I was approached by gearfuse.com to illustrate a banner graphic for their new weekly column, Unevenly Distributed, written by John Brownlee. The column is going to cover a lot of different tech topics, and their impact both historical and on the future, so I immediately knew I wanted to do an amalgamation of images for the banner.
Click through to see some of the step-by-step work in progress of this piece!
The timeline for the project was pretty tight, so I came up with two preliminary thumbnails. We went with the first sketch.
The next step was to clean up the sketch and nail down the details. Initially all the buildings were futuristic, but we decided to change a couple of them to less modern looking structures. Also, added a zeppelin. Both to break up the monotony of the buildings and because who doesn’t appreciate a zeppelin? We have one here in San Francisco and it’s always a little amazing to see it floating across the skyline.
A couple of color roughs were the next step, and this was the decided upon scheme, with a few tweaks here and there.
The inked line art, which means I’m getting close to the finish line! For a little while I was doing any highly detailed and tiny line art digitally, even though I find the Wacom tablet and pen considerably slower and more difficult to use. The computer does have the advantage of being able to zoom in to 1600% which is nice when you’re drawing tiny details. But now that I’ve finally switched from felt pens like Microns and Copics to a set of Speedball nibs, I’m getting much finer, steadier lines and less bleeding. With the advantage of speed and ease of use. So I’m back to doing a lot more traditional inking.
And the final step was the digitally colored piece at the top of the entry. Since this was intended as a web graphic, digital color was the obvious choice – traditional media never reproduces as well in color for me, and I wanted that digital ‘glow’ to come through.