In this case we’re going to design a character for a horror movies producer. The requirement was a monkey as the mascot, the catch being that it was not to be your typical nice monkey. So we came up with the idea of making its clothes include a straight jacket and for it to have a knife with blood… lots of blood! It had to look nice, yet intriguing at the same time.
I always advice you to start any design the traditional way, with a paper and pencil, especially if it’s an illustration. As good as your Wacom tablet may be, it’ll never be as accurate as a conventional pencil.
Traditional drawing on the left, photoshop retouches on the right.
The image at the left is my pencil sketch, I start drawing with a red pencil, and when I’m satisfied with the results I remark the lines with a graphite pencil. As you may notice, it is more of a sketch than a finished drawing. Unfortunately my line quality isn’t as good as some comics professionals, but fret not about that because this is why we have a computer! and to apply them to the character we want to design.
When I get something decent as a start point, I scan it to Photoshop and start to move things around, play with the facial expressions, the pose and various other elements of the design … until I get something I like (image below).
Take a look at how the character evolves during the process. If you don’t have a very clear perception of what you want to do it’s always better to start with just about anything and then retouch it until you get what you’re looking for. And don’t get disheartened if you can’t get it at the first attempt, it’s common for such a thing to happen.
Cleaning and Inking in Photoshop
I already have the base for the character, now with my digitizer tablet I start to clean the sketch in Photoshop, assigning different line weights as I go on.
The next step is to ink our character, the first thing is that it’s critical to use a very high resolution(5000×5000 pixels) for several reasons :
- It’s more comfortable to work with.
- If later on in the process we decide to reduce the design, smaller mistakes wont be visible.
- If the work is the same, preferably let’s do it at a higher resolution so it is print ready.
- While vectorizing, the design would acquire accurate lines.
Notice we have 3 types of lines (take a look to the final inking below) :
- Contour : the bigger lines.
- Area delimitators : for instance, the inferior limit of the jacket, medium thickness lines.
- Internal lines : the lines that mark the cheek, they are the thinnest ones.
- Transition lines : they start as the contour and then get in to the design. We start by making it thick and then thiner as it progresses, as noticed on the line in the chin.
What we shouldn’t do :
- Make shadows with lines: it would merely make the design messy.
- Create extremely thick lines without any variation in thickness.
- Have internal lines too long: the purpose of these lines is to mark volume, you have to create them in a subtle way. It is meant to serve as a guide for when you color.
- Draw straight lines : if you look closely, all the lines are slightly curved.
- Have small areas: ensure that your volumes are as big as possible, otherwise when the time comes to color you wont have sufficient space and it will end up staying flat.
Asigning plain colors, gradient and volumes
Plain colors
Adding gradients
We have to create gradients of at least two differentiable colors, one dark and one light, but not extremely contrasting because we’ll add lights and shades later on. For now don’t pay too much attention to the gradient direction, we’re just choosing the color tones, later on we’ll orientate them to give coherence to the illumination.
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 these big areas in to smaller volumes (take a look to the image below).
Later we retouch the gradient colors to try to get a coherent illumination. There’s a basic thumb rule that’s very important : next to a dark color there’s always a light color.
I’ve prepared a small
VIDEO TUTORIAL to show you how it’s done, download it
here.
Gradient colors with the areas cut in to smaller volumes
Adding shadows and lights
Shadows
We’ll create a layer and set its blend mode to Multiply. This way we have all the shadow vectors grouped together. IMPORTANT : if you make the shadows in the Normal blend mode you’ll have to adjust the vectors a lot so you don’t cover the black lines, this is why we use the Multiply blend mode. This mode makes the layer transparent on top of the black color.
We simply pick a similar color (sometimes I use gradient colors as well) to the one in the background and we make small vectors to mark the areas in the shadows.
Animation so you appreciate the shadows.
Lights
In this case it’s not essential to use different layer modes, although you can always use the < strong >Screen blend mode to get lighter tones. Observe the animation below, first I make a soft illumination and later I add some strong light retouches in order to reinforce the contours.
Final Retouches
Now we only need to add blood in industrial quantities. For this I used the
free Gomedia vectors (if you use them in your design do put a link back to their site, you have to be thankful right!). The blood is added in a layer above all the others, but below the right eye, in the
Multiply blend mode.
