Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 6:11 am Post subject: Freelance job, February
In February I did a job to do about 30 drawings, meant to go along with this song "Against the Tide" by a Belgian recording artist called Milow. Apparently he's rather successful in the pop scene in Europe. Because the song is called "Against the Tide", so I drew it to be about a bunch of salmon swimming agains the tide while playing the instruments (guitar, piano, drums, etc), i thought that would be more fun to look at than just humans singing/playing the song. But then I also brought Milow into the illustrations towards the end, to meet the fish. I guess it will maybe be on Youtube as an illustrated song video... that's up to Milow, now that he has all the finished art. I Hope he puts the finished thing on the internet, I think it came out quite good.
Also, I decided to scan the artwork at each step of my process, from initial rough sketch to finished pencils to inked art, then coloring the art would be the 4th and final step for each image. I thought maybe Milow might want to use these "process" images as part of the final video, but I think maybe the final thing will just use the final art. Anyway, here's the steps that I did for each drawing!
Step one - A very crude, loose pencil sketch, with a very hard pencil, like a 4H... Just to battle out what will be in the image, where the words/lyrics will go, not caring what it looks like, just ANYTHING to avoid looking at a blank page! The blank page is the most depressing thing! These lines are actually VERY light on the page, when I scanned this sketch I had to turn up the contrast all the way to 100% so that these lines are dark enough to see. In reality these lines were very light.
Step two - with a softer pencil, like a 4B, I do what might be considered the "actual" work of drawing the image, but it is much easier when I have the rough sketch to start with. I don't erase the initial pencil sketch, I just draw darker on top of it, trying to make it into a clear image.
Step three- I ink over the pencils, using a ruler with a pen for the straight lines and a brush for everything else, usually. This is the most fun part for me, because it requires the least thinking! And it is when the drawing finally looks good to me, after two rough steps, so I get more gratification out of this part.
Step four - I use photoshop to color the art, I just use the finger-pad, i don't have a mouse or a cintiq or a light-pen. Maybe I should get some of that stuff, people tell me it will be better for the coloring. The hard part for me in this project was that there were a lot of fish, which I wanted to look "shimmering" like fish do, so I used a few different colors streaked onto each fish to try to get that look, you can't quite see it in this picture though because the fish are not close-up here. The other hard part to color is the water, and there was a lot of water in almost every drawing. Trying to use different light and dark blue tones, plus highlights of white and yellow, figuring out what might work to give it a watery look. It is much easier to do things with single colors, for example a nice simple red shirt! The red shirt just has two colors - the regular red and a darker red for some shadows. But the water has about 4 or 5 different colors so it takes a lot more work. Anyway, at this point it is finished...
Here's another image from the Milow "Against the Tide" job, this is #9 of 30...
Step one - basic sketch, although by the time I scanned this one it was developed beyond the initial rough stage... so this one is sort of almost finished pencils, really.
Step two - the finished pencils.
Step three- the inked art/lettering.
Step four - Finished colored art, this time the "shimmering" fish-skin effect that I was trying for is a little more apparent than in that other drawing.
Joined: 23 Nov 2007 Posts: 943 Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK
Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 12:00 am Post subject:
They are really lovely, and what a nice little side project to do. I can't imagine anything better than working doing something you love, where getting paid isn't even one of the main parts of it. I didn't know it took so long and you made so many copies to get it right, but then, I guess I never really thought about it, of course it has to all be edited as writing is. x _________________ You don’t put your life into your books. You find it there.
Joined: 30 Oct 2005 Posts: 2890 Location: Rennes, France
Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 12:35 pm Post subject:
It looks really nice, i had no idea you were using photoshop to color your work, seems really natural, is it more work than doing it manually? _________________ http://uberaffe.bandcamp.com
Some things are colored quicker in photoshop, and some things take more time... but I have found that it seems to be best to choose a coloring method based on where the art is going to end up. For my low budget films I know that I am going to be showing the real art to real people in a real life performance situation, so it works better to just color the art by hand with crayons or markers. Imagine if I scanned in my artwork for, say, The History of Communism in China, and then colored it in photoshop, and then at my shows I would sing the song while showing printed-out versions of the photoshop-colored pages... it would just be weird, I think. And the same seems to be true of the reverse: for a project like this Milow song, where the final result of the art is to be seen on a computer screen, like on Youtube or on another website, then it seems to look the best if I use photoshop to color it, so it has digital coloring and is viewed in a digital/screen environment. If I colored these with crayons or colored pencils and then scanned it in, it wouldn't work as well, i think. The colors wouldn't be as bright and clear and distinct.
By the way, here's the Milow song "Against the Tide" that these illustrations are meant to accompany! I don't really know this guy personally... I met him at SXSW in Texas a couple years ago, and we've been in some email contact. But his manager is Brian Schwartz, the same guy who was my band's manager in the time that we experimented with having a manager (around the 2008 period)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvF66AqJouQ
Again, I don't know when there may be an official release of the song/illustration project... hopefully soon! It would be nice if it was on an official Youtube link at some point. I'll leave that decision to Milow, but if I find out it has been posted I'd definitely want people to know about it because I think it all came out really good.
It seems that Milow did indeed post the video to Youtube a few weeks ago, I just heard about it...
here it is... I think they used a sort of lo-res version? This looks a bit grainier than the art that I have in my own files. See what you think...
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