cartoon

right, so people have been asking, so here's the process of tooth & jaw.  i start on strathmore 400 series medium drawing paper at least 8"x11".  i use a woodless pencil, 2b, for my gesture drawing.  i start nice and loose and tighten it up as i go.  at this stage i'm just worried about proportion and anatomy.  i try not to get too uptight here because i'll clean it up in the next step where most of the work is done, and the final version will usually only run between 2 and 4 inches.

 then i throw a piece of tracing paper over the original drawing.  here i render it with a nice soft lead, usually 4b, and blend it with a variety of blending stumps and my fingers.  i scan this into photoshop at 600 dpi.  i use photoshop 7 'cause i'm poor and cs5, or whatever it's up to now, is for sissy graphic designers.

then i select different parts, jacket, skin, etc. and save them as channels.

  then i overlay pre-painted textures and solid grey tones into the channels.

at this point i'll call it quits if i'm happy with it, or, as in this case, i'll print it out on bristol and paint over it with black and white acrylic to flesh it out more.  then i scan it all back in, hit it with a slight gaussian blur to eliminate any moire pattern from the print, maybe overlay some more texture and play with the contrast.  so, after 13 hours i have half a cartoon, which the mountain x will tell me is too offensive to run because i guess they think their readers are a bunch of sensitive 9 year olds who need to be protected from a cartoon.(i don't think that so i've run the unedited version above, the version that ran should be burned clean).  anyway, i'll arrange the different elements at 8.5"x5" and letter it.

   detail of the final version.