Character Illustration

    For our New Media Tools project, we were instructed to take a sketch of a character, and create an illustration of it in Adobe Illustrator.  I took this image from Dantesapostale on Deviantart, and began my work.

    In tracing, I usually start off with the darkest, and most prominent feature in the image.  In this case, the feature was the eyes of the girl.  I used the pen tool, on fill, to trace out the eyes with solid colour, and to have more precise control over the created lines.

    After the inital feature, I look for like features that I can use the same colour for.  As a general habit, I start off the the small, and work myself to the bigger aspects, as they are more time consuming, and require more attention.

    Once the facial features have been dealt with, I move onto creating the skin.  From the initial take on the image, I receive a light, elegant feel.  I felt as a result, that it would be beneficial to create my image as wholes, and work with a lineless style, to keep a simplistic aspect to the work.

Blue is an excellent colour for initial lines and backgrounds, and I almost always utilize it for digital work, most often in creating a sketch.

    I start to refine the aspects of the image, making small adjustments, and beginning work on the hair.  This is where the use of a blue background, coupled with opacity, comes in handy. 

    As the original work was unfinished, I had to do a bit of re-imagining of certain aspects, to create the full image.  Throughout the hours of work, I made an unfathomable amount of adjustments to each part, even things that had been long covered.  Illustrator is a perfectionist's best friend, and bloody worst enemy.

    Here, I start detailing the shadows that I want to create for the hair.  I use a combination of the stroke tool, and the fill tool, depending on the nature of the line.  I have the lineart in the background, which I use as my direct reference point, by hiding the blue backdrop.  To get a glimpse of how the work is coming along, I use the background for clarity.

In addition, as the image shows, I do many aspects of the artwork as more than one piece, creating numerous layers.  This helps me to achieve an effect, (and make significant less work for myself) by utilizing the way objects layer over one another.    In this case, the bit of hair that has had its opacity lowered, is in a separate layer than the rest of the hair, do that the skin layer may be shown underneath one bit of hair, and on top of the rest.

    As I can be obsessively precise with my work, it takes me an extremely long time to do the hair, and I have a good few battles with the pen tool.

    To create a more realistic, flowing effect for the hair, I use different stroke sizes, and a soft brush that increases pressure around the middle of the stroke, and decreases at the ends.  This gives the effect of an amount of hair clumped together, to make a prominent shadow.  

    To keep myself sane, I stop working on the hair for a period of time, and fiddle around with the other aspects of the image.  I had previously started to pencil in the definitions of the face, and play around with the shadows and lighting that I am going to create.  I also take into account, the compositional aspect when it comes to colour, and change the shirt many times.

    I figure, as frightful as the idea was, that I had ought to stop messing with the hair and tackle the most complicated part of the image.  The tattoo posed an immense challenge, and I abused the life out of the Pathfinder to create most of the imagery present on the tattoo.

    The tattoo has some odd aspects to it, namely the presence of a texture.  I strugged a period of time, figuring my way around how to add the texture to such aspect, before utilizing the a brush stroke filter that was containing in Illustrator. 
Unfortunately, however, as a result of my choice of using a filter, I was then restricted to using only such colour for the tattoo, which caused a good number of compositional complications (say that 10 times fast) that I spent some time ironing out.

 

    After having all but the most difficult part of the tattoo finished, I opted to take a break from destroying my brain on the eye boggling colour combination, and finished my work on the hair, as well as creating lighting and shadows.

To create the light and shadows, in knowing I was restricted by certain aspects of the image, I found a colour, a dark teal-blue, that I created as a universal shadow.  All shadows in my image have been created from the blue colour, by using the colour burn option.  I fiddled a while with this, choosing then, a light purple for the highlights, set to overlay.

      As I neared the completion of my image, I finally finished the portions of the tattoo, and played for a while, with the composition of the image as a whole.  Completely redoing some aspects of shading and lighting.
I then went about and highlighted all my paths for no reason in specific, other than I think it looks pretty cool.

    After the final few tweaks and touches, and some complete overhauls on shading, I reached the conclusion of my image.
All in all, I do not like it one bit.  I feel as it started off great, and slowly dropped in quality as I went along.  The tattoo was a painful headache that I wish I could have spent more time on to finish in a more personal way. 
Illustrator as a program, is amazing, and absolutely anxiety inducing.  I likely spent 80% of the time making the smallest tweaks to the image out of sheer, obsessive force.  Though in spite, I love finalizing an image with decent work, that you as an artist are aware of the amount of blood, sweat, and tears go into shaping a bloody eyebrow.