Strange Things Art to make your skull gears turn.
This was a fun one. Originally planned to draw a segmented drawing in a separated grid. I didn’t end up following through with that concept, and I still want to use it in the future. Somehow using a grid liked this helped me figure out the composition though, so that was cool.
Dumped it into my ancient Illustrator and went to down with the pen tool. This probably would have been a good candidate to ink with the Cintique, but I wanted to make it vector and scalable. Took me a bit of time to get all the line work down, and after trying a bunch of time to make the grids work, I decided it was time to dump that idea. Put it in a box and added the text on the side…
Decided it needed some depth. Wanted to try an old trick in Photoshop to give it a Manga feel. Went to town building a halftone pattern. I was pumped when I figured out a cool method to do this. Started a Grayscale document with the resolution of 600. Filled it with gray. Changed the document to Bitmap with round halftone setting. Gave me a nice deleter like dot pattern.
Then I dumped the vector line work into a Photoshop doc. I took the deleter pattern and overlayed it over the artwork. Then I used a layer mask to mask out the areas I didn’t want the dot pattern to show (the eye, the cape, etc.)
End result came out RAD. I am so pumped with this one. So happy I got to use this halftone effect and happy with how the composition came out. One of my favorites yet.
It’s available on Redbubble and Teepublic.
