Early illustration from my newspaper days
I had been working at the Deseret News for about one years when I decided to try my hand at creating an artistic illustration using a pressure sensitive device. This wasn't entirely new to me, I had already owned a Logitech pen tablet for several years already and had produced several personal works with it. For this I decided to take an image which had already been published, draw a sketch on paper, scan the sketch into the computer, then render out a digital painting from the original reference.
Ultimately this was an attempt to show the management at Deseret News (In late 2010, right after a major layoff of a huge portion of the staff) that I had the chops to do illustration work. After creating this and showing it around, no one seemed too interested in the more traditional look. Which is fine. In the years that followed the Deseret News, like every other surviving Newspaper publication, would water down everything with their physical content. Currently you can subscribe to the, vastly reduced, newspaper and have it delivered in your mailbox. But about 99% of us just hit the internet on our mobile devices.
The Process
On Jan. 12, 2010 the Caribbean country of Haiti experienced a massive earth quake that shattered the infrastructure of the country. The U.S. and my Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) sent massive aid to the help the people of Haiti endure this terrible event. The Deseret News felt it worth the time, and money, to send a reporter and photographer there to document the relief efforts. They sent Jeffrey Allred, and he snapped the photo that I use as reference for this illustration. Later that year I literally clipped the photo from the physical newspaper. From this I did a pencil sketch.
Then I scanned the sketch to a digital file, and opened this into Photoshop
I rendered out the final illustration in about four hours using a Wacom tablet and brushes found in the program. I wanted to do this quickly while at the same time adding definitive value to the overall image. I feel I achieved that in a large measure. Hopefully the 100% zoomed images below will show some proof of that.
Original online article with reference image can be found here.
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