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Description
I sometimes get questions from people asking about how I make my art, so I thought I'd put up a piece that shows the making of a drawing from start to finish. This is the piece "Test Subject" that was our very first home page image at AchillesHeelArt.com.

I sometimes do a little quick sketching to work out an idea. I knew I wanted this first cover to have a pulp magazine feel to it, and I wanted a sexy guy being tickled by a machine. After deciding on the best approach, I started roughing in the guy's body and laughing face.

At first I had the idea to make him a sort of prisoner of war, with an evil enemy captor standing behind him. When that captor started to feel a little too Nazi-like to me (which I thought was a bit heavy for our first cover) I replaced him with a scientist, who looks a little more playfully devious rather than all-out evil. I then fleshed out the scene with the mechanical arms and the control panel.

Once the drawing was scanned in, I cleaned up the line work in Photoshop, and made the whites nice and white and the lines darker and crisp.

My next step was to block in the basic color for the figures and background, pretty much like coloring in a coloring book. My trick for doing nuanced shaded color is to take my basic solid color layer and duplicate it. I lock the solid color layer (so I don't accidentally draw on it again) and I use the burn and dodge tools in Photoshop to add shade and highlights to the duplicate layer above it.

Keeping that solid color layer has a benefit: If I ever want to select whole areas of one color again, I can easily do it by using the magic wand tool on the unshaded layer.

Finally, I added the masthead and text, and all the little blurbs about other drawings on the site to give the drawing the appearance of a magazine cover. To further give it an aged pulp feeling, I multiplied a few low-opacity layers of distressed paper over the entire image.

And that's how it's done!

Description
I sometimes get questions from people asking about how I make my art, so I thought I'd put up a piece that shows the making of a drawing from start to finish. This is the piece "Test Subject" that was our very first home page image at AchillesHeelArt.com.

I sometimes do a little quick sketching to work out an idea. I knew I wanted this first cover to have a pulp magazine feel to it, and I wanted a sexy guy being tickled by a machine. After deciding on the best approach, I started roughing in the guy's body and laughing face.

At first I had the idea to make him a sort of prisoner of war, with an evil enemy captor standing behind him. When that captor started to feel a little too Nazi-like to me (which I thought was a bit heavy for our first cover) I replaced him with a scientist, who looks a little more playfully devious rather than all-out evil. I then fleshed out the scene with the mechanical arms and the control panel.

Once the drawing was scanned in, I cleaned up the line work in Photoshop, and made the whites nice and white and the lines darker and crisp.

My next step was to block in the basic color for the figures and background, pretty much like coloring in a coloring book. My trick for doing nuanced shaded color is to take my basic solid color layer and duplicate it. I lock the solid color layer (so I don't accidentally draw on it again) and I use the burn and dodge tools in Photoshop to add shade and highlights to the duplicate layer above it.

Keeping that solid color layer has a benefit: If I ever want to select whole areas of one color again, I can easily do it by using the magic wand tool on the unshaded layer.

Finally, I added the masthead and text, and all the little blurbs about other drawings on the site to give the drawing the appearance of a magazine cover. To further give it an aged pulp feeling, I multiplied a few low-opacity layers of distressed paper over the entire image.

And that's how it's done!