How do you go from a sketch to finished and rendered image?
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What is your process of advancing from a sketch to a finished drawing?
Lately, I have been having an artistic crisis on how to finish my illustrations by this I mean moving from a sketch to a finished illustration. Do I let the lines show through, do I paint over them.... How do I render? Painterly, rendered, cellshaded or drawing/color pencil or comicbooks style or flat color... Sometimes I feel like I may be over rendering things but when trying out different ways to do it with sharper edges and shading, it does not feel right. I have been looking at how different artists render their finished illustrations and now I cannot decide on a way to do it. On one hand I really like pencil drawing and feel like sometimes my pencil sketch looks better than the finished illustration. On the otherhand, I like the soft pastel or painterly style and atmospherical haze that you can achieve with it.
How do you go from a sketch to a finished illustration and how do you render?
Illustrator & Visual Artist
https://hakepe.myportfolio.com/ -
Hi @hakepe, looks to me like you’ve got a pretty good understanding of taking a pencil sketch to finished colored rendering.
Everything in between is a matter of style I suppose; however, I can totally see your pencil sketches in a middle grade novel.
If you’re curious how I take a piece from sketch to final, you can see my process here.
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@jeremy-ross Thank you. I had a look at your process, seems that we have a similar approach to it. I always like to get rid of the white first, so usually the first thing that I do, is to establish a background color and local colors.
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This looks awesome. Think you did a great job….
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I like both your pencil work, and your rendered piece.
If it is any help, I just want to let you know that you are not alone on having this artistic crisis. I think I struggle of deciding how to do the final artwork for every project I worked on. I am not very faithful to one style or one medium. So this opens up all sort of questions once I am half-way through the thumbnail stage for a book. Mostly, I ended up rendering the work digitally because of time constrains. Even that, I began to question if I am choosing the best brushes for this particular book, etc...
But lately, I have been less and less content with working digitally. I have been experimenting working with pencil, and color it digitally last summer. I also paint some of the background with watercolour/gouache, and combine elements in photoshop. It is very fiddly. I have one book this year that I am going to get through with this process. The sample pieces were well received. But every piece took about 1 week of not knowing what to do at all, and 2 weeks of fiddling .
On one hand, I came to accept this is just part of the art-making: we think about medium, marks, brushes, and the look and feel of the final result; On the other hand, it is frustrating when we are in the middle of all these choices.
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It sounds like you just aren’t sure of what style you want do. I suggest spending some time checking out work and finding some artists you really admire and see what their finished illos look like. Are they loose letting lines show through or d o they have distinct line work or are they painterly? It’s up to you how finished you want your work to appear!
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As already said, it looks like you already a very able to take a sketch to a finished piece. It feels like “* On one hand I really like pencil drawing and feel like sometimes my pencil sketch looks better than the finished illustration. On the otherhand, I like the soft pastel or painterly style and atmospherical haze that you can achieve with it.*” is your biggest conundrum. I’d say that the style you choose is very dependent on the job you are currently doing, or the goal you want to achieve. Sometimes a pencil sketch-like piece works better than a very painterly approach. Just because you can doesn’t mean you have to.
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@niels What I've found personally is that "not feeling right" feeling your describing seems at the end of the day to be growth happening, at least from what I've found. I'm not super comfortable with it and it's not my default way of doing things, but the more I do things that don't quite feel right, I end up folding little tid-bits into my process that end up looking right once I've had a chance to "Josh-ify" them for lack of a better term.
I think ultimately that's what we're after when we do things like master studies or do things in other people's styles, right? I mean, in the end we're not going to draw, paint or finish things like who we're copying, but we're definitely got to take some of those characteristics back into our own work.
If I didn't do anything else I feel like most of my stuff would end up rendering out the same basic way, which I guess in the end is what we're describing at all with our style. But the more I push and look at things I don't always do, and add technique, the more tiny little things make their way into the process. It has the same flavor, but I can definitely tell I'm using a far bigger box of tools to get the job done now compared to years ago.
