Street – 3
Posted by phani in My Approach on September 23rd, 2009
Here’s the cleaned up inked image, after erasing out the pencil lines and changing the brightness and contrast values. We are now ready to colour.
I decided that I will stick to flat colours. The colouring stage took me longer than I expected. I was estimating around 2 hours, but it took me almost 3 and a half hours. I used the cintiq 12wx for the colouring. While I enjoyed working on this illustration, I realised that whenever I draw crowds, I involuntarily draw each character in the crowd much simpler, and with lesser details. I must work on that aspect, and increase my patience further to be able to include much more complexity in the characters and other details.
Here’s the coloured image. Hope you like it.
- p
Street – 2
Posted by phani in My Approach on September 22nd, 2009
I got up early today and got myself a hot cup of coffee, and straight went to my drawing board. I was eager to continue from where I left the drawing last night. A couple of hours of inking later, this is the stage we are at. The inking is over, but as you can see, the pencil lines are still visible. I haven’t erased them out yet. Also, the brightness/contrast values have not yet been tinkered with.
I spent almost three hours on this drawing so far.
Once I am done with the clean up, I should be coloring this. Let’s see how it turns out.
I have a few other things to work on today , so I hope I get the time do the coloring today.
In any case, I’ll get back with another post soon.
-p
Street – 1
Posted by phani in My Approach on September 21st, 2009
I am planning to draw a series of cartoons with crowds in them. I like drawing crowds with lots of details. Drawing a crowd takes a long time, and needs a lot of patience. I have always fallen short when it came to patience. With this series of drawings, I thought I can try to improve my patience and concentration.
The process I chose is very simple. I start out with a pencil sketch. The pencil sketch does not have any details for the characters…just circles and ovals. The pencil sketch helps me in understanding the overall layout and the broad plan. All the sketches are very loose at this stage.
After the pencil sketch is done, I start the inking with a thin permanent marker. This stage is really fun because the characters evolve in front of you while you are drawing. As you can see, there is no tracing involved here. I find this process very spontaneous.
Here is where I am as of today. Let’s see how this turns out!
- p
The Elephant Child – My Approach
Posted by phani in My Approach on September 8th, 2009
Nothing fancy, actually!
Going by the cute story that I was given to illustrate, I decided that I was going to stick to a traditional approach to keep up with the innocence that the story tries to portray. I decided that I was not going to do this digitally, so I got all my art supplies together while I was printing the story out. As I was reading the story, I kept making notes of the situations that would need to be illustrated on post-it stickers. Here is all that I used:
A4 size Ivory board, pencils, Microperm 05 size marker, Faber Castell permanent marker, Pentel two sided permanent marker and an eraser.
After completing the list of images that have to be drawn, I went ahead completing all the pencil sketches from the list.
At this stage the sketch was very rough and was something like this:
The next stage involved taking permanent markers and inking the pencil sketch. This is usually a time consuming stage. I had to do this carefully so I don’t stiffly trace over the pencil sketch, and still maintain a fluidity to the line. This is how the drawing was after the inking:
After inking all the drawings, I took an eraser and erased out the pencil lines. This method works well only if one uses permanent markers for inking. Once I erased the pencils and got the clean ups, I scanned all the drawings into the computer at 300 dpi at full color mode.
After I brought the scanned drawings into Photoshop, I adjusted all images to “auto levels” of brightness and contrast. This makes the whites whiter and the blacks blacker. That’s about it. I was now ready to start the coloring.
I usually take a fresh new layer and change to the “multiply” mode for that layer. If the area to be colored is far too large, I take a polygon Lasso tool and manually make a selection around the desired area. Once the selection is complete, I take a bucket tool and fill the selected area with the chosen color. If the area to be colored is small, I paint the color in (applying it in) with a brush tool. I used my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet for this purpose.
This stage took me a long time. I had almost 30 drawings to color! Some beer wouldn’t hurt, would it?
That’s it! Simple, isn’t it?
Here’s the final completed illustration:
I really enjoyed working on this project. Mahesh is an immensly talented young kid and I’m sure his talent will take him places.
It took me around 10 days to complete these illustrations. Since I had other stuff to work on, I spent around 4 to 5 hours every day on this project. So, in all, it took me around 50 hours to complete the story.
Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!
-p
Working on the Cintiq
Posted by phani in My Approach on August 4th, 2009
My daughter shot this video with her mobile phone while I was working in my studio. I’m not too sure you can make anything out in the darkness, I wasn’t aware that she was recording until much later. I’ll soon post better videos of work in progress on the cintiq 
The music track playing in the background is copyright The Eagles (Too busy being fabulous)
Cintiq 12WX!!!
Posted by phani in My Approach on August 4th, 2009
They say that nothing beats drawing on paper. Well, I was in agreement till recently, trying to draw directly into the computer using my wacom intuos 3 tablet…until very recently I got a cintiq 12wx (thanks for the wonderful gift, dad!). The cintiq 12wx is an interactive pen display, which allows you to draw directly on the monitor, with all the pressure sensitivity that one would expect while drawing on paper. I am still experimenting with it and trying to get used to it, but one thing is for certain…it’s worth it! I’ll write more on this as I get used to it. Here are some pictures on my new cintiq
That's me in my studio
