Hipster Grasshopper - Marker Demo

For this last weeks post I wanted to show the process on how I do my marker art.

So I just started trying out markers last semester and I'm not amazing at them just yet, but I also wanted to highlight a fellow artist.  Adam Munoa (http://www.adammunoaart.com/) is an amazing artist.  He just graduated from UVU in Illustration.  Before that he was a graphic designer and he did designs for the cars he worked on.  Now he does commission work for all sorts of all people and working on a couple movies that he wasn't allowed to talk about.

He was also the Illustration club president when I first started going to that stuff and I have learned a lot from this guy.  His marker work is phenomenal and I took his process and have been trying to make it my own.

So here it goes.

This is my bo staff fighting, fancy coffee drinking grasshopper.



I was a Bo fighting Grasshopper before it was cool.



 

Here he is in action:

 

And finally:



Hipster grasshopper spills his fancy coffee

I can pick out right away some of the mistakes with my markers.  They aren't evenly spread (how do you evenly spread makers you ask?) and I used too much white highlights.  So we're going to take one of these and go through my process.

 

First you draw it out and ink it.  I'm not very proficient at brush pens just yet, so I used an ordinary pen and I didn't do anything too fancy.

I then use my markers and color it in.  I have a set of Utrecht markers and I go them before they were bought out by Blick (I believe that they make them slightly different now).  To make markers lay down evenly you have to move fast before it dries, or give it a couple of layers.  I only used one layer for this, which is probably why it's all splotchy.

Right now it doesn't look like much, just shapes of solid color.

Sorry it's blurry; dumb, cheap phone camera.

Here's a close up after I've put in some shadow.  That gives it a much more dynamic look and makes the colors much more interesting and smooth.

After that I go over it in color pencil. I use prisma color pencils, they blend really nicely with the markers.  I try to add a little bit a subtly with color with the pencils.  So I had warms to my darks and cools to my lights (or sometimes vice versa when I feel like it) and I just really try to make the marker colors pop and sometimes reinforce hard edges or make hard edges soft.

After that I use a white gel pen to add in some small highlights (don't over use this (as seen from my above pictures I kind of went crazy on this)).

This is everything that I used and the finished piece.

If anyone has any comments or questions don't hesitate to write them.  If you have some suggestion on improving marker art even more, I will gladly listen.

Till next week -

- Alisha