Drawing Cartoon Characters

Tweet I recently treated myself to a Wacom Bamboo Tablet with this weird notion that I'd be able to turn my hand to digital painting. Sadly my artistic style doesn't seem to lend itself well to what I want to be able to do, so I ended up just doodling my usual type of character, and I thought I'd go through my process to show how I got from start to finish.

I flood filled the background with pale grey, and on a new layer, sketched this out loosely with a small, hard-edged round brush using black.

Now I created a new layer between the background and the black lines, and used a larger brush to colour the character in mid blue.

With that done, I created a new layer between the blue layer and the lines, and painted in shadows with a darker shade of blue and a soft-edged brush on a low opacity.

I repeated the last step, albeit this time using a lighter shade of blue to give highlights. Et voila!

What about you? Have you ever used a graphics tablet, and if so, did you find it difficult to get used to?

Early Halloween

Tweet Yes, I know it's still only August, but I felt compelled to doodle a cartoon pumpkin holding a scythe yesterday. As you do. So I thought I'd quickly run through my process from taking a hand drawn picture through to a digital piece of art.

First of all, I drew the pumpkin in pencil, and outlined it using a 0.4mm black fine liner. I took a photo of it using my camera phone and emailed it to myself.

It's a bit dark and I need to be able to see the lines to trace them, so I used both the Levels and Brightness/Contrast command to tidy up the picture a little. Doesn't that look better?

Now I place this into Illustrator (on a locked layer) and I use the Pen Tool to trace around each of the shapes. I keep each thing on a separate layer, so the scythe is below the hands layer, and the feet are below the body layer, and so on. It gives much cleaner lines than trying to work with my original pen lines!

I use Illustrator to block fill each shape with flat colours. This gives me a solid base to work on when I get onto the next step.

Now I take it into Photoshop and create a new 'shading' layer for each part of the pumpkin. Using a soft round brush at around 40% opacity, I add highlights and shadows by choosing lighter and darker shades of the flat colours. As a finishing touch, I applied a radial gradient to the background, and added a shadow beneath the pumpkin. I also used a canvas texture on a separate layer to add some punch to the piece. I also added a border with rounded corners, and a copyright notice.

Happy Halloween!