21-Draw-Illustrators-Guidebook-vol-2-ebook-(2021)

CHARACTER DRIVEN ILLUSTRATIONS
WITH KENNETH ANDERSON
I
love drawing characters! I also love
to illustrate. My favorite is when I
combine the two into a character driven
illustration that tells a fun and engaging
story through characters performing
in some kind of drama. While not all
illustrations need to feature characters,
for me, illustrations are more exciting and
entertaining when they do!
In this chapter, I show how to create a
character driven illustration from start to
finish. This is by no means the only way, but
I hope it is helpful for you to learn about my
process.
Illustration at its core is about storytelling
and clearly communicating an idea. I
like to call this a “story moment”—just a
snippet in time of an event unfolding. This
story moment can be simple or complex.
Regardless, this snippet of a story is the
foundation of the whole illustration and
affects mood, setting, and ultimately the
characters.
It is the characters that drive a story
moment and bring an illustration to life.
That is what character driven means—it’s
all about storytelling!
I WILL GUIDE YOU THROUGH
THESE STEPS:
1. Idea generation and how to develop
an illustration from a key story
moment.
2. Research and how to find references
to help develop an idea further by
fleshing out the world of our story.
3. A review of thumbnailing and how
quick sketches can help us problemsolve
and plan out the best approach
to our illustration.
4. Take a deeper look at our characters,
their performances, and how to
effectively use them to bring life to
our illustration.
5. Next, we discuss mood and how our
setting, lighting, and color enhance
our story moment, creating a stage
for our characters.
6. Now we are ready for the final
steps in the process—blocking in
our image, refining, tweaking, and
improving character performances
and making final design choices to
support and enhance our character
driven idea.
For this tutorial, I am using the latest
version of Photoshop and a Wacom
22HD. I want to stress, however, that this
process is not software specific—these
principles and ideas apply to any software
or medium.
For brushes, I mainly use a combination of
Kyle T. Webster’s Chunky Charcoal and the
default Photoshop soft round brush and
122 21DRAW