Day 3: The Process!

Day three of designing every day! So today I got a request from an old and close friend to design a tattoo for  her. I figured this would be a good chance to go through and work on my design process. It's a meta concern but everything I've read about being a good designer says to really work on your overall process of design. I wanted to toss some images up of the process from sketch to photoshop to vector edit. I admit that with the crazy hustle of today (wednesday who knew) that I didn't get much more than a few concept sketches and the final sketch approval and a start on the vector art. What she wanted was

"A tilted halo circling a phoenix feather"

With loose guidelines like that I had a lot of sketching to do, I eventually came up with:

I uploaded the sketch into Raven and started blocking out the shapes as vector images:

 During the whole process I was IMing back and forth with her and discussing details. She liked the initial sketch but wanted to spin the feather counter-clockwise a bit. Also we discussed colors etc. After Blocking the images out I did some test coloring to see if it was going in the right direction. I've heard horror stories about clients coming in with a million revisions that seem to come from left field, so I wanted my process to include as much communication as possible with any prospective clients. By the endo f the whole affair I had the following image.

After that I cleared out the coloring information and exported the image to a raster editor. I want to take some time and get some cool coloring and shading things going and I have a few brushes that I've imported specifically for designing tattoos that mimic what ink can do on skin. So now I'm onto painting the image. Technically this is the second design I've done today since early this morning I also designed and painted an image of Hotei. Since that was done for fun I didn't include it in full here but the image us up on my deviant art site. (( Image of Hotei on my DA page ))

Personal CnC: I had some issues with getting the halo nice and even in the vector editor and the right hand corner of it still irks me. Im going to edit that in the Raster version (since it's a tattoo that shouldn't matter too much) but I've still got a ways to go with my vector editing.


Cheers all

-Brand