Bowie

As someone who likes to explore different styles in his illustration work, I have the utmost respect and admiration for a musician like David Bowie who manages to explore, experiment and evolve in his music during a career that has spanned five decades! So put me down as a big fan of the man and his music.

This was done for the current David Bowie jam over at The Drawing Board.

The 'painting' started out as a blue ballpoint pen scribble. It was then scanned into Photoshop and with the line colourised on a multiply layer, colour and shading was added using a hard brush with opacity jitter set to pen pressure (this creates transparent to opaque brushstrokes depending on how hard you press. Good for painterly brushstrokes). Then I went to Painter and blended together the line and shading to create a painted look (see my paperboy tutorial for that process in detail). Then it was back into Photoshop where I added detail with the aforementioned hard opacity brush. Noise was added at the end to give it a slight grain, reducing the digital look.

Here's a close up of the face detail

Surprise, surprise...more caricatures!

More caricatures, more experiments.

I felt myself getting a little conservative in some of my previous caricatures, so the colour one above is an attempt to try and push my exaggerations that little bit further.

With the black and white caricature I added the digital splatter textures as an afterthought. I'm glad I did though as they really add that extra little something to the sinister feel of the drawing.

photos