Artistic Process

Thumbnails, Sketches, Color Studies, & More!

The Occasional Traditional

Every once in a while, I will start my rough sketches the old fashioned way with good ol’ pencil and paper. For this Human Harvest piece, I made small sketches on paper and came up with overall compositions and drew out the different elements I wanted to show within it. Afterwards, I take a picture of my sketch on paper, upload it onto my digital canvas, and render it further from there. It helps changing things up sometimes and it gets my brain thinking in a slightly different way than usual!

Creation of Alan

I first came up with a design for Alan from a gesture exercise (see below) and from there, the character I made quickly grew on me. Rounder shapes are common a theme for a vast majority of my characters and because Alan was so simple, I was itching at the chance to do something with this character. I came up with the roughest of ideas, laying out shapes and blobs of where I wanted everything to go (see top), from there I cleaned my thumbnail up and polished it out more. Before I even started with full color, I wanted to come up with a color study for Alan (see below) and then build the environment colors around him.

Fiji Mermaids

This was my very first time creating a piece for a zine and since my suggestion was chosen for that year’s theme, I knew I had to make mine special. I wanted to put my own spin on the Fiji mermaids and designed my creatures to have a nice mix of monkeys and fish. I knew I wanted dichotomy elements with my creature design. Fur and fins, cute and menacing, all while still making these elements belong together.