[Gothic Gerbil]

Here you go Jezebel! ^,^

I apologize to all modem users ahead of time.

Ok, this was done all in Illustrator. Sadly there are some rather unpolished areas due to time constraints and I really don't like how the hair turned out as I ran out of experimentation time, so please take this tutorial (more of a how-I-work thing) with a grain of salt. This assumes some familiarity with Adobe Illustrator and the ability to think (I know I'm asking a lot here sorry!). This was made with Illustrator 9 but I think is still compatible with Illustrator 8 but don't hold me to that please.

I started out with a very rough outline of the major areas of the character. As you'll notice later on, I ditched the outline of the hair in favour of a different style of piecing it together. Though I didn't do it here, I'd recommend scanning in a sketch and tracing it from there as working with the pen tool is a bit of a pain. I used my wacom and the pencil tool to sketch this out with minor point tweaking.



After the initial sketch, which by the way I put each element on its own layer which you'd be able to see in the layers menu there if the image was bigger. By the way if people want bigger images I can replace them with bigger screenshots as the originals were shot at 1280x1024. Well I set in the base colours for the gal here. No shading done as of yet.



I then sketched in the first shadow on the face, which is also on a different layer. Layers are cheap in Illustrator so I recommend going wild with them. I cropped it down with a copy of the face and the path tools (intersect in this case) and then converted it into a gradient mesh. My recommendation with gradient meshes is to start by converting them from the menu rather than with the gradient mesh tool. For me at least, it is easier to tweak the points from the default positions rather than add each seperate point, especially when I don't exactly have planned out how many points I am going to use yet. Thusly a 4x4 mesh is usually what I start with. I then started adding colour to the points.



I started adding more shadows here too, to the nose and adding the nostrils. The nostrils are not a gradient mesh by the way, they are just a flat black, with a feather applied. I also sketched in a highlight on the chin, and used a feather on that so it blended a bit better with the lower shadow instead of being a stark contrast with the blend. All of these are clipped to the size of the face, drawn with the pencil tool and converted to gradient meshes.



Here I started in on the eye after adding a few more shadows to the face. I made the orb with a simple circle that was clipped to the size of the eye shape. I applied a simple gradient to it. Then over that for the green I have applied another gradient. This was an experiment in hopefully a faster way to put eyes together. I'd recommend going with gradient meshes as you have more control over how everything works there. After creating the green, I drew a shadow over it, which was also a simple gradient applied as a multiply. The two highlights are simple circles with a white to black radial gradient applied as an overlay.



Here I went through and made her right eye. I didn't make an orb for this one as I could fake it with a gradient on the eye shape. I made the rest of the eye in the same manner as described above.



I started in on the lips here. I took a copy of the original shape of the lips and then divided it into an upper lip and a lower lip. Both of those got converted into gradient meshes. Then it was just a simple matter of applying colours to the points as usual and tweaking the positioning of the points and the direction/length of the adjoining lines.



To make the lips look like they weren't as pasted on, I went through and tweaked the big lower shadow to extend under the lips which give it more definition and depth. I also added a highlight above the lips in the form of a simply drawn outline with a bright flat colour applied. No feather necessary since it isn't big enough to need it. I also started in on the ridges between the lips and the nose. Sorry, don't remember what they were called. These were made with three gradient meshes with feathers applied.

[Gothic Gerbil]

Here I went through and made the eyelashes. They were done pretty simply by making just a flat black outline above them. It was done smooth, none of the ridges there were drawn. I then applied punk to it until they were appropriately jagged, and then a feather applied to smooth them a bit. It was a cheap quick and easy way of making them, the one shortcut I took that was actually a shortcut yey!



Eyebrows were added here and yes I know I usually forget them I'm surprised too! They were done with a flat colour and a heavy feather applied to them. I wasn't very careful about the outline of them which gave them a more fitting appearance, in my opinion. Also some shadows and highlights were added around the eyes to seat them better in the face.



Now for the accursed hair. I honestly had no idea how I was going to go about putting it together in a timely manner. I started going through and drawing in flatly coloured pieces. Some shadows were added as experimentation as flat darker colours with a feather applied. I thought it was working pretty well here.



I started going through and drawing in some highlights on some of the chunks of hair. Again, same way as the shadows, flat colours with a feather applied. Things started going downhill from here.









As you can see, it came out very poorly, and looks more like a shiny metallic hair piece or something. You could bounce arrows off of that. Next time I am going to experiment with small thin flatly shaded lines over a smooth gradient mesh for the background of the hair. It may or may not work, we shall see.

And here is the finished piece. The text was a cheap hack, completely out of time and I'm sure that my grade will be docked for it too. I didn't show more detailed images from here out as I feel that you have basically gotten the gist of it by now. The bordering is just a simple gradient mesh, with many points in them. The background behind the text is a flat colour. The text is a flat Verdana font too. The girl's choker is just a simple line with varying line weight, and the highlights on it the same all of them flat colours. The moon is a modified simple gradient, with a flat black circle behind and to the left and up behind it, and then a copy of it behind that again to the left and up and applied as an overlay. The cloudy flares to the right are several gradient meshes, each slightly distorted applied over each other as normal, multiply, and overlay. The jewel type thingies (very cheesy I know, but I ran out of time sorry!) are again simple gradients, with the lower highlight applied as a small simple gradient. I should probably have moved the hair to looks more like it is resting on the frame of the border. Also the top piece of the border is a bit soft and doesn't quite have the same feel as the other border pieces. Well, I hope this helped someone somewhere or at least that you got a good laugh, feel free to post comments, critiques, tips, flames, flowers, or whatever! Tata!!

[LeChuck]

Grrrrr! Someone that is better with Illustrator than I am. How annoying

The hair and the eyes are my favorite parts.

[n8]

cool tute...appreciate it
now im gonna have to skrew around with illustrator abit more at uni..hehehe

[Gothic Gerbil]

I just realized I completely forgot to put up the source file as I was intending to. Since Illustrator files are relatively small I figured I could afford to put it up for download:

File

Enjoy! No stealing though, please?