After drawing the piece I usually scan it and do a rough coloring digitally, but in this piece, I watercolored before scanning. This is the digital start point, either with a rough color or watercolored, we have a general idea of the colors and mood of the piece. From now on, what I usually do is mixing the scanned line with the color base. This can be done with several methods, from any artistic filter to the usual finger tool, anyway you can mix the general color with local lines is good. This is what it’s shown on this third step, the basic coloring and illumination of the scene.

From now on, it’s really some easy stuff, nearly of the piece is thought and it’s the time to materialize those ideas. I usually work step by step, locally. In this fourth step some work is done on the red character and the boat.

After some retouches, nearly all the detail on the boat is done, so I continue working on the backgrounds.

Sometimes I feel the scene lacks of some point of interest visually speaking, in this piece almost all the piece has a dominant red, so I chose to draw a secondary light source, in this case, as the picture depicts a fantasy scene, I chose to put a a blue torch, because it would be a really interesting light source and would mix well with the main character and the boat.

In the last two steps are above all, I worked on the face of the character, the face drawn on paper worked well there, but it was not working on this stage of the picture. I left a rough background because I didn’t want to draw attention from the viewer, and the blue torch worked really well with the girl character.

This is it. The finished piece. I hope all this is somehow useful for anyone, if so, don’t doubt to leave feedback on twitter, facebook or google plus. Thanks for reading!

I thought a year ago, or something like that, that maybe people who looks at my work at jong.es may be interested on watching my sketchbooks blog. Or maybe, all the audience I still have from my old illustration blog could be redirected to my own work. Those things could not be done with that fragmentation.

So I’ve mixed up everything. I’ve spent hours and hours ahead of the database, making things right. It’s been hard. But now it’s done and will be much more easier from now on.

I intend to make this blog useful for people interested in illustration sharing those little tricks one learns with years of experience and following one of the initial intentions I had with El fatuo diario gráfico back in 2005. Those tutorials will share space with my sketchbooks, and the archives of my previous blogs Alerta Naranja, jongarcia.info and El fatuo diario gráfico.

Be very welcome and enjoy if you can.

Enjoy and have a great year!

Day or night. Siesta or regular sleep. You choose. And with this design you can choose the appropriate mood for you.
Two color design, one side depicts one city-planet during day time and the other side during night time.

Óleo sobre lienzo 81×65 cm / 32×25.5 inches

Just take notice that if you want to leave feedback on some of the tumblr or indexhibit templates, or any other goodie by the way, you can still drop by goodies.uservoice.com, but have in mind which template, design or goodie are you leaving feedback on, since I cannot identify them when they’re not named. Thanks all and sorry for the inconvenience.

Brushes illustration timelapse from Jon García on Vimeo.

You might want to watch their site to read their manifesto, watch their galleries and, why not, buy their tours.

Link: Criminals of 1871-1873