This is a guest post by Mike Rohde. We hired Mike to illustrate original art for REWORK. Each one of the 90 essays in REWORK is accompanied by an illustration that captures the key message of the essay. We asked Mike to share the illustration process with you here on Signal vs. Noise. This post is part 2 of a 2-part series.
In part 1 of 2 of Illustrating REWORK, I wrote about the start of the project, generating concepts and capturing them as pencil sketches for review and approval. In part 2 of 2, I’ll go into depth on the process of converting those pencil concept sketches into final production art for the book.
Inking
Using batches of approved pencil sketches, I began inking illustrations for the book. Batching was important for inking the illustrations, as I could get into a groove and knock out multiple pieces at a time. It also provided a consistency of style, important with such a large group of closely related illustrations.
When I live-sketchnote an event, I listen to a speaker and capture ideas in real-time, using only a gel pen and a Moleskine pocket sketchbook. On the REWORK project I had the luxury and flexibility of taking a more methodical approach to the final illustrations for the book.
Chances were high that I’d see late, last-minute changes in the publishing process and I wanted the ability to make those changes quickly. Rather than inking each illustration as a complete unit, I inked multiple elements separately which were scanned and stitched together in a layered Photoshop document.
First, I created a variety of separate elements on a single spread for multiple illustrations, then used the elements which worked best after scanning the entire page into Photoshop. –Photo by Brian Artka.
Here’s a photo of the final illustration, printed in REWORK. This photo shows how various elements were scanned and stitched together in Photoshop to create a single, unified illustration. –Photo by Brian Artka.
Near the end of the project, I had to make changes to a few of the illustrations. Being able to quickly sketch a few elements, scan and drop them into the Photoshop master file made updates much easier.
Approval and Delivery
Once a batch of inked illustrations were completed in Photoshop, I would export lower-res versions of the pieces as JPG files, and post them to the Basecamp project for Jason’s review. Basecamp’s handy ‘View all of these images at once” feature allowed Jason to scan an entire batch and approve or suggest tweaks.
Here’s a sample batch of illustrations posted to Basecamp for review and approval. Note the PSD file attached to the comments above for backup. Jason was able to click individual illustrations in the grid or select “View all of these images at once” below the images for detailed review.