Lot's of people was asking me to show full video of my work process. I've just found this old one created in 2014 but it is still actual and I can say nothing much changed from that time in my style of working. Here is the video and detailed text explanations with screenshots.
Sketching
Sketching is the first step which is the most important. Without cool sketch I can not start. I will have no inspitation. When I have nice sketch ready I got the feeling to color it immideately. I've done these sketches with pen on paper in my sketching book and during the long 8 hours flight started to play with for the New iPad 4 Retina and Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 1. This iPad was the prize we won with my wife together. I've sent her illustration for Payoneer debit cards contests, asked my facebook friends to like that post and it got over 150 likes so we won it but completely had no clue what to do with it since we both was working on Macbook Pros that time and was satisfied with it.
So I've chosen this sketch to play with. Actually I don't know why I liked it :P But I thought it's cool and anyway I had nothing to do flying long way through all the Russia from Saint Petersburg to my hometown where I was born in Far East, Khabarovsk. It's near Japan by the way and people are kidding about bears on the streets but this is true. It's rare but still it happens. In winter time hungry bear may wake up and go to the city looking for food entering supermarkets. A bear or a wild pig.
Sorry... I've chosen this sketch.
Made the sketch as a Multiplied layer on top of others and made it transparent for 20-30%. Then I've started to add layers filling them with solid shapes.
I was trying to check different brushes and then my wife took an iPad and added the mustache to that guy. We laughed, I loved that and added some Georgian hat (I though so at that time).
I've decided to leave that mustache and continue adding details. Locked the layer transparency, switched the brush transparency for about 20% and started to add lights and shadows.
And some details as well...
Than thought of changing his shirt color to match the hat.
I had to add more layers with food and vegetables but iPad 4 memory is limited if you draw on A4 paper format it allows you to have only 8 layers. So I had to flatten few old layers together to add new one and continue.
Drawing food in the plane is something... Usually during the 8 hours flight there are two meals but still I was always looking for snacks.
Then I've started to add that blue tint to make it look more colorific and realized that it's not a hat but a vegetable - marrow or how do call that? Cocozelle?
This was the final. I've added transparent texture on top with soft light overlay.
How do you like it?
P.S. Same things you can draw even with your finger but you will spend little bit more time. Best thing which I've tried for drawing such a characters and simple illustrations is iPad Pro with Apple Pencil for now in my oppinion. The word "Tutorial" in the preview made with that Pencil by the way.
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS