Samurai Monkey
The protector of the enchanted white bamboo forest.
Samurai Monkey started with a sketch I posted on flickr. It had a lot of positive feedback and it was too much fun to resist from finishing it. So I thought that I would share my process a little bit since I also get many emails asking about how I go about my drawings.
First I take the sketch I’ve made on paper and either scan and trace it or redraw it in Illustrator starting with simple black and white line art.
After the line art is to my liking, I begin trying out different color combinations and compositions. I have a trend of going with more realistic colors for things I can relate to in real life, so with some good advice from a friend, I tried to avoid that this time and go with some unusual colors to push me in a new and different direction with the colors.
I liked the feel of him standing on top of the fallen insect a bit more than him flying through the air, despite it’s more dynamic feel. But with him sitting on top, you kind of wonder “what next?” more than focusing on the action itself. But now the base colors are in and I’m happy with the composition so I move on to the shading. This is pretty much taking transparent blacks, whites, and other shades of colors and imagining the scene in my mind to figure out the lighting. I highlight or shade based on the contour I had in mind while drawing him and try and emphasize those as well.
I also work on the background in tandem, but for simplicity I’ve just focused on the figures for the demonstration. But that’s all there is to it, I mainly just have lots of fun while drawing and experimenting with everything.
You can view the final drawing of Samurai Monkey here.
