TUTORIAL - Digital
1. For this piece, I used a .05 mechanical pencil for the main part of the drawing. Most of the time I’ll use ink, but for this drawing it wanted to have some very light parts and some very dark part, plus I like the texture a pencil gives. I try and get very tight with the details, and the hard edge of the eraser also helps me do that. I drew on two separate sheets of paper for this, then scanned them into photoshop and adjusted the levels so the grayscale was similar. Then I moved them around and free-transformed each one until they were at the scale I wanted..
2. I make a layer above them and set it to “multiply” then I select a color that’s mostly desaturated and fill that layer with it. With my Wacom tablet (best investment eva!), I use the burn and doge tool to sketch in shadows and highlight on the figures. This really gives the figures depth.
3. Then I texture it. The textures are always different. For this particular piece, I went outside and took some pictures of metal, old plastic and a wooden board that my neighbor used to clean fish on. In photoshop I kinda meshed them together by changing the layer modes and lowering the opacity, I also adjusted the Hues and Saturations to keep the color grayish-green.
4. Once the texture is down, I re-adjust the levels on the original sketch so its gets a little darker. Then I’ll add some subtle colors by adding another layer on top and changing the mode to “color”, I’ll use a brush with a 10% or 5% opacity and just brush some colors over the figures. It’s very, very subtle, but it makes a difference. Then, with the bush still on low opacity, but on a different layer, I add the ground shadow by using black and blues. I add the text at the top the same way as I did with the original sketches.