Vector Genius Tutorials

Why did you first start to create art?

    I started drawing when I was really young. I liked to draw my favorite things like superheroes and cartoons and this motivated me in the future to continue drawing and take up the trade as a career..

What is your preferred subject and why?

    I always prefer sequential art with superheroes as the subject. It is just what I have always enjoyed doing. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the plot could be, comics are just plain old fun to me.

What is your preferred medium and why?

    I always do my preliminary work and rough sketches in traditional media first. This helps to keep a flow or life in my drawings that sometimes a full digital piece can lack. When I ink and color my work I use Adobe Photoshop. I like to render things with a wet watercolor or marker feel.

Who or what are you inspired by?

    My biggest inspirations are Stuart Immonen, Pepe Larraz, Masashi Kishimoto, Capcom’s artist: Bengus and Kinu Nishimura. I am also inspired heavily Japanese and Korean manga. I admire the manga artists I follow because they continuously pumping out 16 page chapters of their original stories every week. Some of the creativity and originality behind them is just mind blowing to me.

How do you feel when someone interprets your artwork differently?

    Doing comics is tough sometimes because it can be a bit of a niche and I run into some people who overlook black and white penciled pages for full color illustrations.  When someone misinterprets my work I always try to hear them out and analyze their perspective to see if if there is anything I can use to improve my future artwork. I am never really dissapointed from a bad critique. It just lights a fire under my feet to get working on my next piece.

How has your work developed through the years?

    I have come a long way in the past four years alone. Though it does not seem like a lot of time when I start to think about it. The years went by so fast. I have developed my compositions and detailing techniques tightly. It has been only recently, the past year or so, that I finally honed down my color sense and style application to my lineart. I am also dabbling a bit more type in some of my more design works.

Do you listen to music when you create your art?

       All the time! I am huge fan of South Korean pop. Way before the whole Gangnam Style pop culture craze. Korean pop is fun, bubbly and just plain catchy. It is what I listen to at any kind of time I need or want to create some art. South Korean pop is a major influence and inspiration for my fashion illustrations, which are my guilty pleasure.

Patrick Benjamin – Vector Genius Photoshop Tutorial – June 2012

This was an environment concept illustration I did to help me piece together some of the locales in a comic book project  I’m working on. This particular thing is a gratuitously-armed water-bound fortress for coastal defense.

Step 1

I first drew out the whole thing in pencil, working out my shapes from my imagination and a collection of reference of various stuff from WW1 and WW2 – concrete bunkers, field fortifications, flakturms, etc. This took me a couple hours of diddling around until I had the kind of look I was going for – big and menacing. Then I went over the whole thing with a ballpoint pen to get my lines in nice and tight.

With this sort of illustration, I know it’s the drawing that’s going to be doing most of the heavy lifting, so I have to make sure I get that right before I move on to anything else.

Step 2

After getting it scanned in, I started blocking in the large sections of color with the pen tool in photoshop. My initial colors are always super garish so I can keep them separated more easily.

After I get all that done, I start fiddling. I like starting my colors this way, because I can quickly change whole areas just by double-clicking the layer and fooling with the color picker until I find a basic scheme that works.

Step 3

Then comes the ‘stuff’ – I paint in some sky smudginess, aerial debris, etc, and throw some texture on top of the fortress itself to give it more ‘grit’.

After that, I start fiddling with adjustment layers to non-destructively edit the whole thing until I get a tighter color scheme going on. At this point, it’s starting to look kind of fearsome!

Step 4

Next is all of the optical effects, both in front…

…and behind. The glow and lens flare bits are stuff I hand-paint in there.

Finished!

A few more final touches in the form of a color balance adjustment layer and some additional painted bits, and we are set!

This should be appearing somewhere inside of my comic book project when I wrap it all up in a year or so

Patrick Benjamin is a professional illustration enthusiast who persists on a diet of charcoal and sunlight. www.tetchist.com