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Unlike many digital artists and cartoonists today, all my pieces start with a physical sketch. While tablets come close to the feel of a real pencil, sketching is a much easier way to quickly get a detailed idea down on paper without sacrificing your personal style. For any character, I start with basic circles and rough indication lines, and then add detail from the head down. At this stage, I'm not worried about the background, though I have an idea in mind as to how the final composition will look.
My Process
Sketching
Next I take my pencil drawing and scan it into my computer using an Epson printer. The image quality is very nice, and I always end up scaling the picture down to fit my digital canvas. I then open up a new project in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011, add the scanned image, and turn down the opacity to around 50%. This is so that I can clearly see what I have and have not inked in the next step.
Scanning
Now I select the pencil and ink over the pencil sketch in a new layer. This way, I can get rid of all traces of the pencil sketch once I'm finished by deleting the layer! I use a pressure-sensitive pen to achieve natural line variation as I work. This is also the step in which you can correct mistakes you made in the original design by moving pieces of the picture with the lasso tool.
Inking
Coloring
Coloring is the most fun step! I start with filling in the basic colors of objects and not worrying about light or shading. I put each base color on its own layer, so that once I'm finished, I can select one layer in particular and add light and shadows without accidentally coloring on something else. Once the character is colored, I work on the background by adding large areas of color and then shading each individually. I use an airbrush for sky and hill textures, and occasionally import a google image of a certain texture at 10% opacity for added realism.
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