Character Sketch I - Nermal

I wrote a children's book several years ago called Nermal's Thermal Underwear. I never finished illustrating it. Okay, I didn't get beyond making a few character sketches. I'm hoping to complete the work on it, and will be using Doodle-All-A-Day to post some of my sketches and ideas. This is the first sketch, and is an idea for the title character.

Bonus Material: Behind the Scenes

I did a screen cap (using CamStudio) while creating this sketch for anyone that is interested in getting an idea of how I work. The above sketch took a little over 20 minutes to complete. I did speed up the video, though, so you won't have to sit through all 20 minutes:



I use a Wacom Intuos3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for the majority of my artwork. I have a blank canvas template set up in Photoshop that includes four layers - Background, Sketch, Shading and Outlines - which are linked. Photoshop doesn't offer an easy way to rotate a canvas while you work, so I set the template up oversized and use a custom action to rotate the canvas at 30 degree intervals at the touch of a button. This simulates turning the page as I'm drawing.

I begin sketching on the Sketch layer. This is a really rough outline of the final drawing. Basically it's just guidelines to help me visualize the piece. Once the final sketch is completed I turn the opacity way down on the layer (usually to about 30%) so that the sketch is barely visible. I then move to the Outlines layer and begin drawing more definite lines. For sketches I usually only use a single brush - though I vary the width of the brush frequently. For this, and most of my sketches, I use a graphite pencil from Dave Nagel's Brushes Series 33. When the outlines have been completed I move to the Shading layer and lay in the shadows. Keeping everything on separate layers makes it much easier to control the various aspects of the drawing.

When the final drawing is complete, I save the file as a JPEG and upload.