Step by Step

1. Once the piece has been inked I go back in and add texture and shading with a B pencil. Sometimes I get obsessive and shade, smear it with a paper towel and then deepen the shading with a 2B or darker. For this illustration only one level of shading seemed necessary. I’m going to be busy enough in Photoshop.

2. Once the illustration has been scanned and put together (my scanner is only 9″x12″ and the drawing is 12.75″x16.50″) I make adjustments for contrast, convert to grayscale to remove any weird color from the image and then convert back to RGB so I can begin coloring.

3. For this illustration I’ve added a sort of sepia tone colorized layer. This both keeps me in the mood of this being a historical piece and give me a base color to work from. I’ll be working on a number of different layers back and forth.

4. This layer is, at the moment my main color layer. The colors here are put down mostly flat. Shading and highlighting will probably be added in separate layers. I’m learning to use the burn and dodge tools so I may use them on this layer. Not sure yet.

5. And here we have the illustration with all the layers turned on. Looks a bit of a mess, eh?