April's Birthday Card thing.

I'm going to skip a ton of steps here but I can at least share a few - not that anyone needs to see my process... most of the time my processes are very sloppy and defy logic... but still I always enjoy seeing how other people work so maybe someone will enjoy this?

Ok so I started with my trusty Pentel Quicker Clicker 0.5 Mechanical Pencil that I've been using for as long as I can remember... threw down a few sketches and tweaked the facial features forever until I thought I had a reasonably ok likeness and a sort of ok pose going.

Then I butchered it by trying to ink it with a well-worn Faber-Castell Pitt Brush Pen... which did ok for some bits but for the details of the face... not so much. Nothing against these pens but once they are a bit "used" they aren't really the best for fine details as the tips tend to fray a bit. Oh well. So I then scanned it in black and white and here's that then:

So next... I brought this image into Flash for cleanup... and what I usually do there is make the image into a symbol so I can scale back the opacity on it and put the image on a guide layer for reference while I go over it with other crap.

The way I usually work is just to draw boxes over areas I want to trace... hack the crap out of the boxes with the polygonal lasso and then bend the shapes until I get what I want out of them. I do have an older Wacom (Intuos 2 I think) at home that a generous friend sent my way after he upgraded and I do have some experience with these from a former employer but I still seem to get faster/better results the hard way. So after doing this here's what I came up with:

The first of these two images is with the reference layer showing and the latter is with just the vector trace. Coloring is then a snap cos I can just fill in whatever I want... so I did that - but everything looked really flat and lifeless and I thought it might need more texture... enter Google Image Search - one of the best sources of comedy in the history of mankind.

I took the fills I did for three areas (the pomeranian, the fleshtone, and the clothing) and I separated them to their own layers... then I headed to Google Image Search to find some textures!

Here's the one I used for the clothing:

A few more textures later and some added scanned in garbage in photoshop and BANG! The finished piece!

Ok, I have to do work now or I will get fired!!!