I thought I might give my adoring fans and brooding competition a peek into one of the many process I use in creating an illustration. In this example I show how I created the Illustration Friday theme of Empty in less than two hours.

1. The sketched idea is the heart of it all. In this step, the layout is the focus and not how good the artwork is.

2. After I am satisfied with the basic layout, I proceed to redrawing the piece to work out any problems with anatomy. This is often my final drawing stage so I spend a lot of time here. I try not to redraw too many times because my line will become tight and mechanical and lose the energy of the original sketch.

3. Here I scan in my illustration and begin laying down basic color in Photoshop.

4. This piece needed texture to appear more believable so I photographed some granite and made a pattern of it to overlay my color.

5. The final stage is where additional shadows and highlights are applied. There was no background to this illustration so I put a basic gradient there to make the statue come forward a bit more.

As I said, I work in a variety of ways but the aforementioned steps worked well for this piece as it made it possible for me to complete it from concept to completion in less than two hours.