Odd Monster
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Perfect Blue Illustration

Perfect Blue Illustration

Jun 24, 2022

I'm trying to be better about documenting my drawing process, but there are still several gaps missing here. Sometimes I'll get an idea stuck in my head (like this one) and go with it - a lot of the times I'm not sure if there's anything to it, but it's like a bad song you can't get out until you sing it. Or in this case, put it to paper.

Step 1: Inspiration and reference materials
Basically this is me hunting up any and all photos/images I think will help with the concept. I'll gather screenshots, illustrations from other artists I admire, anatomical reference and real-life photos of objects. Then it all gets dumped into a folder on my computer labeled with the illustration's placeholder title.

Step 2: Thumbnails
This is the step I'm missing. (I did them on scratch paper and they got recycled at some point) At this point in the process I'll do 2 or 3 pages of super rough thumbnail sketches, usually in a Prismacolor red pencil to get the composition and layout down.

Step 3: Sketch
Next is firming up the sketch in pencil. For this one I didn't bother to sketch out the monitor windows, as those would be much easier to lay out later on as vectors in Illustrator.

Step 4: Linework
Once I'm happy with the sketch on paper, I'll scan it into Adobe Illustrator at 300dpi. When drawing digitally, Illustrator is my preferred program. These lines are drawn with the brush tool:


And the windows were done with a combination of the basic shape and pen tool:


Step 5: Color
At this point I'll start coloring in the linework on a separate layer - normally these colors would be random, bright tones like green/pink/purple - this is just to get the space filled in. (one more step I forgot to take a screenshot of in the process) After filling in the solids and blocking out where I want the shadow/highlights to go, I'll go back in and alter them to be the final hues, which is what you see below. (with the linework turned off it looks sort of spooky...)

Step 6: Putting It All Together
With all the individual parts complete, now it's time to assemble the pieces.

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