A Creative Year

I recently had the opportunity to work on a unique illustration project. Superbolt, Inc. is updating their 12 minute corporate video with new graphics, new footage- new everything. I’ve been working on this for quite a while as it is a side project with no set time table.

At one point in the video, 2 cartoon drawings are used to show the dangers of swinging heavy sledgehammers around. These were created over 12 years ago. They look dated, unprofessional, and were probably colored using crayons:

I eagerly put pencil to paper in an effort to bring my own little cartoon workers to life.

My goal was to make the drawing look more refined, have better color, and look crisp and professional. The basic scene was to remain the same and communicate the same message. Here is an initial sketch:

I then scanned the sketches that I liked and began outlining them in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted nice, crisp vector outlines for our scene. Here is an example of this completed process:

After that I had to decide if I was going to color the scene in Illustrator, with finishing touches in Photoshop, or just take the whole thing into Photoshop. I decided on the latter since my coloring skills in Illustrator are a little rough, and I feel much more comfortable in Photoshop. Also, I hope to do some digital painting soon and this was an opportunity to try a few techniques.

I laid down basic color, put the background in, and then went back to do shadow and highlights. This is supposed to be a cartoon and I kept the coloring simple and straightforward, while trying to clearly separate all the elements and characters.

After the two scenes were finished and approved, I flattened all the layers, sized them appropriately to be imported into the Premier Pro video project, and that’s all she wrote. The images are a vast improvement over what was, everyone here is happy with them, and considering this is something that is not my area of expertise, I am happy with the results. What do you think?