Down to the nitty gritty of illustration. I like to establish a platform or “engine.” The engine is what will drive the illustrations. It will allow me to create effective, print ready graphics that are easy to build and edit, lend themselves to consistency and push the project to its limits in terms of what it can be. To illustrate this project, I am using Adobe Illustrator. I chose illustrator because it fits nicely with the types of images I want to create.  I will be able to  scale images up and down without having to redraw them or lose any resolution and drop in colors and textures easily.

My first step in establishing the engine with Illustrator is to create a method to simulate the lines I have envisioned for this project. For this example, I will use Orange Monkey. I had originally planned to use a straight, consistent line. However, while doing the sketches I realized that a jittery quick stroke would work best. I decided to simulate the sketch lines in illustrator. I was able to build a brush that did this effectively. My second step was to begin to build the Illustration in parts. By breaking Orange Monkey up in parts, he could be moved and repositioned easily while retaining consistency, much like a paper cutout put together with brads. I broke him up as a body, 2 legs, 2 arms, a tail, and a head. This allows me to swing his arms and legs to position them however I want and reconfigure his face to get the right expression.

I put all this parts together and played around with poses and positions to see how it works. It was incredibly effective. This method allowed me to work fast and efficient while maintaining the life and playfulness of the original illustrations. Following are the results:

Orange Monkey Sketch