04 Mar How to create cartoon monkey

I start sketching my monkey with a soft red pencil, when I’m satisfied with the results I redraw it with a normal pencil. As you may notice, it is a very loose sketch.

Unfortunately my line quality isn’t as good as some comic artists, no worries, we can scan it and make some improvements with Photoshop!

Once we have a final sketch for the mascot character, I clean it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet and assigning different line weights, then I proceed with the final inking.

For the final inking we can use Photoshop or Illustrator vector tools,  alternatively you can hand draw with a digital tablet and learn how to vectorise in Illustrator.

Assigning Base Colors

Now we only have to fill each white area with the color we want, I use medium tones, not too dark or too light so, later on, we have room for the lights and shadows.

Cutting vector shapes

The gradient areas are too big to get good illumination effects. So we have to cut these big areas in to smaller volumes with the knife tool. Donwload this video to learn how to do it.

Now we fine tune the gradient colors so we get a coherent illumination. There’s a basic thumb rule:  next to a dark color there’s always a light color.

IMPORTANT : if you use shadows in Normal mode you’ll need a lot of adjustments to not to cover the black lines. Multiply mode makes the layer transparent on top of a black color so there is no adjustment needed.

Adding  highlights

In this case it’s not essential to use different layer modes, although you can always use the Screen blend mode to get lighter tones.

First off I make a soft illumination and later on I add some strong light areas in order to reinforce the contours.