The Baker Street Babes

sketchlock:

Progress work of the “Would you 221B Mine” Illustration/poster I did for the Baker Street Babes. (Prints available via Society6)

Basically how I got from a sketchy thumbnail to a finished illustration. Thought some of you might find this interesting/useful (Plus I did promise Curly I would post this). This is not as detailed as I would’ve liked since I just found out that Tumblr photo cap is 10 images. So I had to shorten this. But here’s a short-ish explanation on every step:

Part 1) Thumbnail It always helps do do a small thumbnail (or several or 50) of your ideas when beginning. I happen to have a more solid idea in mind so this time the first thumbnail was also the last.

Part 2) Clean Draft 1 I enlarged the thumbnail to cover the entire canvas and did a more detailed sketch on top. The base color was to help steer the mood/intended temperature but also so to help me see what I’m drawing. (in other words, colored grounds are great)

Part 3) Lineart Unfortunately I didn’t get to record all the in-between drafts from Step 2 Clean Draft to Step 3 Finished Lineart because while I normally do “clean drafts” altogether in one layer on top of the older sketch, for this I separated that process by subject (Background, John, Sherlock) and did it individually. As it happens, I did a lot of back-tracking and re-editing with this illustration because half of it was me experimenting so there were many many layers and many many parts which were defiantly confusing at times (we’ll come back to that).

Part 4) Value Study Here’s where I really started experimenting. While I had solid ideas about the composition and lineart style I had only a vague idea of the color scheme (I wanted it to be warm). A greyscale value study helps me figure out the basic contrast between the items and keep on track (I have to say I didn’t normally do value studies before as I tended to mix the color draft and value study together on all previous work)

Part 5) Color Drafts (AKA Testing the water) This is the bit with the most experimentation. Really what it consisted of was pulling in various colored textured and adjusting in Photoshop till I hit something that was about right. The draft with the pink tint looked good but it it just wasn’t what I wanted to go for as a whole, so I saved a version to come back to and kept experimenting.

Part 6) Color Draft Finally I hit upon this color/texture combo. I have to admit that it was kind of by accident. That happens sometimes when you do art. Happy and sad accidents. Good thing this time it was a happy one.

Part 7) Shading (Attempt 1) I actually finalized the text around this stage (or the next) I just went back and edited it in previous save files. Anyhow, I was trying to shade everything individually by pulling in textures for each component (John’s hair, jacket, skin colors, couch etc) but I realized my mistake halfway through, the unity of the image was being thrown out of whack (aka I stood back and realized this looked horrible to me). I suppose if I finished texturing and shading everything then tried to adjust as a whole I might have hit upon the right combo, but I was able to realize I was giving myself more work then not if I did it this way (the hard and annoying way).

Part 8) Shading (Attempt 2) I backtracked to the previous “base colors” I had for John and Sherlock and did the shading and color adjustments for them all together instead of by individual parts. It paid off.

Part 9) Thumbnail A little more color adjustments, threw in a atmospheric yellow glow on the flatmates and a few tweaks here and there. Save and done!

Well that’s about it folks. I don’t know if I made this clear but this isn’t meant to be a tutorial, since half the time I’m floundering around on this one. What this IS is for your consideration, I hope you learned something from it, or just enjoyed the process.

-Zenyr