STEP BY STEP // creating a promotional image (Patreon)

Welcome back my wonderful Patrons. i hope you're doing well, whether you're in confinement or not (if not, you'll be in confinement soon o__o)

Luckily my work goes on, so I want to share with you the last thing I did: it's a door sign that will be given as a promotional gift for my new book "Les Soeurs Grémillets", out in August if everything goes well.

SO: the editor gave me the "gabarit", the size and shape of the door sign. The image must obviously fit this shape. It may look difficult but it's ultra-funny! I love challanges, and creating an image in a rigid, weird shape is a nice challange.

I did the rough drawing digitally. This allowed me to move the elements here and there to fit the shape without having to re-draw everything 1000 times!

Once I had every element in the right place, I printed the rough drawing;

I did the definitive drawing on my light-table. I don't use ink in this project. The inking is done with mechanical pencil. I do this because I want a soft, "artistic" feeling.

I add some shadows with grey watercolors.

Then I scan it and hop, back to digital!

I color the drawing on a "densité linéaire +" layer (sorry, I don't know how it is called in english  *___*). It's the layer that allowes you coloring everything but pure white ( it's not "multiply" for it darkens too much the drawing)

Some grey is still visible , so I put a "color" layer between the drawing and the "densité linéaire +" layer. This "color" layer allowes me to have brighter colors, especially for skin and hair (you can see the difference between image 15 and image 16).

Then I put all those little lights (eyes, lips, nose ...) that I love too much :) reminiscence of my manga crush!

Then, the background: it's a sky texture I did time ago: ecoline on paper, with teethbrush stars (a technique we used a millennial ago!)

The moon is a picture taken from internet, and modified to look not too realistic.

A bright outline around the characters adds a touch of magic. As I said, I wanted to be neat and simple for the target is to be clearly visible hanging on a door!

The text sais "members only" (more or less). It explains the "badass" expressions of the girls :) I'm not satisfied about the text so I'll try something different (I have some more days before the printing, so I can let it "rest" a little and have a second look later).

I put a screenshot of my layers, just in case; but I use a very old, "vintage" photoshop version, so I don't know if you can find the same layers on yours. My advise is to scan your drawing, open it on photoshop and play with all the layers, until you find the effect you need and like. I learned like this :)

I hope it's been useful

once again, THANX a lot for supporting this Patreon project of mine!

stay safe, bros and sistas

A.