Illustration Process

I thought it might be (mildly) fun and / or interesting to show the process I go through in producing an illustration - in this case a t-shirt design for AR Mcguire - steadicam operators extraordinaire. This was for a promotional t-shirt to be given away to cast and crew on the set of the new Streetfighter movie, then shooting in Thailand.

Step 1: Roughs

I started with a rough pencil sketch, based on the brief - to produce an illustration showing the AR steadicam operator as a Streetfighter-style character, surrounded by the actual characters in the movie. I didn't worry too much about likenesses etc. at this stage, as it was just to get the basic gist of the design in place.

This then got changed and added to a couple of times, as the client requested additional characters and various minor alterations.

1. First version.

2: Balrog pops up top right, M. Bison (top centre) has his dodgy arm attended to.

3. A new challenger! And another. I forget these guys' names.

Step 2: Inks

Once the client was happy with the roughs, I then inked the design. I usually do my 'inking' in Manga Studio, but decided to try a different approach for this. I started by drawing in the white highlights on the characters, and then filled in the black shapes behind them. I really enjoyed working this way, and love the high-contrast vaguely-Frank-Miller-y effect it gives you. I'm totally going to try drawing a whole comic in this style. One of these days. When I get a minute.

At this stage I had to use a lot of photo reference to get the actors likenesses right - I'm pretty pleased with the result - while being quite abstract / stylised, I think they do kind of look like the people they're supposed to be. (I forget some of them, but casting highlights include Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li and Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog.)

I stuck in a red background to give these JPEGs a nice high contrast look, but the actual files were sent to the client as unflattened files with a transparent background, so they could be printed on the t-shirt colour of their choice.

I produced a couple of versions, one with the black figure art for all the characters and one with it only on the camera operator.



I think I like the second one best.