Ed Steckley - NYC based humorous illustrator

Private Commisioned Christmas Card, Pt.2

posted 11.25.09 at 12:00 am
Every year I usually get hired to create a few private Christmas cards, this year was no exception.
A few days ago I posted the beginning of this job. 3 kids in their respective outfits, and of course, Santa Clause. In this case, the Santa was to be very cartoony, and I even had a reference of what the parents wanted. (I've always wanted to do something like those old Haddon Sundblom Coca-Cola ads with the traditional Santa, but this job wasn't going to be it.)

I decided late in the game that this was going to be a digital job. Lately I've been doing only layout and sketches on the computer, then transferring to paper and digging in with watercolors. But, this time I decided, since I did the same job last year all digital, to be consistent. Clients don't like to be surprised; when someone calls, they want to know exactly what they're gonna get.

So, here's the basic process:

To recap, everything is sketched out in Alias Sketchbook Pro software, on the Wacom Cintiq monitor:

Three appley faced young lads

The basic caricatures are roughed out and approved.

Then the layout is sketched out and approved

Once that's done, in this case I actually copied and pasted the caricatures onto the bodies in the final. (that version is evident in the final, below.)

At this point I save the drawing and close Sketchbook. That program is awesome for drawing, but not so good for color.

From here I open up Photoshop. The original drawing in it's own layer, I create a layer below that, and name that layer 'color'. Then I select the top layer, with the drawing, rename that 'drawing', and change the layer properties to 'Multiply'. This is, by now, a relatively well known method to be able to use colors behind a layer in which all the white space is transparent and the blacks remain opaque.
Now, I'm free to color in the bottom, 'Color', layer.

Oooh, paint by numbers!

All you have to worry about here is selecting the right colors and staying in the lines! Two things I was never particularily good at...

When the color is all blocked in, then I save a copy of this, and then go in and begin to add the reds in the skin, then the highlights in the whole thing. (I don't have a picture of this, sometime between here and there it got lost on my hard drive. Go figure.)
The very last stage of the game is to add shadows. I use a dark cool brown on a very low opacity paint brush and gradually build up for the skin tones, and a not-quite-black-but-kinda-purplish tone to build up the shadows.
The result is a very cartoony, yet (I like to think) highly effective rendering that comes close to my goal of having jobs like this look as little like they're done on the computer as possible: