Vector Comic Girl
The purpose of this post is to give some useful hints and tips to digital artists. This isn’t an in-depth tutorial, so a fair grasp of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop will be needed to begin drawing and manipulating at this level.
Tip One: Create a rough freehand sketch of the artwork you want to vectorise. Scan the sketch, and import it into the application. This will act as your guide, in much the same way as a normal pencil to ink drawing.
Tip Two: Begin to draw around a selected area (in this case the hair), using your sketch as a basic guideline. Put a transparency inside your selected object, so that you can see the sketch, and easily modify your outline.
Tip Three: Base colour fill the object, and begin on detailing. Fine detailing can be added later in Photoshop if required, but try to add the base detail in vectors, as this will greatly enhance the finish.
Tip Four: Moving on to another object (in this case the eye), put the transparency back on the former object to aid clarity. Begin to draw around the selected area as in step two.
Tip Five: After you have repeated the above procedure for each object, you can begin painting the image (in this case the skin tones) in Photoshop. Detailing of the whole comes in at this point. Remember; the more individual vectors you use as objects for the skin tones, the easier it is to detail later.
Tip Six: Remove the initial sketch in order to see the image on its own. This where node tweaking comes in, as the image needs to balance without the guide.
Tip Seven: Add edges and comic book effect using the filter parameters in Photoshop. In this case, I used the poster-edge filter with no thickness, using an intensity of 2 and posterisation of 4.
If you wish to see Vector Comic Girl in her indigenous environment…
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Tags: art, drawing, illustration, Illustrator, vectors
