This self-portrait was created to work out a new illustration technique. I wanted a strong line and texture and limited shading in the color.
The sketch was done old school—non-repro blue pencil in a wire-bound sketchbook. I love non-repro blue because it’s such a preliminary statement, as in “here’s an idea... what do you think?” This was the scribble that Danielle and I agreed felt most like me.
With this drawing I decided to embrace my cliff face of a forehead. Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not really exaggerating it that much.
What you see above is the finished vector art in grayscale. The art was drawn over the original sketch in Adobe Illustrator. It was an all-tools-on-deck process. I used Astropad Studio to draw in Illustrator on my Mac via my iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. With this method, I drew using Dynamic Sketch and other plug-ins from Astute Graphics. If you’re serious about drawing in AI, you have to check out the Astute Graphics plug-ins. There was one more piece of hardware that made this possible—the awesome ElevationLab DraftTable created for the iPad Pro. So much better than some kickstand.
This video shows the finishing work done in Procreate on the iPad Pro. I selected and edited the colors and added texture—mostly with the Bonobo Chalk brush. I like the texture it added to the colors; it provided a speckled airbrush look that seemed well-suited to the illustration style.