Monster Character Design Work in Progress

Scanned Rough Drawing

Colored drawing using Adobe Illustrator

For this design challenge I was asked to design a Monster inspired by the Characters from Monster's Inc University. I had to pick out of a cup pieces of paper that had random numbers that represented how many arms, legs, and eyes my monster would have. I chose 6 eyes, 3 arms, and one leg. It was really interesting thinking of how to incorporate these elements into my monster design, I have a few very rough thumbnail sketches that I will try to add to this post at a later date. After I had drawn out a rough sketch of my final design and scanned it onto my USB using a printer, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the line art. I used the pen tool for this, and this was a technique that definitely took me a lot of time to get used to. I didn't use a tablet at all for this drawing, everything was drawn by mouse. It was really interesting exploring a digital drawing technique that doesn't involve using a graphics tablet. I also think that using this method gives you very clean results. I colored The drawing by using the live paint bucket tool and pen tool, for the highlights and shadows I adjusted the opacity and settings of the highlights and shadows layers. This process was frustrating at times because I don't think I fully understand it yet, but for a first try, i'm pretty impressed with myself.

 The reason why this post is currently a work in progress is because there are a few details I need to clean up, like the visible brush strokes on the glasses, and I also wanted to try adding a gradient effect to the monsters tail.