Okay, because nobody demanded it… here’s a little insight into how I illustrate my ‘bean men’.
I chose to do Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, mostly because I’m looking to work on illustrations for pop culture mags, but also because he’s a cool visual. So, first things first. I work in Illustrator CS, and only use Photoshop for cropping and resizing, etc.
Step 1: Scan the original sketch (yes, my pencil work is always that rough) in Photoshop, name the file and open a new doc in Illustrator. I always use a 250mm x 250mm template. File > Place the scan, and lock the layer. Open a new layer to do the linework.
Step 2: Trace the outlines and features using the pen tool. I’ve used a thick pink line here for clarity’s sake. All of the stray lines are there for a reason. Having them makes the whole process faster, believe it or not. (Tip: You may notice I forget to save this document until I’ve totally finished it. Don’t do that. I’m stupid.)
This section looks a litle crowded, and some lines are doubled back over each other. Basically, when I hit the Divide button in a second… ah, you’ll see.
Step 3: I’ve hidden the lines that would interfere a little (Ctrl+3), and selected all the other overlapping shapes. Then I hit Divide in the Pathfinder palette. All of these sections are now individual shapes. They’re grouped, which is useful so I leave them that way and use Direct Selection (A) to edit for now. Best thing to do at this stage is to give all of these sections a fill colour so you can select easily. I delete shapes that I don’t need, like between Venkman’s legs and the edges of his collar, and I combine shapes, such as the two sections of the gloves, the three sections of his face, and so on.
And it’ll look like this.
Step 4: The shapes I hid earlier come back into play here. From this stage, I like to combine and copy the finished shapes before hitting Divide again. The backpack, symbol and straps are going to be dealt with here.
Like so. Yeah, I know the hose thingy doesn’t fit right. No biggie, that’s what the pen tool does best.
Step 5: Being a simple kinda guy, I like to keep my facial features very simple too. All it requires is to highlight the eyes, eyelids and lips and outline the stroke. Then they’re shapes too! Shapes are happy things! I hit Divide again and combine the sections I want, deleting the ones I don’t.
Step 6: Now we’re getting somewhere. Slapping some colours on this puppy makes it feel like I’m nearly finished. Truth is, it’s easy to get lazy here and leave it. It would look crap though. At this stage, I select everything and turn off all strokes.
Step 7: Depth. I adjust colours so they a) look better and b) don’t clash. The biggest problem with my style is that being so simple, if I have two objects of the same colour overlapping, I need to remedy that with shading or outlines. I don’t outline, so that leaves one option. It’s not always accurate in terms of light source, but sometimes it would look weird if it was.
Step 8: Background. New layer. Like I said, simple. A grid of yellow rectangles on darker rectangles, behind lighter rectangles. With a big purple rectangle behind and a side salad of pale circle. Overdo the background on a bean man and suddenly the focus has shifted. I put him on top of a city building with the cityscape behind (and my almost trademark moon) because through association, you pretty much know which scene this is, right? Right?
Step 9: I don’t do halos much anymore. Used to be every time, but they can overpower a picture. This time, there’s quite a lot of dark on dark, so a halo it is. (In all honesty, I might change this later) This is done by selecting all shapes on the character layer, copying and pasting behind with a thick stroke (rounded caps and joins). Then outline the stroke (never leave a stroke, or any resizing for future use will get all screwed up).
And… ta-daaah!!! One Venkman, extra beany. Now sit back, have a pint and wait for all this to blow over…
