Illustration Begins

This past weekend I took great advantage of having no social events or appointments that needed to be attended to work on my sketches / concept  and start the detailed drawing process in Adobe Illustrator for the next part of the snowboard design competition entry.

A lot of people ask me about my process and I usually answer the exact same way every time. After having the illustration or reference images I take these into Adobe Illustrator and start drawing out the basic shapes (which can been seen in the below screenshot as the dark brown areas). From there I’ll slowly build up detail on seperate layers and lightening the colour each layer to build depth and add detail (the lighter brown / tan areas).

One thing which I have found very time consuming and never having tried it before is drawing fur within my illustrations. Usually I stick to larger shapes when drawing as I know that my previous illustrations are not going to be printed larger than an A3 peice of paper and that any detail that I put in smaller than what I have done in the past would of been lost when printed as it would be too fine to come out in production. So when it comes to something that requires the fine detail of that of a snowboard thats over 5 feet tall, I had to pull out all the stops and tread into unfamiliar territory. A challenge. I love it!

Thats it for now, back to the tablet to work on the illustration some more.