Illustration Walkthrough Julie Dillon www.juliedillonart.

com
In this tutorial, Im going to take you step-by-step through my creation of my illustration Newborn. I wrote this in 2010 as a pitch for a project that didnt take off, so I figured I should share it rather than let it sit idle on my hard drive.

The given theme was Newborn, and my original idea was to draw a girl who found and was caring for a newborn gryphon hatchling. I wasnt sure what else I wanted to do with that idea yet, so I just started sketching. At first, I wanted to show the moment when the hatchling was born. I thought it would make for a cute, heartwarming scene. The composition in this sketch is a simple pyramidal shape, with the figure and box front and center, and minimal background details. The scene is cropped closely around the girl with her egg. There isnt a lot of movement in the scene, because the focus is more on her happy emotional reaction rather than any action or drama.

While I liked the previous sketch, I decided I wanted to try a different approach. I wanted to play up the feeling that the girl was protecting the newborn gryphon from some lurking danger. In this next scene, the girl has bundled up the gryphon and is running away from her home with it to keep it safe from pursuers. The camera angle is lower to the ground, focusing on the girl as she flees. The curve of the sheet-rope leading down from window shows us that shes climbed out the window. I took a few liberties with the perspective and angles of the buildings, giving the surroundings a slightly exaggerated look to perhaps enhance the feeling that the girl is overwhelmed and scared but this unfamiliar situation. The low angle also helps make the otherwise normal house seem slightly larger and potentially more mencacing. The focus of the illustration is on the girl. The eye moves in a curve from the open window, down the rope and to the girl, directing the viewer straight to the focal point and also showing the path that shes taken as she runs. Without that rope (or a ladder or some other means of escape) hanging from the window, it might look like shes just running through someone elses backyard.

Compositionally, I really liked this draft. I liked the circular movement created by the girl and the building. Narratively, however, I was having difficulty making it make sense. Who is she running from? Why is she scared? I thought to put some lurking men silhouetted in her room and in the bushes as though they were looking for her, but it wasnt reading very well, and I had trouble making the nature of the danger clear based on the image alone. If it were paired with written text, I could use writing to explain her situation, but I wanted to tell the story with a single image alone. In this sketch, I was worried that it might look like she was kidnapping

the baby gryphon rather than trying to protect it, and thats not what I was going for. It had plenty of energy, but was less clear whats going on.

I tried a third approach. This time, the girl is hiding in her room, protecting the hatchling from very obvious and present intruders. Instead of human enemies, shadowy fantasy monsters creep in the window. This changed the narrative, suggesting that maybe in taking home the egg, the girl unwittingly has invited a darker fantasy realm into her otherwise normal life. Theres a sense of danger and tension: Will the girl be discovered? Will she be able to escape?

The main thrust of the composition is the strong diagonal sweep created by the creature coming in from the window and pointing down at the box with the eggshell. A secondary spiral sweep moves our eye from the top left monster down to the girl and the gryphon, helping bring our focus over to the girls scared face. When you first glance at the piece, you are drawn to the monster picking at the egg in the box, and afterwards you notice the girl with the hatchling hiding behind the bed. You can quickly read that the girl is trying to hide her hatchling from these monsters who have an obvious interest in finding them. I wanted the creatures to look vaguely birdlike, like evil, shadowy versions of the gryphon hatchling. Scary, but not too terrifying: this is a dark fairy tale scene, not an outright horror scene.

I want the perspective to be a little exaggerated to enhance the otherworldly nightmarish feel of the scene, but I still referenced a perspective grid to make sure the major lines of the architectural elements were making sense.

Next I worked on developing the sketch further. Rather than focusing too much on details, I focused on defining the general areas of light and dark. There are two main light sources in this scene: the main source from the moonlight coming in through the window, and soft radiant light from the glowing gryphon himself (I like the idea that he glows, thus making it even harder to hide him from prying eyes). I dont want the entire scene evenly lit; I just want to use the light to help direct the eye to the important areas of the scene, rather than overwhelm with the scene with detail. Areas of high contrast will draw the eyes attention, so we want to balance the intensity of light and shadow to help direct the eye around the page to help tell the story. The highest areas of contrast between light and dark are 1) on the monster and egg and 2) on the girl and hatchling, both of which are my focal areas. Ill be painting on top of this sketch later, so it doesnt need to be completely tightly rendered at this stage.

Now I was ready to start adding color. The first thing to do was lay down my basic areas of color. As with the grayscale sketch, I didnt want to focus on details at this stage just yet. I just wanted to block in my main areas of color and further define my light and dark areas. For my color theme, I chose to start with a scene dominated mostly with blue-green. The girls room is probably very bright and colorful in the day, but in the dim moonlight, whatever warm colors are in the scene will be muted and tinged with blue, and therefore I dont want to stray too far from the green-blue-purple range except in focal areas (ie, the girl and gryphon). If I scatter bright warm colors throughout the piece, the lighting will feel more like daylight than moonlight. I created a new layer on top of the grayscale sketch, and set the layers properties to Overlay. This allowed me to tint the sketch without losing any of the detail. I filled most of the scene with bluegreens, with yellow on the gryphon and box, and red on the monster eyes, flooring and bed sheets. The color is still pretty washed out with just the overlay layer, so Ill need to add another color adjustment layer on the next step. The Overlay layer just helps to tint the sketch and keep it from looking too dark and muddy on the next step. We also get a rough feel for how the colors will look in the scene, so we can adjust the color scheme if needed with little effort.

Next, I added another layer on top of the overlay layer, and set the layer properties to Multiply. As before, I just lightly washed areas of color over the scene: in this case, blues over most of the image, with yellow on the gryphon, red on the sheets and monster eyes, and muted brown on the floor. This multiply layer helps darken all the washed out white areas, and make the colors richer. However, without the overlay layer underneath it, it would look muddy and ashen. With the overlay layer and multiply layer both tinting the sketch, we get a nice rich underpainting with our major color areas blocked in. From here we can begin painting.

Next, I created a new layer on top of all the others (layer properties just set to normal), and began to paint. I used a simple circular brush in Photoshop, opacity and flow both set to 100%. Most of my main color and value work was already done, its just a matter of rendering details. Note about Local vs Perceived color: In the full light of day, the bedspread might be pink/red, the floor a warm brown hardwood, and the walls lilac. However, in the soft blue moonlight, the actual perceived the colors as we see them in the scene will be very muted and more bluish in tone. The only true bright reds are the eyes of the creatures, because they are glowing and emitting their own light. All the other reds or browns in the scene (the bedspread, the flooring, the cardboard, etc) are very muted. The color of an object will be affected by quality of light that illuminates it.

You want the colors in your illustration to look like they all exist within the same environment, and often that means toning them down or shifting the hue. Remember to save your areas of highest contrast and saturation for the focal points, so you can control exactly where you want the viewer to look.

Here I started experimenting with the color and composition a little. Sometimes this leads to interesting results, and sometimes you start going off on the wrong track, so always keep copies of earlier drafts that you can refer back to. I liked the purples and reds, but overall it was looking too dingy to be a young girls room, unless she lives in an attic. I started thinking about what the girls room should look like, and what kind of items would be found there. I decided I wanted to show that the girls life has been revolving around this egg that shes found and brought back to her home. She put it in a box and wrapped it in blankets, drew pictures of the egg and its possible inhabitants as she waited for it to hatch, and made preparations to care for it when it did finally hatch. Where she got the egg and where it came from are left for the viewer to ponder.

Unfortunately, in adding details I ended up going completely overboard. I got too caught up rendering little details all over the room and stopped paying attention to the overall image. Thats something that can happen when you zoom in on your picture to work, and dont zoom out often enough to check your composition. Notice that in this draft Ive lost that initial diagonal thrust from the window down to the eggshell that the original sketch had. Its too evenly lit, the values are scattered all over the place, and the scene is starting to lose its depth and flatten out. The scene is more descriptive than atmospheric; it looks like several smaller vignettes all patched together rather than one cohesive environment. I liked the storytelling aspect of the added details, and if my intention was to create an illustration that clearly defined every object in her room , then this would be the path for me to continue taking. There definitely would be a time and place for that sort of illustration; it can be used to great effect. However, in this case, my goal when I started out was to create a relatively realistic atmosphere and to show the threat of danger the girl faced, and this current draft is pulling away from that. By lighting and rendering everything equally instead of applying detail and contrast only in focal points, it starts to take away the sense of movement and cohesiveness. It was time for me to make some tough decisions about where I wanted to take this piece. I needed to decide if I wanted a descriptive illustration, or an illustration that conveyed a mood and atmosphere.

I went back and looked at my original sketch, and after comparing it to my current draft, I took a huge step back. I reestablished the diagonal light coming through the window, and faded out some of the areas that were not focal points. I can still keep a lot of the details from the previous draft, but they need to all look like they sit within the lighting of the space. Although there is always a temptation to render every item in a scene, not everything is going to be evenly lit; items in shadow will have less contrast than items being hit by the light sources.

I redesigned and repositioned the main monster a little. I wanted to exaggerate the shadow he cast upon the bed and the floor, to increase the sense that he is large and ominous. I also added more subtle reds in the bottom of the image to give some movement and contrast from the blue-green upper portion to the warmer colors surrounding the girl and her gryphon.

Notice that although the gryphons egg is lit up, it is not a light source; the is moonlight illuminating its glossy surface and making it glow slightly.

I experimented a little more with the composition and tried out having only the one main visible monster. The monsters face is in shadow, and a separate monster tail cut across the floor around the egg hinting that there are more creatures in the room. I like the spookiness, but I think its a step too far: now its a little too moody and atmospheric.

Here is my final draft. Ive combined elements that I liked from other drafts, and polished it up. Small details are present, but they dont overwhelm or clutter the scene. The scene has some hazy atmospheric elements, but its still clearly a young girls bedroom. There are a few stuffed toys and drawings lying around, but they do not dominate the piece or distract the viewer too much from the main areas of focus. The monster is cloaked in shadow and helps form a strong diagonal line. The girl clutches her new gryphon friend , wrapping him in blankets and hiding him from view. The viewer is left to wonder what happens afterwards, and hopefully will spend time looking at it and thinking about the larger story that I hint at in the finished piece.

Here Ill take a moment and go over painting the girl in detail. Ive laid in the basic areas of color on top of the BW sketch in an Overlay layer. I broadly brushed in muted green, then added yellow over the gryphon and red on the drapery elements. By itself, the overlay layer is very washed out.

To bring out the color more, I put a Multiply layer on top of the washed out overlay layer, and paint light yellow over the gryphon. This intensifies and darkens the color so it isnt as washed out. Notice that since the gryphon is emitting light, Im letting the yellow flood from the gryphon onto the girls face to show that his light is reflecting onto her.

Now Im starting in on the more careful rendering. Ive started detailing the faces and drapery. I hadnt decided fully on the specifics of pose yet, so thats left pretty sketchy for the time being. The girls cheek is still strongly lit by the glow from the gryphon, while the other side of her face is in blue-green shadow. To further enhance the feeling that the gryphon is glowing, Ive added some glowing patches on the bed sheet above him to show that the light is shining through the fabric.

Here I realized that the gryphon was just too bright, so I toned him down quite a lot as I retouched the composition. Ive reworked the girls clothes and the shape of the drapery surrounding her, and worked on her face a little more.

Now Im working some warmth back into the scene, and making the gryphon glow a little more. Right now, the light shining on the girls face feels more like reflected light: soft and gentle instead of glaring. Notice that her clothes and bed sheets all read as being pinkish, despite it being very muted. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the pale light of the scene will fade cool off the areas of warm colors.

Finally, I put more yellow light on the girl, drapery and bedpost, to make it look more like the gryphon was emitting light. I didnt want to go too overboard, though; it doesnt take much to make him stand out, so I want only enough to make him look like a light source, not a spotlight.