Illustration Tutorial- The Bear Who Hated His Job

A preview of the finished image.

Today's tutorial shows the process in making the cover of my Bear Who Hated His Job graphic novel. In this tutorial, I will break down my how I constructed the image including my inspiration, and give a step by step layout of how this image came together.

Step 1) The Sketch

I made a simple pencil sketch on regular sketchbook paper to get a feel for the pose and the shapes. I then ran some very basic inks on the drawing with a pen just to get a feel for the lines and shapes. Now on to the inking for the finished drawing.

Step 2) Inking

I took this drawing into Adobe Illustrator to tighten it up, simplify the shapes, and "ink" the drawing digitally. While it is extremely time consuming, I love the precision and control I have with Illustrator.

Step 3) Line of Action and Line Weight

By applying the principles of line of action (or flow of action) and line weight (or line variation) to the character, the drawing will be more interesting to look at.

Line of action helps direct the viewer's eye across the figure and it creates movement to the piece. In the piece above two diagonal lines of action are used to suggest movement. The more vertical line is tilted to show our bear leaning back, and the more horizontal of the lines follows the flow of the knife to the bear's gaze.

Line weight brings a visual weight to the lines. If all the lines were the same width, the piece could not sustain the clarity this version has and the viewer would have a harder time reading the image. Notice the heaviest line along the back of the bear to weight him from that direction.

Step 4) The Logo

Every cover needs a title logo. For this one, I chose to stretch the text all the way down the page and emphasize the words, "bear" and "job". The stretched text also creates a looming feeling to the piece.

When I place the text in the composition with the bear, it's almost as if the word "job" is sneaking up on him. Now, it's on to the colors!

Step 5) Colors

 I decided before I started, that I would use a limited color pallet of red, white, black, and gray.

First, I start by laying down the flat color.

 I could have stopped here if I wanted to, but I like adding texture to create some extra visual depth.

Step 6) Extra Touches

One trick I like to do is add some scanned paint textures into the piece. I insert the paint texture into a layer in Photoshop, set the layer mode to "multiply", (which means the darkest elements of it can be seen, and the lightest will be see through) and then I set the paint image at about half transparency. Remember, it's only there for depth.

The added texture gives a nice backdrop and I also add another beam of light behind the first one at a lower opacity.

Next, I add some gray tone shading to the bear himself and I desaturate the colors a bit more for the whole piece. And then it's finished.

I hope you enjoyed this piece and found it informative. Comments, suggestions, and questions are appreciated.

The Bear Who Hated His Job: The Missing Pages Part II

Here's another page from my tale of dissatisfaction. This was supposed to be the splash page where a grizzled man tells two young children in a museum a story about a circus bear.


It took me a while before I was happy with the colors, and I'm still not entirely happy with the bear "painting" on the left. When I redo this story I think I might not use color at all, unless it's very basic.

Thanks for looking. Comments are welcomed and appreciated.

The Bear Who Hated His Job: The Missing Pages

A few months ago I decided to start a little comic called, "The Bear Who Hated His Job". It was about a Bear, who once was the world's greatest knife thrower, but now he has been hired by a different circus who thinks the only thing he is useful for is dancing on a rubber ball.

It's a story about pursuing what you truly love.

I've decided to post one of my pages from that story here. This is page two, which starts a flashback. I hope you enjoy. Lines and lettering were done in Adobe Illustrator with the tones made in Photoshop.

Two Kids

Just a quick one from a comic project I'm working on.

More from "The Bear Who Hated His Job"

Here's a crayon sketch of a narrator character I had designed for the "The Bear Who Hated His Job" story. He was supposed to be your typical Burgoskovian (a country I made up for the story) citizen, which lent him some very stereotypical cold war Russian features combined with wooden clogs. While fun to draw, I eventually felt this narrator was limited in his ability to clearly move the story along, and replaced him with the sensible British art curator and historian. I do, however, plan on using this character in the story still, so he will probably pop up again.

 Here's a very early rough (and a peek into my thumbnailing process) of the second part of the story. Although, a lot of this has ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak,

Finally, here is an early rough of my cover for the story, which I liked so much that I barely changed anything but the typography. You can see the finished version of this cover here.

Well, that about does it for today. If some of you notice some layout changes to this blog, it's because I finally made the decision to do some ad placement and I'm trying to make it work. Thanks for looking in the meantime, and as always, comments and suggestions are really appreciated.

The Bear Who Hated His Job- early sketches

by David Finley

 Today, we revisit 'Bear', a character in a story called, "The Bear Who Hated His Job". I did a previous post that featured a working version of the cover I'm going to use and you can view that here.

 I hope to get the writing finished for it soon. My writing, while growing, still takes me a lot longer to do than my art does. Anyway, I should probably get down to the nitty gritty and post an image. Here are the oldest remaining sketches I have of my knife throwing bear. The original sketches were lost.

 In the oldest drawings, he had a little derby hat, but my friend Jonathan suggested that I give him one of those fuzzy Russian style hats.

 So, here he is.

The Bear Who Hated His Job

Today's post is one of my newer projects. It's about a bear who has a problem a lot of people face.

He hates his job.

To make matters worse, he is grossly undervalued and underutilized. This bear is the most talented and accomplished knife thrower in the whole world. The circus is only interested in using him as a silly dancing bear, so he is relegated to a rigorous cycle of performances as a mindless preshow entertainer.

 Of course, his malcontent simmers until he is forced to take drastic action... but I don't want to give the whole story away.

Here is a mockup of the cover and logo. Yes, it is a nod artistically to soviet propaganda posters. I think the strong, yet simple, design elements combined with the cartoonish story make for a good marriage.

I drew the bear in Adobe Illustrator and did the finishing color work in Photoshop.