Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I'm in print- finally!


I worked like a fevered chimp over the summer on a bunch of projects, one of which was this where's Waldo-style Shaun the Sheep book. And it's on sale now! er- in Germany. But, there are no words, and if you like this kind of thing, it's here on Amazon.

The very simple premise was that Shaun and his buddies bust out of the farm and go on holiday, while Bitzer tries to restrain them. The readers are supposed to find just Shaun, but I had to entertain myself with a few easter eggs, like a UFO breakdown, and extensive bike race, a duck party. That kind of thing.

First I sent the client roughity-roughs like this:
Just to get their buy-in to the angle and subjects.
Once that was done I penciled the illustration at full size. This was important because in Illustrator I would be zooming in so close, I would lose sense of scale pretty fast.
Then into Illustrator; first time I used this programme, and I really enjoyed it. The fun part about using the brush is that it can fill your strokes instantly. Which meant I could ink AND colour at the same time. I had only 2 days for each image, so time saving was crucial. My kids loved how fast a full colour character would appear on screen.


So I made layers in illustrator. The program would often complain due to the amount of vectors. My computer cried.


And finally, comped it in photoshop, added shadows, maybe texture and a bit of lighting. And onto the next one. The question is, where is he?

4 comments:

jriggity said...

very cool man....Congrats!

jriggity

stefan marjoram said...

ha ha, great stuff - I've often wondered who does these kind of pictures - my son loves them. It's the sort of job that could send you mad if you had to do it too often.

Owen Williams said...

great work, thanks for sharing the process too :)

Shelley Whiting said...

Wow I love all the detail. A very fun and wild piece. Very fun and beautiful.