James Hackett

I have been working on my website again, and in the process of putting up my daily sketches including the ones I missed. I decided to return to my old format for clarity. So to kick things off here is a tutorial that I kind of did before but never quite finished. It looks at my process for one particular style that I developed over the last few months and it is a fairly quick look at it. The entire process took about an hour or so and a couple replays of the latest muse album. Njoy!

The image here is the final outcome, tutorial after the jump.

 

This tutorial utilizes Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Some of the textures and brushfilters I have had some time and have forgotten where I got them but I will try to post proper sources when I can. Click the images to see a larger version as you go through.

1. I start by placing the image in Illustrator. I leave that image in a seperate layer by itself and adjusting the layer properties I dim the image to about 50% so that I can see the line work on top when I start working. Lock the layer create a new one and move on to the next step.

 

 

 

2. In the new layer on top I start outlining the image. I do one thick outline first of the general figure.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Then I do the inside lines with a less thick line. I take liberties with the way I construct it I cannot seem to slavishly follow the image, what can I say I am an artist. So feel free to add your flair, you are creating  an illustration so have fun with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Lately I have been adjusting the lines when I am complete to make them look more hand drawn. In Illustrator I use the Artistic caligraphy bush, 5pt Oval and set the stroke to .5. The bigger sizes don’t  look too good with most of these, you can try it out yourself to see how it looks.

 

 

 

 

5. So once I have completed my outlined drawing I hide the background image layer. I put box around the entire thing to contain my drawing, so that I can contain my fill areas ( which we will get to later on). I go to the export function in illustrator and save the drawing as a nice high reolution tiff.

 

 

 

 

6. I then locate and place my newly saved tiff file back into illustrator in a new layer.

 

 

 

 

 

7. Now having a high resolution file ( I used 300 dpi) I get a nice clean conversion when I use the Live Trace function on the image. In the old days I used to use a programme called Adobe streamline but Adobe has incorprated that into Illustrator itself here now ( speeds up workflow for me most times). This image is pretty simple so I have little hassles with conversion, but sometimes it can get tricky, just have some patience and play around with the different conversion options that live trace has to offer and edit your drawings smartly.

 

8. So now the fun starts! Once the drawing is converted using Live Trace hit the ‘expand’ button so that you can start editing your newly converted vector image. I use the direct selection tool ( white arrow, second from the top on the tool bar) to select my blocks of  of white to colour. Here it is pretty much like paint by numbers. So have fun! I started by blocking out my background so I can get a feel for my figure and what I am doing.

 

 

9. Now this happens ever so often. I did not seperate my face from my hair so I have everything the same colour when I filled that spot. A nice way to fix that ( that works on most occasions) is as follows.

 

 

 

 

10. Just zoom into the spot where the spillage occurs and using your knife tool. Which you can find down by the scissors ( shown on screen), just make a slice down ( from black to black) to literally cut the mass of green in two. Now if you deselt and reselect any area using the direct selection tool you should be able to colour the two areas seperately. Sometimes it does not always work depending on how your lines fall. In that case, sadly, you will have to redo your line drawing and come back again to this point ( sorry if you have to it can be annoying!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11. Good so now that I have completed my colour I can play with some textures to spice it up a bit. I like using illustrator’s stock txtures and patterns, sometimes a limited palette is good so you just focus on an impact and not get to crazy with a million different things coming at you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12. When I am putting textures on the clothing. I select the areas of colour I want using the direct selection tool and holding shift so I can pick which sections I want to change. Some of the lines and patterns in illustrator do not have a background you see underneath.

What I do is copy the areas I want and paste  in a layer on top ( using  CTRL+F which = paste in front). This way I keep my background colour and have my lines etc on top so I can edit either for various effects.  For this tutorial I just went pretty straightforward and dropped some lines on clothing. I made the texture an overlay.

( Note if you are competent with illustrator you can do like me and just paste the textures in the same layer. I can handle the confusion some prefer not to or cannot so organise your work accordingly.)

 

13. When I have added all the textures I like I usually change all my outlines to white ( my own style).

 

 

 

 

 

14. I changed it back to black to see and tried a few things just thinking about a different options but I did not like it.

 

 

 

 

 

15. So back to white where I save the file and head over to Photoshop. This part of the tutorial is similar to my previous one, but from here on I am adding my second part where I do some more adjustments beyond the vector drawings.

 

 

 

 

16. Photoshop time. So in Photoshop I use the Quick selection tool to select my background ( it was easy with this image others you would have to use another method with the lasso).

 

 

 

 

17. Having my background selected I make a seperate layer and fill it with a block colour and then fill the inverse of that with another colour. I give each seperate layers. This is so that I can easily get a selection of my background or my figure when I need it for the later steps. It is easy for me so I don’t have to go through a selection process everytime.

 

 

 

18. K now here I have a lot of fun and I can spend quite a lot of time tweaking. The brushes I have come to use a lot can be found here at bittbox, they have a lot of good resources check them out.

So I slect my background and using my brushes I pretty much paint and play with where I place my colours etc. I like to restrict the painting to area blocks it helps to seperate forground from background and gives the piece a focal point etc.

 

 

19. I move on to the figure and again selcting and seperating it from the background I paint using my specialty brush until I find something I like.  An added dimension, check out the effects as seen in the image, where you can add an overlay or most photographic filter styles. I tend to hover around linear light and hard light. have fun and explore different filters and effects to create your image, you will find a lot of good options that you can use again and again. I add several layers and build up some good textures with this, according to what I am doing it can take some time to get the right tone.

 

20. When I am done I get ready to add some shadow to the figure to create some depth using a regular brush and some black. Now it looks horrid here, that is okay this is done on a seperate layer on top. We fix this on the next step.

 

 

 

21. Adjusting the effects of the layer I multiply and change the opacity of it a bit to get the right tone of shadow.

 

 

 

 

22. This last part is kind of like icing on the cake, I may or may not do it depending on the piece. But I would add some photographic texture like I did for my Dougla series.

In this instance I used some wood photos I picked up here. I pasted it into the background shape ( by selecting and using the function paste into) I placed it lower down in the layer structure so the pain can go over it and create  that painted wood vibe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

23. In the end its just tightening up the image and getting everything to seem unified. I used a pinlight filter and changed the pacity a bit on the layer with the wood so it has a subtle effect. From here I would duplicate the image and flatten a copy and do some last changes. ( that way if I screw up I can go back again!)

 

 

 

24. In this case I just added a posterize filter to the image, I was not happy with some of the dges and posterise tend to take out the roughness and make it look more finished. This does not always work though.

I assume there are stages before I could have stopped and have a fine piece. That is something you have to be aware of and edit yourself. All in all have fun and do not be afraid to make mistakes.

If you have any questions about specific steps in the tutorial feel free to drop a line.