Rising from the Ashes — Jumping Brigadier
Determined as hell, I set off at the first chance I get to reclaim the treasure I had lost last night. I found it again without much trouble at all. And it probably took me a third the time. Additionally, I’m much happier with this version, as well. This bad-boy probably took me an hour, tops. It is great to know that I can “recreate” pieces I’ve already done in much less time… it is a sweet taste of the realization of progress.
Thoughts: When I made this illustration last night, I spent way too much time nit-picking over how exact I was in tracing the photo. I probably ended up doing three different traces (last night) to get the final forms I wanted. Seeing as my pencil/pen sketch style seems to be sort of frantic and wild (with many stray and unconnecting lines), this wasn’t too intuitive for me to switch over to Illustrator. The solution, I’ve realized, is to use that very same intuition — and just feel out the general shape I’m tracing. Don’t worry about sticking to the exact lines — go for the overall feel.
What I Learned: The trace process, which usually takes up at least half of the time of the overall illustrations I’ve been doing, took a ridiculously small amount of time today. The shading wasn’t at all bad either, given that I’m embracing the more simple approach. Additionally, my use of layers was as flawless as it has ever been. For example, in this piece my layers were as follows: 1) boots, 2) legs, 3) tunic, 4) arm, 5) head. Underneath all of these layers was the picture I was tracing. In the past I’ve found myself going overboard with the layers — this can waste precious time and make your task harder than it needs to be. Layers are there to help you. As simple as this piece is, there is no reason for each boot to have its separate layer or to separate the hair from the face or the stick from the hand. Simple arranging (bring to front, bring to back, etc) can take care of this.
Notes on Shading:  I learned a very valuable lesson with shading in the creation of this piece. Of course, I’ve been ranting about embracing a simpler style of shading, but this has to do with something else. In the past I’ve talked about using semi-transparent shades of black and white to add darkness/light to objects. The benefit of this is that you can change only one color (the base color of the object) and the shading will change correspondingly. This is good in its own way. However, using black and white alone doesn’t always give you the best coloring. Most of all, I’ve notice that using black can make its underlying color much to gray — and the impression is lost. At first, I did shading with black and white for this piece. In the end, however, I went back and did color specific shading. For the brown boots, for instnace, the “light” part (at the toe) was created by matching the toe to the overall boot color and then moving all the color values (CMYK) all up correspondingly (“up” meaning toward their maximum value meaning toward white). This creates a lighter shade (or a darker shade if I had moved them down) which isn’t blatant “black” or “white.” I’ve included examples of both below. The differences are very subtle, but perhaps most noteworthy in the hair and the tunic (the dark shade is hardly seeable in the black/white version).
