The Process

By now, everyone who visits this blog and my website is intimately familiar with the image that I'm breaking down in this post. It's one of the first pieces of new erotic artwork I produced when I made the decision to get back into fetish art.

I thought I'd use it as an example to illustrate how a typical drawing that I produce for the site is made, from the earliest sketch to the finished piece.



Every piece begins with a few very rough sketches to map out the basic idea of what's going on in the piece. I knew I wanted some sort of 'tickle machine' to be featured in this image, since it's such a popular fantasy.



My idea was to make the homepage look like a magazine cover, in the style of the old men's adventure magazines from the 40s and 50s. At first, I was going to have the poor victim at the mercy of some Nazi-like soldiers, but I eventually decided that I'd stick to scientists, since this was going to be the first image everyone saw when they visited the site.



The soldier was replaced by another scientist, and the background details were added to the piece. I do a lot of the shading in this stage of the drawing, as I don't ink over the pencils. Instead, I scan it in and clean up and sharpen the linework in Photoshop.



Once the drawing has been digitized, the basic colors are blocked in. This step is a lot like filling in a digital coloring book.



The final step involves shading and detailing all of the colors, adding little details such as the computer read-out screen on the control panel, and adding any captions or text. Another effect that was added was a layer of distressed paper texture to give it even more of an old magazine feeling.

And that's what it takes each week to bring you a new drawing!

Achilles