Ever wondered how artists come up with those illustrations that seem to be so fashionable on sites lately? Well I can’t teach you how to draw in a single tutorial, but I can give you a little insight into my own illustration process.

Planning

The first thing I do is think of the purpose of the piece. All art has a purpose (even if the purpose is solely to be aesthetic), and commercial illustration usually has quite specific purposes in what they need to communicate. In this case I’d like to do a character illustration celebrating Christmas to post on my blog and send to people as Christmas cards. The purpose is to wish people happy holidays as well as indirectly promoting my skills as an illustrator.

Next I think about constraints. In this case I don’t have a huge amount of time to spend on this picture, so it will have to be something simple and quick to draw rather than a complex and involved painting.

With all these things in mind I decided to draw a simple vector illustration of an abominable snowman. With a candy cane.

Sketching

Even though I’m planning to create this picture in a vector program on the computer, I like to start out with pencil and paper. Generally I find it much easier to quickly sketch out ideas on paper as I tend to not get as caught up in details as I would on the computer. First thing to do are some thumbnail sketches.

Thumbnail sketches are small, fast, loose sketches to figure out where you want to go with the final product. The idea is to experiment and get all your ideas onto paper as quickly as possible, without bothering about details, rather than jumping right into it and realising at the end that your composition doesn’t work. I apply the same concept to logos, website designs and even crafts, and have found that I always get a better result with proper planning and sketching.

Here’s what I came up with:

Some people like to do heaps of sketches, but since this is quite a simple idea I just did the four on the left. I had a vague idea of how the snowman would look, but felt that even in sketch form it wasn’t really working (again, this is why sketches are important!). The fifth sketch you can see there is a further stylised look, which I decided I was more happy with. For the actual pose I decided to go with the first one, which is nice and dynamic.

With a pose and style in mind, I did a fairly clean and larger sketch to work with, and messed around with it until I was happy. It doesn’t have to be perfect at this stage, just clear enough so that you can recreate the shapes on the computer.

Vectoring

Armed with a relatively clean sketch, I then scanned it in and brought it into Adobe Illustrator. I usually start by bringing down the transparency of the sketch so it’s visible but not so distracting, then lock that layer so it doesn’t get in the way.

I don’t want to go into the vectoring process too much as I’m still learning the best way to do things myself, but I basically create the basic shapes using the pen tool, add colour and then add shadows and details.

Small details like shadows and speculars on the eyes can really bring a character to life, even with a character as simple as this one.

Finished!

Here he is, all ready to go!