IGI features
Peter Donnelly: Smoke Break
| Aug, 30, 2007IGI member Peter Donnelly has spent the last 20 years involved in both the illustration and animation industry, his distinctive style can be seen in many children’s books and on TV. Peter recently talked to us about how he breaks down a typical illustration project.
In this step by step tutorial I’d like to explain the process I use for illustrating the example above. As always, there are a number of ways to achieve the end result, this is just the way I find works easiest for me. The tools I use are paper, 4b pencil, Wacom, Photoshop and Illustrator. Here goes…
Pencil rough
As with every piece I illustrate, I begin with the foundation, the rough drawing. I always work out the pose and action in my head first so I tend to do a fairly clean pencil rough once I get started. I’m not too concerned about the finer things like the flower for example, just once the layout feels right. Next I scan into Photoshop. I sometimes do a rough correction at this stage using the Wacom if needed.
Colour rough
This is a stage I am beginning to include more regularly into the process. I find that by working up a rough colour image, it can sometimes influence me to change a shape or volume in the drawing to enhance the piece. It also helps me see how colour as well as composition can balance the illustration before I move on into inking.
Inking
By now I’ve opened the pencil rough in Adobe Illustrator. I use this as a template and trace the line work with the pen shape tool. I used to hand ink everything but once I mastered the dreaded Bezier tool my life got a lot easier. That and the undo function have kept my marriage alive and well! I love this stage, working with line weights and thick and thin. Working through the drawing I try to make the lines flow, even though the piece is quite graphic. I try to avoid any line work which will break the action or cause visual tension in the pose. Next it’s back into PS to colour the artwork.
Colouring
I open the ai lineart in PS. I keep the line art as the top layer and change the layer properties to multiply. This allows any colour layers below to be seen while retaining the black line work, just like a comic book. I give each colour its own layer and name it appropriately. I tend to avoid using the airbrush too much and prefer a flatter colour finish with hard light and shade.
Sin é! Illustration complete
Oh yeh there are obviously other stages in between like changing a CD or having a smoke etc but that’s basically it. And just so you know an illustrators job is never done… after the whole thing was finished I returned a week later and desaturated most of the colour to push the gag further, now if only I had done that tutorial you’d be finished reading hours ago. Bye.
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