The March issue of Nickelodeon magazine has finally hit the stands. A couple of months ago, I painted this cover image, and I've been eagerly waiting for it to come out because I think it's my favorite painting so far.
The concept from the editor was something like, "SpongeBob and Patrick are chewing bubblegum." There was no real gag idea yet, so I played with a bunch of different ideas before settling on this one:
Once the editor approved the sketch,
I tightened up the drawing in pencil.
Here's a screen capture from when I was inking the drawing in Adobe Illustrator. If you click on the image below, you can see a full-size version of my desktop at the time.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceAfter inking in Illustrator, I exported the line art into Photoshop.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceIn Photoshop, I split up the drawing into layers and colored the outlines on SpongeBob and Patrick. Then I saved it and imported it into my favorite painting application, ArtRage 2.5. In this screen grab, I'm blending the colors for Patrick and his pants.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceThis close-up from the ArtRage interface shows a little more detail about how I apply the paint. You can see that I have a reference image open so that I never stray too far from SpongeBob's standard colors. I like to play around and get really sloppy with the digital paint because I know I can always press undo. If I go too far.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceThis is where I start laying in the colors for the sky. The bubble gum will have to wait until I bring it back into Photoshop. Normally I avoid the airbrush tool like the plague, but for painting bubblegum bubbles, it seemed to be the appropriate choice.
Back in Photoshop, I'm drawing the clouds in the sky. That little white scribbles underneath the red cloud is just a guideline. I set down before or using a Photoshop paintbrush to draw the cloud shape. I used a gaussian blur to push the clouds back into the distance.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceIt took quite a while to get those bubbles to look like real bubblegum. Trust me when I tell you that I was looking at dozens of reference photographs to try to capture the right transparency, highlights and shadows.
click on images to see a full-sized screen capture of my workspaceI keep almost all of my elements on separate layers so that the art director can move things around as needed. I also paint way outside the planned crop marks, which gives them a lot of freedom to resize things if they want to. So the finished cover always looks a little bit different than the original.
here are the first eleven
Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Inking
tutorial videos:
Last year I had the pleasure of drawing and painting the cover for the first issue of SpongeBob Comics (see above).
