Since being home for the summer I came across some old drawings in my room that I drew ages ago and never fully finished or pushed further so I decided to revive a particular piece and chose to illustrate it with an aim to establish and show a direction of a style I want to try and delve into.
This was the initial work I started with, black berol pen on A3 paper, I didn't want to change or add too much to it, but I wanted to play with colour, contrast and an illustrating technique for the line work digitally.
Using this image I placed it into illustrator and lowered the opacity to be able to easily see my drawn strokes over it, I didn't bother scanning the artwork as there wasn't major detail that wasn't captured through taking a photo on my phone which also enabled me to quickly send to my laptop and start working. I chose to illustrate by using the brush tool instead of the pen tool, so I connected my graphics tablet as it would be far more natural to draw with than a mouse.
I created a calligraphic brush, ensuring that pressure sensitivity was enabled which would allow me to create contrast in the thickness of my lines, an area I wanted to practice getting used to pressing harder and lighter with my pen at different points of my strokes.
When I finished drawing all the main thicker shapes I went through again with a much smaller brush without pressure sensitivity so the width of the strokes were fixed, these shapes would be easier for detail and contrast well against the thicker lines.
After finishing all the line work, I had to tackle the type, the type I drew on the initial artwork was intentionally warped, had dimension and was 3D. The appearance panel in illustrator was a huge help and crucial in this process of trial and error of achieving multiple layers of strokes, fills, warps and shadows as it kept everything live and customisable.
To get everything looking how I wanted it took a long time, like a long time but I knew the more time I put in the better the outcome would be and the easier it would be to colour later on in the process as the hard work had already been done, keep persevering even when it’s perhaps not going your way.
I purposefully exaggerated the warp on the type compared to the sketch, this made the surrounding shapes and lines not fit around it. Looking back it would have been smarter to of created the type before the line work so I could draw my lines with the type there to integrate and work around rather than drawing the line work leaving gaps for the text to be placed in to then having to go back in and fill areas around the type so it’s seamless.
Next time I'll definitely think about the order in which I should create elements within my work especially if they’re overlapping or layered.
Hours and several files later I finally had a fully merged and expanded line work on a single layer with a transparent background.
Time for colour. Live Paint was the best way to go about this, it’s a feature I’m new to but it's simple and convenient for colouring. If you use a calligraphic brush you have to expand your lines before you can live paint but if you use the pen tool for outlines you can use them how they are. I selected all my work and went to object > live paint > make.
It’s now like a colouring book, you can colour anything that is fully connected into a shape, I selected the bucket fill, chose a colour, hovered over the area I wanted to colour and clicked to fill.
Heres the finished piece! Theres definitely areas in which i can improve and speed up my workflow but it's a start! My first concise explanation of producing a line work and adding colour is complete!
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