The Nancy Experiment

I had a rough sketch of Nancy Drew, and decided to finish it off by experimenting with the same technique I tried with the rooster illustration . I've decided I like the method, but I'm not too happy with the way Nancy herself turned out. There's something that bugs me about her face especially. Anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to show the different steps...

click on thumbnails for larger image

This is the first sketch - done quickly with good ol' pencil and paper. Poor Nancy looks a bit crazed.

I scanned the sketch, and started making adjustments in photoshop. I have a tendancy to draw eyes too big, so first thing was to shrink the eyes. Once I was reasonably happy with the revisions, I printed this out.

Using a lightbox, I redrew Miss Nancy, and spent a while doing lots o' shading. I used a blue colorerase pencil, mostly because I had one sitting around (scanned grayscale...). Her face lost the original expression, but I didn't feel like trying to fix it.

After scanning the finished drawing into photoshop (and moving her left arm a bit), I made the lines into a channel, filled it, and made it the top layer. I made lots of layers underneath - one for hair, one for skin, one for her shirt, etc. and then did a little bit of shading under the lines.

The finish... After some basic shading under the lines, I colored the lines a few shades darker than what was underneath. Then on a layer above the line drawing, I did lots of touch-ups and highlights all over the place. I experimented a little with custom brushes, but I mostly used the Spatter brushes in the default palette. To finish it off, I put a texture of a piece of scanned velvety paper over the top of the whole thing.

So there 'tis. Time for some sleuthin'!
-maryn