Christmas Card Illustration Process

As promised here's the process for this project. This was a design for the Christmas carolers thank you card. Here in the Philippines this is a tradition. Everyone young and old will jump from house to house singing, and the house owners if they like your singing will give you money in return. When I was a kid my siblings and I will get/create musical instruments like stringing bottle crowns together, creating drums from discarded milk cans, or if there really is no time, I just get a spoon & fork and bang them together! And that was the end of my singing career. :) Okay enough flashbacks.

SKETCH
I started with a very quick sketch (I did the sketch on the first paper I got my hands on, I can't find my sketchpads anywhere so the notebook it is! ) The sketch/doodle is very rough, just to get the layout. Next I transferred it on watercolor paper here I refined the line art.

sketch

COLOR
After the detailed sketch I started blocking out the colors, I used watercolor for the sky & tree and used the gouache for the rest. I wanted a colorful opaque style for this, more like a vector feel. Okay if you are looking at my sketch & my colored piece intently like your life depended on it (which I doubt), you will see that I removed an element in the background. What you didn't notice?! I decided to remove the kid & dad in the background so the user will focus on the carolers, KISS (keep it simple stupid). :)

DETAIL

After I blocked the colors I added the details, line art, which needs a lot of concentration... and not breathing... and tongue sticking out on my part.

FINAL ART

And after a couple of hours tadaaaa! I would like to present my present! (get it!) I hope you had a blessed Christmas!

Mon the Monkey

Mon the Monkey is smart and has a big heart.
He is amazed with mazes and likes making faces.
He wears glasses and loves math problems.
But his favorite part is eating bananas! 

Okay the last part doesn't rhyme but I want to insert bananas in there!
Anyway I did this character for an educational game, created 2 other monkey versions of this one.

And here is the digital version of Mon, did a few tweaks on the final study.

You should be working!

Decided to illustrate a slice of life from my work. This is how I think my boss looks like when he caught me browsing my facebook o slacking off at work! :) It really bothers me when someone is hovering when i'm working, the feeling of being watched is creepy.



Did the sketching and inking on a different day, and coloring took  about 2 hours. DETAILS: Did the base painting first, then added the shadows, to create depth i used a darker color and did the poitilism technique both on the watercolor & with the ink. I can't stress this enough "patience is a virtue!":))
 

The Owl (Fussyket partner)

The fussyket would be so lonely without her owl. So I created this coffee owl to accompany her. :) I like the way this turned out, especially the coffee cup element. I can so relate to Mr. Owl's caffeine boost! since we have the same big eyes and because i stayed up from 6pm to 6am the previous day to finish a freelance storyboard illustration (even though i only did the coloring stuff).



Made using watercolor on paper. This was done on intervals, created the base colors and added the details last week, i was just too busy to post this before. :( Added a somewhat pointilism effect for the detail, for the leaves I used 2-3 different shades of green.

Meow | pussycat illustration

This was one of the many sketches I made for a project. Too bad this cat was not chosen in the final stages of the poster I was making. So I made a promise to myself that this cat sketch will see the light of day! hehe So this Saturday morning   I decided to paint my cat. The style was inspired by Maurice Sendak's classic children's story "Where the wild things are". And behold my masterpiece!  :) Around 15 mins to sketch and ink and about an hour to color. happy rainy weekend everyone.

 

panda

Did this watercolor last April when I was condo living for a month! One good thing when you live near your work is you have a lot of time on your hands. (but now I travel to my office for 1.5 hrs everyday and another 1.5 hrs to get back home, 3hrs spent ont ravel!!! sniff...) Anyway I forgot about this piece for a while... until I saw a bright light coming out of my sketch book then it started moving towards me, as it comes nearer the page opens showing me the unfinished panda painting, it looked at me with blue evil eyes and told me in a slow threatening voice "finish this painting or else..." okay I should stop daydreaming! I just saw it today and decided to finish it. Spent a couple of hours doing the details. I really love the way it turned out. :)



This was shot during my condo living days...

DETAILS: For the panda fur I used a fine sable brush. And painstakingly added them one by one. This took about an hour and yes patience is a virtue! Added texture on the hair by creating uneven lines, i like the feel of its unevenness. :) Same technique is applied on the shirt, just make sure to follow the shape of the object you are trying to make, so it doesn't feel like it was just pasted.

 

Pink

A pink portrait i made, this was inspired by the upcoming Brave movie. :) I can't wait to see the movie the trailer is just sooo awesome I love Merida! I used watercolor and colored pencils for the details.

Watercolor

My very first watercolor piece for 2012. I really want to start painting again and I decided to put watercolor paper on my christmas wishlist last year. So here goes my first artwork. This was finished around january, lazy me to post it just now. :)