I received emails from peoples asking me how I did all my artworks. So, I am going to do a quick run through on how I did this “Pipit Anniversary Wish Art”. It is not meant to be a in-depth tutorial, but it will give you a clear view on how I did my artworks.
Before drawing anything, I always try to visualize on how the final artwork going to look like. Some peoples will start to do rough sketch to generate ideas. Some peoples will look for references. So, it depend on what work best for you. After getting a brief idea, I will then do a quick sketch to see if I am happy to proceed with it.
If I can see where I am heading to with it, I will clean up and refine the lines of the sketch. The lines doesn’t need to be super clean as we are just using it as guidance to trace the image into vector format.
Most people will use Illustrator for vector tracing, but I am doing it in Flash. If you are doing it for print, you should trace it in Illustrator since that the standard file format for printing. Beside that, I will also lower down the opacity of the sketch and use a blue color line while tracing. This make it easier for me to see the vector line.
After finish tracing, I start to put in the base color for the vector. For a color blind person like me, I always use reference images for color scheme. In this case, I google some pipit bird photos and use color picker to pick the color from it.
Some people prefer vector art without outlines, some prefer dark bold outline. There is no wrong or right, it is just different style of vector art. In this artwork, I will proceed with a bold black color outline. It still look a bit ugly in this stage, but will start to look way better after the next step.
Some vector art skip this step completely. But for the type of vector art I am doing, it always look better with the shading. In this case, I imagine there is a light source on top left, so everything will be brighter on top left, darker on bottom right. With this two band of color shading, the artwork will start to look a bit like cell shaded 3D.
We can always import our artwork into Photoshop to do some final touch up although it won’t be a pure vector art anymore. In my case, I added the wood texture background, frame the artwork inside polaroid image and did some color adjustment. I can still do the background and polaroid in vector, but for what? Adding them in Photoshop look way nicer.
I didn’t really go deep into each of these steps but I will try to do a more detail tutorial soon. In the mean time, I hope you will learn something from this brief tutorial.
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