Chris Deutsch

Birthday Card

This is the illustration to a birthday card we did for a colleague's 40th birthday.

We had decided on the drawing being him playing a bass riding on a giant turtle. This was my inital sketch:

Then I did some sketches of his face, trying it to get to look like him, but not going into an actual carricature.

Then I sketched turtle mounts from World of Warcraft.

This is the final turtle sketch. The guitar sketch is the final one as well, but I wasn't quite satisfied with his pose.

Now, the order in which I did the elements is not the same as the order I'm showing the creation in. The sketch of the guy was actually finalized before I went on to coloring the turtle.

It always amazes me at how some shadows and some highlights can make a huge difference in how the image looks like.

Back to the bassist. This is the final sketch I went with. I had some different faces going on there. In the end I chose a mixture of both.

The inking has been fiinalized in the image below. Many lines still overlap, since each element of his body became a seperate layer - head, torso, arms, guitar, legs.

Drawing instruments is actually very easy. Just find a good picture on the internet, trace it, apply colors and experiment with the lighting.

Another small anachronism going on here: In reality I worked on every single element, applying colors, shadows and highlights first to the head, then to one arm, and so on. But to speed things up, I'm showing all steps simulatneously.

I admit, I overdid the shadows and highlights on the clothing. I guess creases in clothing should be illustrated using shadows alone. And I need a lot of practice to get that just right.

The cards and the cord were actually added much later, when most of the background was already finished.

Without background.

With background and flying cards (he plays poker, in case you were wondering). To make the background elements appear out of focus, I applied the soft edges effect to the objects - the more in the back they are, the stronger the effect.

In the end, I add fog, clouds and highten the contrast in Photoshop.

For this piece I used Scriptographer, a plugin for Adobe Illustrator for which I wrote a script that gives me better control over the thickness of stylus-drawn lines.