1When I get busy I tend to just start piling stuff in my work area. Pretty

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2 Tiger Tutorial All Content Copyright 2010 Glitschka Studios I don t do a ton of pro-bono work but this was for a good cause: a diabetes fundraiser poster with a jungle theme. They asked if I d specifically illustrate a White Tiger for them. Though my work schedule was very busy and I d been turning down a lot of work, I agreed to help out. Over the course of a two day period, as I had down time, I created the art you see ll see below. I ve illustrated more cartoony tiger characters before but never one like this and never a White Tiger which was a bit challenging due to the color limitations. I was happy with how it turned out and sent them a PDF they could print out to show their board of directors. [Cue ominous music] The lady who was my contact for the board said, The Tiger is far too aggressive and intimidating can you make him more playful? My response: No. He s a Tiger, you want him intimidating that s why they are so cool. (And in my head I am thinking: Lady you re not paying for this so you don t get to be picky.) Well needless to say they ghosted me on the project. But it s not a total loss, I do have a cool Tiger illustration now and I documented my process for this tutorial. Illustrative Design Creative Process These tutorials are meant to help you discover, enhance and facilitate your own creative growth and skills. So don t feel obligated to take my comments or examples as gospel. Use them as spring boards to explore, experiment and have fun developing your own creative process. That is how you ll benefit most from these tutorials. Any referenced source files for this tutorial can be downloaded for FREE at by searching for the tutorial with the same name. 1When I get busy I tend to just start piling stuff in my work area. Pretty soon it gets out of hand and I can t find anything and then mini landslides start to happen and it s at that point I usually clean things up. No this really isn t part of my creative process but it s just a realistic peek into my daily creative life if you will. If you look hard you can see my Tiger sketch behind a few magazines in this picture. 2When ever I begin a project where I am creating something I ve never done before I like to put together style boards like these. Not really boards just groups of images to wet my creative appetite and get the juices flowing. 1

3 3 The most important reference is those you can pull from real life. If I am going to draw a tiger I ll be far more successful at it if I take visual cues off of the real deal. Doesn t matter how well you think you know a subject or theme you can always improve your creative batting average by referencing photographic scrap. Pixar does it, so why not you? 4 When I work in the style I have chosen for this project I work in layers meaning I rough out my art not concerning myself with the line weight. All I m concerned about this point is composition, pose and form. I tend to draw, re-draw, erase and re-draw until I have these three things thoroughly worked out to my satisfaction before moving to the next step. 5 I wasn t completely confident in regards to how I should form the stripes on the Tiger? Since this Tiger was going to be a White Tiger I knew I had to have them perfectly placed to help shape and add volume to the body so I drew them on a separate piece of vellum. Good stripe reference helped me to refine where I should place them etc. Once I had the stripes refined I scanned in both sketches and composited them in Photoshop, saved out a tiff and printed that out to draw my final refined sketch from. 2

4 You ll notice the print out of my rough sketch composited in Photoshop spans two sheets of paper. I am 6 drawing my final refined sketch at this larger size to better capture the exact detail I want in the final art. The teeth of the Tiger would have been just too small to accurately draw them if I fit it to one sheet of paper. I ll weld the two refined sketches together in Photoshop and then save out a tiff to build on top of in my drawing application. At this point I should be able to get a clear picture on what the final will end up looking like in general so it s important to scrutinize your work now before you start building it. 7I scan in my two parts and take them into Photoshop to weld the images together. Now that I have my final image of my refined sketch 8 composited I save out a tiff image for placing into my drawing program so I can build my vector shapes on top of it. 9 Sometimes it s just easier to create the vector shapes by punching out with other shapes rather then trying to build it all as one shape to begin with. This is easily done using the pathfinder palette. I created the general nose shape then using the circle tool punched out these shapes from the nose shape to get the final shape I desired. 3

5 Note as you look at these images that my vector shapes follow my refined pencil sketch almost identically. I rarely ever alter from my drawing when building. I ll make modifications as I go along but I already know what I want to build so there is zero guess work at this point and that is very important. Work out your art prior to going digital and over time you ll see a huge improvement in your final work. I follow this same routine to create all my vector art for this Tiger. Be patient and eventually you ll develop a natural sense on where to place your next point, how to adjust your bezier curves and thus achieve the level of precision you want in your artwork. Good creative habits turn into well-honed skill sets over time. For more information regarding the building of precision vector shapes I highly suggest the book Logo Font & Lettering Bible by Leslie Cabarga. You can get more information about it in the Resources section of the web site here. These three images show the fundamental build process I use for this style. I create 10all my shapes, note that I don t worry about them being separate shapes because I ll be fusing them. If necessary after fusing them I ll go back in and do minor tweaks where two shapes come together if the bezier curve needs some massaging etc. The fusing of the shapes is done via the pathfinder palette. I like calling this Fuse because it makes more since to me then what Illustrators engineers decided to call it which is Add to Shape. Leave it to engineers to use three words to describe what could have been one word Fuse. But I digress. I decided to show you this process of fusing before I actually did it to everything. You ll learn why in a few steps. 4

6 This timage shows all of my vector paths complete. I love this point of the 11process because from here on out it s pretty much down hill. The hard work is done...or so I thought. You see when you work digitally you re not really done until you have Saved what you have done. And sometimes you forget to save your work and then drawing application suddenly quits on you and you panic and think to yourself I don t think I saved my file in the last forty five minutes before the app crashed! So, even though I had all my vector paths done I lost them when my app crashed. Basically I lost 45 minutes of work and spent another 45 minutes re-building what I had lost. Thankfully it wasn t too much just the tail and all the minor tweaks I had done. Before I started fusing the whole body I decided to test 12the head shapes first and make any adjustments I thought necessary. When I fused the head shapes I noticed the outer line of the mouth detail needed to be fattened up a bit so I did that. Now that I knew the Tigers head was fine I moved along to the rest of the body. Everything was meshing together nicely. 5

7 Here s one trick I learned from an old creative director 13years ago when illustrating. It s a good rule of thumb to at least consider when you illustrate. Some styles it won t apply to obviously but for this specific style it really does make a difference and pushes the art towards a more custom look. The outer thickness of the TIger art needed to be increased. The fist image shows it as is, the second image shows me experimenting with a good thickness to achieve the desired result. The problem with it however is I didn t want all the points rounded off as shown. The pink shows the thickness I am after compared to the original thickness. In order to edit the points and sharpen them I had to covert the stroke to a path, delete the inner shape not shown then go into each of the points I wanted to be sharp and edit them manually. Some areas I kept rounded off such as the claws and else where as you look at images further in this tutorial. Once I had my B&W art in place I printed out a few copies and using a black 14pen I figured out where I should add more black to help the depth and clarity of the art. If you look at the left and right image the red circled areas show where I added more black to improve the art. I did this through out the entire Tiger. I also circled areas with my red pen as mental notes to go in and adjust those areas so they look better too. 6

8 Using my marked up print out I visually refer 15to it in order to edit and modify my B&W vector artwork. If these changes are too complex I d scan it in and use it as a guide but these are relatively simple modifications so I am not doing that. Look closely at these images and notice how the clarity of the art improves. That is what you re always after: making small but powerful improvements as you go along at each stage of your project. Now that my base art is done I am ready to start working on the coloring detail. As a digital illustrator I am alway jumping back and forth 16from analog to digital. To work out my shading which will make up the color for the most part in this project I simply printed out a few copies of my final B&W art and using a regular number 2 pencil I freehand in the shading. The only thing I can say about this part of my process is the more you do it the better you get at figuring out how to form you shading so it enhances the artwork and adds dimension and depth to it. One thing that helps is to know upfront where you want your light source to come from and then everything should adhere to that universal attribute. If you have shading that contradicts the darkest black shadows in your base art then it s simply not going to look as good. I always prefer more dramatic lighting from a direct source. I also prefer organic black ice tea too during the summer months. 7

9 As I said earlier if my sketches or modifications are too 17 complex I ll scan them in, place them into my drawing application and then build on top of them to create the new content. Such is the case with the shading. I follow my scanned in sketch creating my vector shading on the Tiger. Then using the pathfinder palette I take a copy of the Tiger shape and the shading shape I ve built and using the Shape Modes I create the final shading shape using the Intersect Shape Areas command. (Once again the engineers could have just called it Intersect. ) I repeat this same build process to create all my shading shapes until I have them complete. This shows my final color art for the TIger. All my shading has been created, detail for the eyes, mouth 18etc. have been added as well. 8

10 This is a quick four image review of the build process. 19 First you need a tight refined sketch that leaves no guess work as to how or what you need to build. Think of it as a road map for your vector paths. Second is the construction of your actual vector shapes. Remember you re following the tight sketch underneath them. Don t be afraid to zoom in and get precise. Embrace your bezier curves they are your friend. Third is fusing (Add to Shape) of your vector paths to form your base B&W art. Take the time to self art direct your work. Print it out, scrutinize it and play around with the details until you dial it in before you move to color. Fourth is building your color. Think through how your color interacts with your base art. Avoid visual tension and work out your shapes and color so it only improves the end product. Bottom line with each part of the process take your time and learn to enjoy refining your art and you ll end up getting far more satisfaction from it. This shows the final files I provided to the client. I decided to give them 20a suggestion for the background on the poster to possibly help sway their opinion but to no avail. And even though they didn t use the art I was happy with the outcome. I still may go back to this art some day and create a standard orange tiger version from it. In any regard I hope this tutorial helps you to focus your skills and have the Eye of the Tiger when you create your art. 9