Chris Deutsch

My Girlfriend's Cartoon Avatar

This drawing consitutes the first LtD segment created on my Cintiq. And it's the first to be done with Illustrator CS3 (Live Paint 4tw!!). Much of the work was done while the subject was actually watching... that's a first one too.

As always, I start out with some sketching. I found sketching her surprisingly easy and went with the bottom one.

Then I went over to inking. It took some time until I got the scarf right. I thought about leaving it out... but it's her trademark. And you don't fuck with the trademark.

The final inked version.

Finally, with Live Paint (god bless CS), filling in the colors is so much quicker! The inked strokes are not actually part of the Live Paint group, since such groups cannot contain stroke brushes, but in a seperate layer.

Then I gave the strokes a specific color, according to the area they are outlining.

The shadow areas are created using Live Paint, but they need to be turned into regular shapes, since they don't have only one color, but several transparent surface effects.

Then I add highlights.

Then I add a background color, a drop shadow and a glow effect.

But it just doesn't work. Until today, I have not found out what exactly went wrong with this picture. The pose? The inking? The colors?

So I start a new one based on the very first sketch I did of her (see above). And this has never happened before: The very first sketch I do of someone actually turns out to be the one I'm basing the final image on.

Here she is with colors.

Colored lines

Shadows

Here I add highlights and pay extra attention to the hair and the sparkly eyes.

At the end I enhance the contract slighty in Photoshop, making the colors stronger, and add squiggly lines as a background.

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.