Illustration Friday: Smart

Initial Ideas

• Clever people
• Scientists
• Smart Car
• Smartie pants
• SMart (art programme)
• Morph
• Dressed smart
• Suit and tie
• Smarties (sweets)
• Smart phone
• Owl
• Lightbulb
• Mad Professor
• Isaac newton

Thumbnails

Due to having quite a busy and stressful week, I didn't produce as many thumbnails as I anticipated. I really got into the process of drawing the mad professor, and enjoyed developing his character. I decided to combine the mad professor with a light hearted replacement metaphor of chemicals with a smarties tube to enhance the theme further. 

Reference Imagery

I didn't rely heavily on my reference images this week, which is positive; developing the characters expressions using my imagination was surprisingly successful, and I will continue to develop this further. However I did find it difficult to accurately draw the pouring smarties, and a lot of images I found on google were heavily copyrighted so was unable to use them.

Process

I was back to using photoshop this week, and I am still getting used to the different brushes. I built up the layers gradually using soft edge brushes for the base layers, gradually building up to more defined brushes to add facial features and other details. It took quite a long time to complete, partly due to the fact that I am a massive perfectionist, but also because I haven't drawn people in such a long time. I need to keep practicing this! As well, I found it difficult to create a smokey effect; I looked on youtube for a tutorial which instructed me to use the filter > maximise tool when drawing a freehand line, but for some reason this was not successful. So instead I just played around with the opacity of the brushes, making them appear more transparent.
Initially, when receiving feedback from my housemates from my final image, they said the smoke was too thick around the professors face and they couldn't quite make out what it was. To amend this, I erased the smoke layer on a low opacity so that his face became clearer.

Evaluation

This isn't the best outcome I've ever produced, but I'm happy with the concept and how my brush skills are developing, especially with facial features. I spent far too long completing this image, so speed is another element I will need to work on, as well as further developing colour blending and use of the brush tool. I'm also eager to learn how to create smoke properly! One thing I'm not proud of is the smarties, they look like I've done them in microsoft paint... but I think I subconsciously rushed because I'm pretty stressed at the minute. But to conclude, I'm happy with my effort and concept, just need to keep pushing myself further.