In living colour

My favourite part of the illustrating process... colour!!!!

Since I was a kid I've spent a lot of time practicing colouring in watercolour, colour pencil and marker. But, for some reason I took to digital rendering. I think it's my love of comic books and inability to clean up after making a mess with paint that led me to digital. plus it produces such a smooth result.

It was Salvador Larroca's work on Xtreme X-men that sold me on clean digital rendering under natural line drawings. There's a loss of synergy when you wipe away the scratchings from a pencil drawing in exchange for sharper inked lines. The raw pencil against the hyper-real colouration creates a poetic dissonance.

The way I create illustrations in colour is a process of creating layers in photoshop. First I create an outline from the original drawing. Then I build up the image from the base (usually the skin) up. This allows me to make some quick flat colours to start before I start doing more detailed cropping and shading. It gets particularly fun to zoom in and start working on details that eventually build up to a much richer clean image.