Breakn' It Down

Ok now! So its time for kind of a crazy post! Sorry that its up late but I really wanted to make it as awesome as possible.

I thought it would be fun to do the breakdown of a piece. I always think its interesting to see how different artists go about working on something, so here's a glimpse into how I do it.

1. The Sketch - For me the first step is to sketch out the idea. I don't normally do thumbnails unless I'm really confused about how I want a piece to go together. My main focus in the sketch is to resolve anatomy issues and such. I make sure to draw through overlapping areas so I know how the forms should be.

2. Blueline - The next step for me is to bring the image into photoshop and do some messing around. First I work on croppping the image until its more to my liking. My second goal is to blueline the image - Blue-lining allows me to have a nice solid sketch on my page for the inking stage that I can get rid of easily.

3. Inking - This one is pretty self explanitory. Using the blueline sketch underneath as a reference I ink the piece. I make sure to take into consideration any changes I feel are neccesary and include details I may have overlooked.

4. The Flats - My least favorite part of the process is flatting. This is where I bring the finished inks back into photoshop to be colored. I love the coloring process but I sometimes find this step tedious. In this step the focus is to get it colored, and to chose the right color tempratures so everything still reads well.

5. The Shades - One of my favorite steps in the process, this is where everything rounds out. In this step my focus is to give another more rounded dimension to the drawing.

6. The Final - At long last it all comes together. In between the shades and the final are a bunch of color tweaks and such to get everything looking just right. This step is where I make the final decisions on how I want the piece to be. Noteably for me, I have come to learn that my color pallette tends to be very crayola: that is, very primary colored. So an important part of this last step for me is to get the saturation of the colors looking right.

And there you have it! That's how I roll...err something. Anyways, that's the way I break down a piece when I'm going from a sketch to the final. I hope it was fun to get a glimpse at the way I work. And I hope it was informative for you artists out there. Oke, well that's it for this week. Catch you later!