Illustration Toolbox

This tutorial demonstrates Andy’s approach to producing quick and effective concept art and book cover illustrations from the initial pencil sketch to the final digital illustration.

Pencil Sketch

The initial pencil sketch was drawn with a propelling pencil on printer paper. I usually doodle on whatever is handy if I am going to make a digital illustration. The lines are only guides and usually get changed for new ideas as I am drawing and coloring.

As the detail was going to be painted over, this was a fairly quick sketch giving only the information required for the beginning stages of coloring the image.

Background

The background was created simply using three passes of Filter > Render > Clouds in Photoshop. This gives a quick mottled effect to the background and is great for removing the whiteness of the paper. The pencil sketch layer was set to Multiply and placed over the other layers to allow it to be seen.

The first pass laid down the darker tones and the next two passes were applied with lighter and lighter color values. The second and third passes were then deleted around the edges with the Eraser Tool (E) leaving the background image with a dark to light fade from the outside to the center.

From Top to Bottom: The Hat

With these types of quick sketches, I usually have a definite idea of where I want to go with the illustration and decided to start from the top down with the coloring of the image. I used a hard round brush to sketch in the tone and shape of the hat which was done fairly freely to give it a nice rough texture.

Face and Hands

Using a hard edged brush to begin with, I defined the darker shadow areas of the face, hands and feet. I then used a softer setting for the same size brush for the lighter colors of the face. Due to the style and final size of the image I could rough this in fairly quickly as these areas would be defined more later on while refining the final image.

Clothes

Using the same technique for the face, I rendered the clothes starting with the frock coat working from dark to light adding very subtle color changes of purple and blue hues.

I deliberately made the shirt lighter to define the area of the chest and to add interest.

The trousers were defined in the same way as the frock coat with darker tones first working to lighter colors to which I added some texture with a pattern brush.

At this point I got carried away and added details such as buttons and buckles. Normally, I would do this near the end, but I wanted to see him with the details more immediately and started to refine the image by adding more definition.

Little Details

In order to add some life, I made the eyes especially white with added highlights so that they would stand out in the final piece. They should realistically be a lot darker, but I wanted the eyes to draw the viewers focus.

To add a tiny element of color to the illustration, I lit the pipe and surrounding areas with a subtle orange glow to bring out the details of the side of the face.

Lastly, I added the mushrooms, details and highlights to complete the illustration.

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