Life drawing 2 (Warning, contains penis)

A male model this time. My warm-up sketches were terrible but the drawings weren't bad.

New life drawing class-the point of warm-up sketching

 I've started a new life drawing class. The first drawing was a bit tight and self-conscious. I haven't done any life drawing for months

 A couple of quick sketch exercises. The top picture was drawn in 50 seconds, the bottom without taking the pencil off the paper. Spot where I cheated!

Second drawing, a bit freer and more expressive. The third drawing was rubbish though. Attending a life class full of 19 year old art students puts a bit of pressure on! I didn't do too badly considering how rusty I was.

Zoo sketches

A couple of sketches for a new edition of Vet School based on some sketches and photographs I took in Africa and Thailand (monkey not included)

New commission

This is what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. It's been through a couple of drafts.

Sketches in Leamington Spa

This church and these fields are about 10 mins from my flat, on my running route. These were an experiment in using more colour in my sketches.

sketchbook binding....

Artwork process part 2

 There were a lot of artists I would have liked to use for the Tarot cards (particularly Lee Kennedy, who is a Girly Comic staple) but I chose those that fit the major arcana best. This is not a realistic spread of tarot cards- a proper layout would have covered up too much of the tabletop.

Because some of the cards had extreme perspective, I drew them to normal dimensions and used the Free Transform tool in Photoshop to warp them into the main composition. I then used the channel menu to separate the line art from the white background and filled the lines in in black to make sure they were clean and crisp. I kept flipping the picture - unless I'm aiming for a particular effect it's usually pot luck which way round it ends up.

Tarot from left to right: 

• The Fool from Septimus Le Page In The Killer Frock Of Doom  by Jenny Linn Cole.
• The Lovers from Roommates by Zack Gardner.
• The Empress from Kelechi, queen of the world by Jonathon Dalton.
• The Chariot from Tankless Tasks by Jeremy Dennis.
• circus poster from Strangers To Love by Douglas Noble and David Baillie.
• newscast from Pumpkin Coach by Allen Ashely, Serena Lock and Mayko Fry.

 Next step: adding text to the posters. Once the text was in place, I created a new layer in Photoshop, traced over the letters and deleted the text layer underneath. This gives the text a hand- drawn quality.

I created a new layer for the colour underneath the line art, coloured the illustration in and applied a a blue filter to the mobile phone screens.

The shawl texture came from a scarf which I scanned in and pasted into the illustration. I keep a texture library on my computer and download a lot of free textures from mayang.com.

Then I started putting the details in. I added "makeup" to a separate layer on the face 

...and knocked the opacity back to make it more subtle. Watercolour painters use purple and green under a flesh coloured wash to create realistic flesh tones.

I added shadows, highlights and gradients...again these are on separate layers, so I can remove them if something goes wrong. 

There were a few more tweaks I did to the rest of the illustration, applying yellow highlights and colouring some of the lines.

This is a screengrab of the final illustration - it's a good idea to get into the habit of naming and organising all the layers. There are at least 35 here. The whole process took about 6 weeks to complete (working evenings and a couple of weekends).  A simpler illustration can take two evenings.

Here is the final product! It has been cropped a little but most of the detail has been kept in.