The good folk at Wacom recently asked me to give some insight into my illustration process and technique. Although there are often many decision changes and alterations throughout my drawings, I will try and keep it as simple as possible and outline a reasonable walkthrough for you below.

1. It Begins

Everything starts with an initial sketch. This is usually something I map out briefly on paper, although I do at times go straight to screen using the tablet. In this case I used a recent pencil drawing from my sketch book which I scanned and "cleaned up" a little in Photoshop.

I scan my line work in grayscale at either 300dpi or 600dpi and import it into Photoshop. I raise the line work from the background by placing it on its own separate layer. I duplicate this layer and use one specifically for colour. I'll try and not bore you with the technical details as I often create several layers throughout the illustrations I do. Let's concentrate more on the colour.

2. You say Color I say Colour!

With the drawing saved as a PSD file, I open it up in Corel Painter and get the show on the road with some broad sweeps of the background. I'm also trying to get a feel here for what colour each of these bird boxes will be and you will notice I have already decided which one will be red.

Incidentally, although my Intuos3 works perfectly fine without it, I still like to tape a sheet of textured paper on top of the drawing slate. I find that the extra "tooth" of the paper gives a more natural feel to the whole thing, especially as I do a lot of traditional media work on paper. It also gives me somewhere to write things like "don't forget to put out the garbage"!

3. Off with the Birds

4. Caution - Wet Paint

At this stage I'm still messing around with the background and decide to work it up into a nice cloudy sky. The freedom and accuracy of the pen in comparison to using a mouse in a drawing like this is like chalk and cheese. And, in combination with programs like Painter I am continually amazed at how close it comes to looking like real traditional media.

5. Hey You, get off of my Cloud

Speaking of traditional media, there's a great little mixing palette in Painter (seen here at the bottom right of the image) where you can "dip your pen" and literally mix the colours just like the real thing. No messy turps wash up here although I miss the smell of the linseed oil!

As you can see I have an expressionistic skyline happening and really made some progress on the bird boxes. I decided to make the middle one green.

6. Burn Baby Burn

7. Birdscape?

Getting close now... Using a combination of Painter and Photoshop I've tidied up the sky and worked on the foreground adding colour washes and texture. The trusty Burn tool gave me the shadows at the base of the bird houses and I used the Dodge tool once again to place highlights on each of the posts.

8. A Star is Born

>> Click here to enlarge

9. Hey Presto! It's "Nestworking"

As you can see, I have decided to give the bird houses a "lived-in" look with the addition of a chimney, ariel and window... couldn't help myself. There's also a reference to the whole networking theme with a conspicuous "www" stencil painted on one of them.

The wires were produced by long elbow sweeps with the pen stroke at a fine setting. In some cases I had to click the "step backwards" button in Photoshop to delete previous swing attempts that just didn't have much curve.

One of the last steps I perform with each illustration is to make level or curve adjustments for tone and then some final unsharpening to make the whole thing zing.

So there you have it, a brief breakdown of my illustration process which I hope made some sense. Good luck fellow Wacom users and for those of you who are thinking about trying your hand at digital design or illustration... "Lose the brick and you'll never look back!"

Artfully,

Leith

www.leithomalley.com

Thank you Leith for this amazing walkthrough! If you'd like to share your own walkthrough with the Wacom Community, contact us here.