My Little CrockPot of News and Thoughts

I’ve thought about doing a “How I Work” type of post for a while now and had all intentions of doing it, but life happened, and my good intentions were put on the back burner. Then Roque Ballesteros of Ghostbot and Ward Jenkins of the Ward-O-Matic posted their own “How I Work” posts and forced me to do the same. Rogue recently ended his series of posts entitle “Anatomy of a BG” in which he describes the process a background takes from concept to final piece at the Ghostbot studios. You can read his posts here, here and here. A few weeks ago, Ward Jenkins, while creating a submission for Illustration Friday gave birth to an illustration that was such a big hit with folks that he went back and gave the run down of how he did it. You can read that post here. Needless to say the bar has been set with these fine posts, so let’s begin and hope for the best… First, let me start off by sharing the tools I use. Flash is my weapon of choice and I use it a lot. A whole lot. In addition to Flash, I have a swanky Wacom Tablet which has just about replaced my mouse. I also use pencil and paper for sketching things… the Wacom tablet has yet to replace that… For the first several years that I used Flash the only thing I could do in the program was sketch things with the brush tool using the ol’ Wacom tablet. Building objects with the line or pen tools was totally out f the question. I was never able to manipulate the lines in a way that looked natural. Everything always had sharp angles and little jagged edges to it. It wasn’t until I got my job and was forced to start building with these tools that I started to slowly developed a way of working in Flash that was both quick and more importantly, gave the right look and feel I wanted. So, as I was saying, when I start out creating anything in Flash (in this case it’s a background) I’ll grab a stack of paper and a trusty pencil and begin to doodle. I generally stick to drawing thumbnails. The thumbnail allows me to get a great bulk of ideas down in a short amount of time.

Once I’ve put down as many ideas as I can on paper, I’ll go through and decide which thumbnail is the strongest. In this case I liked the first thumbnail that I drew the best. It was the strongest in terms of layout, design, and was the most interesting to look at. However, there are things that I don’t care for. I don’t like the stove range and hood that sits behind the island. The sink on the island could also stand to be tweaked since I’m not crazy about its location, but I can make those changes in Flash.

Next I scan my page of thumbnails and import them into Flash. Once I drag the drawing onto the stage and have it positioned just right, I’m ready to start building everything. To do that I simply make a new layer then, after selecting my line tool, I begin blocking in the basic shape of the object, right on top of the rough sketch. Depending on the complexity of the object, this step will usually be the most confusing, do to the massive wad of lines that you will accumulate.

Once I have the basic shape down, I’ll select all the lines and begin filling in the different areas of the object with color. When that is finished, I’ll delete all the lines that I had selected and fill in any areas of color that I might have missed. Now that the basics of the background are blocked in, I’ll go back through and add all the kitchen items on the cabinets.

To save time, I’ll usually go ahead and sketch this part out on a new layer, using the Wacom tablet. Generally these sketches are rough, but that’s ok, because I’ll fine tune everything in the next step. (Note: I did complete a few more items in the kitchen before moving on to this next step)

Now that I have all the kitchen items in place and am happy with them all, it’s time to build. Again, I build these pieces using the same process that I used before. When they are all completed, I’ll begin work on the details of the kitchen, really trying to make the space believable (in a warped kind of way).

And that’s my process in a nutshell. I usually revise the piece I’m working on constantly, always trying to make the illustration stronger and easier to read. Because of that, not everything I do follows this exact route… but you get the general idea.