As I’ve mentioned before, all my illustration work begins as black and white line art before I add the color. So I draw with the intent to color, obviously, but I love it when I can get the ink drawings to stand on their own as good drawings without the color added. Sometimes, the artwork falls flat without color. Other times, it just shines and I regret that no one will get to see it in the uncolored form. With “It’s A Sunny Life,” I was thrilled with the line art on nearly every page. So I thought I’d show off some of the inked artwork. This work was all done on Bristol paper with my trusty Rapidograph pens and PITT brush pen (although I did cheat and draw the snow in Photoshop on one page.)
I always enjoy showing off my artistic process, so I hope you don’t mind if I show off how I created a double page spread for my new book “It’s A Sunny Life.” I began with a rough pencil drawing. The grey clouds were added in Photoshop as a time saver.
After the rough sketch was approved by the publisher, I printed it out (with the approximate text placement) in blue onto 11×17 Bristol paper.
Why print it in blue? I can easily remove the blue line from the page in Photoshop. I also redrew some elements I wasn’t pleased with with a blue pencil. If you look closely, you’ll notice the extra blue pencil lines in the dog’s body and paws. I then drew the final linework in ink.
I scanned the drawing and removed the blue lines in Photoshop. I also filled the upper right corner with black (which I decided was faster to do on the computer than by hand.)
And then I colored the spread in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I neglected to save any of the intermediate coloring stages. So I’ll skip ahead to the finished spread from the book with the text added.
If you’d like to see more, you can find the book on Amazon at this convenient link:
