James Hackett

This was an old tutorial I had on facebook and realised it was not on my blog. So here is the full tutorial those who may be watching and never saw it, this is kind of  a quick look at how I construct my lines when I am creating pieces. The first image is the final and after the jump the tutorial begins. N joy!

Sketch and Scan

So I sketch out the image and Scan it into Illustrator and get ready to convert it into Vector.

Setting it up

The sketch is placed on a layer by itself and I reduce the opacity, lock the layer and get ready to add some lines on another layer ontop.

Putting down the lines

Basically just making sense of the pencils, cleaning up where necessary, sorta like a line tracing, using the pen tool in illustrator.

Moving the Pencils

Here I have completed doing all the outlines for the drawing. I remove the pencils and get ready for the next stage.

Exporting

Exporting the drawing as a TIFF in high format, like 300 dpi so that I have a good resolution image when I get to the next stage.

2nd to last stage

So I place the TIFF back in illustrator. And using Live trace it converts everything from the (bitmap) tiff back to vector and because I exported it as a high resolution it converts nicely.

Finally the colours

From here I basically flood fill the the parts of the images with whatever colours I want. Kinda like a colour by numbers. I put in patterns for different areas to make things interesting sometimes.

I do some other different tweaks to add shadow and so on. But I will cover that in another one of these.