As I began to create my illustrations using the electronic medium, I chose the most obvious solution that would simulate natural media. Programs such as Photoshop and Painter replicate materials from marker to watercolor on many paper surface grains.
Scanning my initial gesture and then using the application to finish the drawing brought tremendous freedom using layers and experimenting with painting effects.
To achieve the best results, a Wacom tablet and pen is absolutely necessary creating pressure sensitive strokes. As intuitive as these graphics program evolved, setting the resolution confined the finished drawing to a specific size. Additionally, editing a pixel illustration can be as labour intensive as erasing and adjusting the natural media drawing.
With the introduction of the brush palette in earlier versions of Illustrator, like most of the fashion industry, used the application to create design flats and technical drawings. Mastering to draw vector shapes brings speed and consistency with the ability to combine shapes, freely scale, change styles and continuously edit shapes. There is an inherent flatness with vectors, but Illustrator has come a long way to combine transparency and effects normally associated with pixel applications.
My new approach to design sketches uses Illustrator instead of Photoshop. Posted above is the before and after of my original scanned gesture and the “vectorized” finished drawing. As I use the Pen and Brush Tool to perfect the shapes, I can adjust the figure on top of the scan. Later, I’ll be posting more detailed tutorials.
