Marvelous Mustache Factory

A new illustration! The plan is to use it as a new self-promo postcard. Hopefully it’ll bring in a few new clients! I’ve been going through an epic freelance drought. I posted fairly regular process updates to my twitter account as I was working on this illustration. A few people expressed interest, so I figured I’d collect all the process stuff here for you guys.

Before I get into the process stuff, I’ve got a quick announcement: I will be exhibiting at the MoCCA Festival this weekend (April 10 & 11) in NYC! Come find me at table E21 along with my pals Jess Fink, Eric Feurstein, L. Nichols, and Jorge Diaz. I’ll have mini comics, screen-printed shirts, original art and high fives.

On to the illustration process stuff!

My sketchbooks, for the most part, are filled with notes and scribbles much like this one. I don’t seem to sit and draw in my sketchbooks much these days. They’ve mostly just become a place for collecting and developing ideas. I scribble little thumbnails like what you see up above. Most of them never make it past the thumbnail stage but a few lucky ones (like this one) grow up to be big inky drawings.

Next we flesh the idea out a little bit. The characters transform from vague, ugly blobs to detailed ugly blobs. I really enjoy this phase simply because I really enjoy drawing. It’s just so much fun! I do this stage of the drawing on crappy printer paper because there’s no reason to do it on anything fancy.

I wasn’t super sure what I wanted to do with the background at first. In fact, I was really struggling with it for a few days. I decided to scan in the characters and print out a sheet of four thumbnails so that I could just doodle and figure the background out.

I’ve always focused more on characters and expressions in my work. Recently I’ve been making a conscious effort to really improve my background/scenery skills. I’m forcing myself to draw backgrounds as much as possible. You’ll see this in my upcoming Picture Book Report illustrations.

Once I settled on a background, I jumped into inking. I use a lightbox when inking. I’m not super picky about my inks or my pens. I use whatever ink I’ve got laying around and just use a cheap nib pen. I do the inking on Strathmore 140 lb. cold press watercolor paper.

The finished ink drawing! I like to augment some of my lines with a beat up old brush. If you look at the old guy’s sweater lines, they’ve got that fuzzy beat up old brush quality to them. I love that.

Before I get into painting, I often like to scan the inks in and play around with colors in Photoshop. I find it really helpful to digitally come up with a rough idea of what you want to do with the colors before attempting to paint. The final product won’t look exactly like your color rough, because that would just be nuts, but it’s really nice having something to shoot for.

I’ve started painting! I’ve just got some basic wash layers down at this point. haven’t touched that crazy carpet at all, haven’t done any shadows or anything. Just keep it nice and simple for a while!

This is a crummy phone picture I took while painting. At this point I’ve got most of that carpet done. Still haven’t gotten much into shadows or anything, but soon! We’ve hit the home stretch.

And eventually, we get here, to the finished illustration. Scan it in, fiddle with the levels a little (watercolors never scan well), and bang! Finished!

I hope you find this whole process peek at least a little bit interesting! I look forward to seeing everyone at the MoCCA Festival this weekend!