Brian Huff: July 2011

Thursday, July 21, 2011

290: Bikini Weenie

This is a character I had to develop for an ad at work today. I thought I'd show, briefly, my process of going from sketch to vector drawing.

1) I start off doing research, as time allows. At first I was going to make a hotdog character, but as I researched, I saw people in hotdog costumes and thought that was a much more appealing look and a little less creepy.

2) After I get a basic direction, I start doing some thumbnails to develop the look of the character, what are it's physical features and what personality am I going to show. After thumbnailing for a bit, I'll do a few roughs to work out any problems with the design and see if I'm missing something that would make the character better. In this case, I had a pretty good idea where I wanted to go as the costumes and the bikini requirement from the client were pretty specific. As for personality, I wanted to make her kind and inviting, physically cute and sexy without being overly sexual.

3) Next I do my final pencil sketch. I start off using a hard lead pencil so the lines are light and easy to erase or cover over later. If you look closely, you can see her neck and shoulder line and stomach/waist. When drawing characters with bulky clothing (or costuming in this case), I start with drawing an unclothed character and then build the costume around their body structure. Once I have the layout roughly the way I want it, I go back over it with a soft lead pencil to get nice, solid, black lines.

4) I scan the drawing and the place it into Illustrator. I put the drawing on a template layer and then depending on the complexity of the drawing, I make individual layers for each object. In this case, since it was a single character, I just had only the one additional layer for the character. I select the pen tool, set the fill to none and start tracing over the drawing, line-by-line. I do not always use closed objects because I will be using Live Paint to fill in the areas with color. I also draw through objects to make sure lines on the other side of an object line up correctly, then use the Scissors Tool to remove the overlapping line. One area I used this on was where her arm overlaps the bun. I drew the bun, ignoring her arm temporarily, then after I placed in the arm, I came back an snipped off the bun lines that intersected her arm. I could do this in Live Paint, but I find it reduces the visual complexity of the line art, making it much easier to figure out and remember what the fill areas are.

5) Now that the outlining is finished, I select all of the lines and convert them into a Live Paint object. I choose a color scheme appropriate for the project then start filling in the areas. Here I picked warm appetizing colors, though for the eyes, I chose blue because blue eyes are very inviting, calming and kind. I love to use Live Paint because it makes drawing in Illustrator more like drawing in real life. Before Live Paint, you had to draw with closed objects and it was much more like collage or putting a puzzle together. Drawing with the Pen Tool is still very alien from pencil drawing (I see the pen as more like sculpting than drawing), but at least with Live Paint I am drawing line-by-line instead of shape-by-shape. It makes it much easier to link areas together, though editing is a bit more difficult as you can easily break areas as you move anchor points around. Once the coloring is complete, I'm finished and ready to place the artwork in my ad layout.