For a while I drew almost exclusively digitally; In the past year, however, I can’t seem to get comfortable with my drawing tablet. It occurs to me there might be something wrong with the stylus, or the tablet may have become annoyingly scratched during travel; or, most likely, I became spoiled my my first tablet, an a4 sized first-generation intuos, and haven’t really managed to adapt to my currrent a5 intuos3. However, friends asked for my assistance in making a poster, so I tried to re-gain my vector brain, or at least a little of it.

And because I think it’s cool to see other people’s “how this is done” posts, I thought I’d show you a glimpse of the process behind this one. Yeah? Yeah.

First I look up some reference photos and jot down some scrambly lines. Then I add blotchy colour, because I have to show the basic idea to my friend, and need him to be able to see what’s what.

He says “Cool”, so I set to work. I delete the blotchy colours, keep the lines but turn them into a pale colour, and start ‘inking’ in a new layer. (I have had people asking me about my lines in vector images more times than I can count, and for some reason half of the people who ask fail to comprehend the answer: it’s not a brush. I draw my linework as full shapes, using the pencil tool with a black fill and no outline. Yeah? …Yeah.)

At this point I should have made a screenshot of my layer palette aswell, firstly because good layer organization is a nice habit to have, secondly because, for this image, the layers were named thus: “retard in front: lineart”, “retard to the right: colours”, etc. (I am pleased by any chance to demonstrate my awesome political incorrectness.)

Blah blah, I finish inking and add colour. End result, before random text was added at the top and bottom:

I actually have no idea if the image suited its intended purpose at all, as the people involved were all too busy to give me a whole lot of feedback, apart from the comment “I like the retard expressions! Link looks like Mrs Pacman!”