Digital Sketching

I came across these icons I illustrated for an article on contraceptive technologies in Popular Science last March and thought it might be interesting to show that although I use good ‘ol pencil and paper to do most of my sketches, I sometimes sketch on the computer.

I can quickly generate shapes and repeating objects for the sketch than doing it by hand. It might seem odd, but I’m most comfortable using the mouse (instead of my drawing tablet) to draw vector lines in Adobe Illustrator. The handiest part is that in many cases I can pull the vector lines and shapes from the sketch and bring them into Adobe Photoshop to use as masks as I render the final art.

My approach is the same as with pencil and paper. I begin blocking in areas and shapes with light lines to get the general, rough composition down, and then I draw over them in more detail in darker lines.

So, why the blue lines you might ask? When I started working way back when before computers were so tightly integrated into the workflow of graphic arts, we used non-photo blue pencils to sketch and layout compositions in our black and white line art illustrations. Of course, we would come back in, ink the final art directly over the blue line sketch, and shoot it on the photo-stat camera for reproduction. As you can guess, the ink lines appear in the reproduction, while the blue pencil lines do not. I really love the editable feel and freedom of using this color of blue for line sketching. You could say, my relationship with the blue pencil in sketching is very much like the relationship Linus van Pelt has with his blue blanket in Peanuts. Even if it is a digital blue pencil.