Creating an Illustration - My Process

Hi All, back again! Was hoping by now to be able to show you the Stranger Things sketchcards that I created for Topps / Netflix in the US. Unfortunately release of these has been delayed until Halloween, so a few weeks to wait yet.

In the meantime I have kept myself busy in a number of ways. Last week I held a prize draw on my Facebook page to win an art bundle (kindly also promoted by Fanagram). The entrants had to comment on what I should draw next. Well anyway the contest came and went and I had whole host of suggestions of what to draw.

Out of these there were a number of requests for old school characters e.g. He-Man, Skeletor, Hong Kong Phooey, Battle of the Planets etc. This inspired me to create a range of A5 illustrations featuring some of the above characters. Which as can be seen above is going quite well.

I thought it may be an interesting insight to show you my process for creating one of these illustrations. The following steps will show my process and the materials used to create one of these images. So hopefully the below will be both if interest, and also possibly inspire you to try doing something of your own!

The paper I am using is a Winsor & Newton A5 Bristol Board. I choose bristol board as it is thick like card but has an extremely smooth surface so it takes pencils, inks and marker pens without issue.

OK so first of all I find a decent reference image or two to make sure characters and colours etc look like they are supposed to, and then I roughly sketch out the composition. This is simply to make sure everything is to the correct proportion, the correct size and most important of all it fits on the paper. For this I simply use a 0.5mm mechanical pencil.

Rough Pencils

Once I am happy with the layout and position of everything I now tighten up the pencils and add detail. Again this is just with the mechanical pencil.

Refined pencils.

Once happy with the pencils it is time to start inking. For this I will use a fineline marker with nib size 0.1 although depending on image I can use anything from a 0.05 to a 0.5. The brands I use are Sakura Pigma Micron, Unipin or Copic. Brand is not important but ensure the ink is waterproof (usually called pigment ink). This will prevent and smears or runs later on.

Once inks are complete the pencil lines are erased. I use a kneaded or putty eraser as I find this removes pencils more successfully.

Now onto colours. I usually choose watercolour paint, coloured pencils or coloured markers for the colours. For this image I am going to use all of teh above. The markers I use are made by Copic, they are alcohol based meaning they do not leave streaks when applied, and also can be blended with each other. There are other brands such as ProMarker, Spectrum, but these are my preferred choice because of quality, plus they are refillable so more cost effective in the long term.

Some of my Copic Markers

I gradually work across the image adding the various colours as required.

Now the character colours are complete I need to add a background. I stick the paper down with masking tape and add a outer space type wash using water colours.

The watercolours I use are Kuretake Gansai Tambi Japanese Watercolors as they have very bold bright colours.

Finally I remove the tape, add on outline to the border, and using a Posca white paint pen add the star effect.

The picture is now finished!!

See more like this and keep up to date with my art over at AlexMinesArt on Facebook and AlexMinesArt on Instagram.