I recently put this little illustration together, but how did it happen? For a brief and entirely inadequate overview, read on.
Starting with a 'quick' sketch of Sun Wukong, legendary figure of the 'Journey to the West'. I used a blue animators pencil on a very nice A5 sketchbook and drew this guy in about an hour. Usually I would leave it at that but for some reason i decided to continue.
Refining details with a HB mechanical pencil in preparation for inking. I'm keeping my linkwork pretty loose as i feel my way around the shapes and try to start figuring out some of his armour and smaller bits and pieces.
Using a 0.1 fine liner pen to pull out details and some textures. This part is really therapeutic, it's like a mix of technique and intuition.
Here I'm using a slightly thicker 0.3 pen to pull out some forms and create a bit of visual variety. I quickly blew out my my expectations of this being a quick sketch.
I wanted to continue without being confined with the page size, so I scanned the drawing and opened Photoshop. One of the big advantages of digital is being able to flip the canvas, which helps spot issues with composition. From there I started roughing out some possible directions for the piece, before settling on this.
Cleaning up some detail and adding bolder lines. I also went with the idea of Monkey perching on this column of rock, and tinkered with his staff, and hand position.
More refining, more tinkering with the staff and hand. Plus he got a tail. This is pretty good in general, but a bit too 'busy' with all the different grayscale details. I enjoy doing all that intricate stuff but sometimes it gets out of hand.
Some more work in value, using much more solid areas of light and dark. He's already looking more unified than before.
And adding colour. The colour is on a 'soft light' layer, which was why I made the gray so dark, because this type of blend mode lightens things quite a bit. And below are some colour variations. I'd love to know which you prefer, and why.
So that's a behind the scenes of my Monkey drawing- soon to be available as an NFT- https://nftshowroom.com/dcfisher/gallery