How I Construct an Image for Work

When I am designing a piece of art for work, such as for a university brief, I start with a pencil sketch. I feel that drawing in pencil gives me much more control over how I want the design to look and feel, as well as making me more engaged with the art.

For this example, I will use a design I came up with for the graffiti-style stickers brief in Applied Creativity.

The initial design is roughed out in pencil on paper. As previously mentioned, this allows me to be closer to the art work and gives me a better understanding of how the finished art will look and feel.

When I am happy with the design, I go over the outline of the sketch with bold line. This gives me a more solid and reliable base on which to build the rest of the image, but is also the most time-consuming part of the process due to the high level of accuracy I insist on.

After the outline is done, I work out the details of the image; in this case, the writing inside the outline. While this does not always take as long as the outline, it can still take a fair amount of time due to my perfectionism.

Finally, colour is added and the rest of the image is cleaned up. After deleting the base image, I have my finished piece of work.