Jonathan Edwards

After working in the LOVE creative studio and meeting Alan Wardle, I started to look back through my old issues of Computer Arts Projects for some of the names of artists he spoke about. One in particular cropped up in the ‘Editorial’ issue… I had already followed the blog of Jonathan Edwards and even found him on twitter, but I didn’t realise he had a tutorial in this specific edition. He has become another great inspiration to me in that he too uses hand drawn imagery, he inks each piece by hand and then adds colour digitally afterwards… this has now become my preferred way of working rather than vectoring my work as it is a way for me to maintain that hand drawn aspect in my work. His guide shows that he begins by sketching out any and all his ideas… developing them until he gets approval for one and then he inks the final thing.. very much like how comic artists work… thumbnailing their ideas, adding detail to the approved image and then inking the final lines before adding colour and going to print. I had never picked up on the fact that his work was hand inked… by scanning it in and adding colour digitally it gives the impression that he could’ve used hand drawn effect brushes in Illustrator, but this is why I enjoy pickin up these magazine as they offer an insight into how these artists work. I have asked Edwards how he chooses the colours he uses in this work but either he isn’t giving away any more secrets or it really is by luck that he picks the right one for the job. Judging by some of the images in this tutorial, it also appears that he works on a very large scale allowing finer detail to become easier to work on rather than struggling at a small scale.

This little snippet is what made me change my mind about doing editorials... I like the idea that I will receive varying articles and thus be able to work on a variety of different projects but I won't know until I give it a go ;)