John's Thread (Used to be super active! Still the longest thread name ever in CD)

[John]

I'm making a "Josie and the Pussycats" print! Love the cartoons. Love their sporadic stint in the old Archie books. Maybe it's a good time to spread that love.

So here's some process work:

1. Sketching ideas phase. It's where I throw in figures in space, or scribbles. No perspective, no anatomy stuff. None of that nonsense! Just put whatever's in my head onto the canvas!

I think I had 2 initial sketches, but went for the first idea. This is where I put in the placeholders for the characters:


2. Now that I have more or less a direction where I want to go with the piece. I gathered a lot of reference photos to a point in which I cluttered my desktop! A lot of Chrome tabs opened. It's a constant gathering of photos til the end of the piece and it's depressingly time consuming. Here's what I ended up with:


3. I work out the perspective, and give characters faces, and figure out the anatomy. This is a rough pass, because at this point I'm trying to make sense of the perspective, and anatomy.


4. After all that neurotic behavior, I turn the lines down to 20% opacity so I can make a cleaner pass on a new layer. Basically, choose the best line I've thrown from the rough pass, and commit by do a cleaner line over it.


I'm done with doing the line work! Next entry will be coloring!