Camera Sketch

About two years ago I spent a lot of time learning how to use Illustrator. It was actually not that difficult once I got past the introductory units and started to understand shapes and paths and realising that to create something that looks quite complicated you actually use very simple shapes and build them up.

This morning I felt like opening illustrator, because, to be honest, I don’t have that much free time to mess around in there. I wanted to create a sketch and picked my trusty Mamiya 135 to be my subject.

You can watch the timelapse video below to see how I created the sketch or continue reading for an overview.

The whole process took about three hours plus I took two rest to rest my eyes (always a good idea when you are at the computer for a long time). The first two hours was basically sketching the camera. I started with the big things like the shape of the body and the lens using the pen tool, which works the same as the pen tool in Photoshop. Once the big details were down I used the pencil tool to sketch in smaller details. Just like the pen tool, the pencil tool is similar to the one in photoshop except it creates a path not just a line.

Now I used the wrinkle tool to make the lines to feel more hand drawn and any that were affected too much I cleaned up. I then created a brush in illustrator and used it to stroke the paths  and then adjusted the weight of each line.

I selected my sketch and copied it into Photoshop. Photoshop was a little bit quicker than the sketching. I created colour layers and then added layer masks to hide them. I used the polygon selection tool to select areas of the sketch and used watercolour brushes on a low opacity to paint in the colour. For each part I used multiple brushes at different angles to create a textured effect. Once painted I added a paper texture layer as well as some levels adjustments.
Of course this was all done for fun, but please let me know what you think.

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