Chris Deutsch

Introduction, the Universe and Everything Else

This a cartoon I did of my girlfriend. I gave it to her as a Valentine's present.

Again, I started out with sketches - mostly of her looking amourous.

I decided on something similar to the top right one and started with the head in Illustrator. Since the form of the skull is so important, I usually draw several versions and pick the one I like best.

Since I felt that a combination of the one on the left and the one on the right would do best, I laid the on top of each other and let Illustrator do a gradient from one to the other.

It turned out the one in the middle - the morph, so to speak - really did make a good head.

Sketching the body looks like little work, but really: It takes forever to get the pose just right.

Here I'm playing with her hair (pun intended, teehee).

This still isn't an Illustrator with Live Paint function, so I create the colored areas by hand.

On a seperate layer I draw the shadow lines in red.

The main color is good and ready, the shadows still need tweaking.

Instead of applying an art brush to the lines (which just didn't work on this illustration), I drew over the original lines with a calligraphic brush. Quite a bold step for me. I think I'll keep up that technique.

Eyes are the most important element so I gave them a lot of shine.

Give her dress some hearts, put her on a tan background, add some freehand written text, a shadow and some shiny, squiggly outlines and presto: She's finished.

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.