with photoshop at the
left
Inking. The next step is to ink our character (right image), the first thing say is that it’s very
important to use high resolution (5000×5000 pixels) for several reasons:
We have 3 types of lines (take a look to the final inking a bit down):
1. Make shadows with lines: we’ll just make the design dirty.
2. Extremely thick lines and without thickness variation.
3. Intern lines too long: this lines are to mark volume, you have to make them in a subtle
way, it’s just a guide for when you color.
4. Straight lines: if you take a look, all the lines are slightly curved.
5. Small areas: try that your volumes are as big as possible, otherwise at the time to color
you wont have space and it’ll stay flat.
3
Final inking, it’s very important to modulate the lines correctly.
1. If you’re a drawing professional the best thing to do is use your pencil lines, then simply
clean them in Photoshop.
VIDEOTUTORIAL: Photoshop digital inking 1
2. If like me, your handdraw lines are not too good, we ink the sketch with Photoshop’s
vector tools.
VIDEOTUTORIAL:Photoshop digital inking 2, if you’re not familiarized with the pen
tool you should better take a loot at this tutorial about Photoshop basic digital drawing.
Then save your design from Photoshop to TIFF format (without transparency) and open it in
Illustrator.
Then download the VIDEOTUTORIAL where i explain how to vectorize with Silhouette. Here
you have a screenshot of the parameters i use:
4
Now that we have out design vectorized we can edit it until the lines are perfect. I normally add a
contour from Illustrator to give a sensation of balance to the design.
*** Note: when you add a contour with Photoshop it rounds the borders, it doesn’t respect the
angle details while Illustrator does. Depending on the sensation you want to give to your design
you can use one or the other.
*** Note 2: i guess you’ll ask why i have used Photoshop to ink with bitmaps to vectorize it
later?, Isn’t it better to use Illustrator directly? it’s a personal choice, these are my reasons:
Plain colors
Adding gradients. We have to create gradients of at least two differentiable colors, one dark and
one light, but not extremely far away because we’ll later add lights and shades. For now don’t
pay too much attention to the gradient direction, we’re just choosing the color tones, later we’ll
orientate them to give coherence to the ilumination.
5
Gradient colors
Cutting the areas. As you have seen the gradient areas are too ample to get good illumination
effects. So we have to cut this big areas into smaller volumes /take a look to the image down).
Later we retouch the gradient colors to try to get a coherent illumination, there’s a basic rule very
important: next to a dark color there’s always a light color.
I’ve prepared a small VIDEOTUTORIAL to show how it’s done, download it here.
Finales Retouches
Now we only need to add blood in industrial cuantities. For that i used the free Gomedia vectors
(if you use them put a link back to their site, you have to be thankful) The blood is added in a
layer on top of all the others but down of the roght eye, in Multiply mode.
www.twistedmonkeystudios.com
Observe that in the post i link to other tutorials or artices that cover the different phases of the
process, although i know that in suck a complex tutorial i might have forgotten a thousand things
to explain, if you have any doubt just comment it, i’ll try to answer as soon as i can and i’ll add it
to the tutorial.
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