You know, like in a computer. Pixels, vectors, Adobe products, Apple gear, WACOM tablet, LCD, external drives. Electromagnetic Hell.

So some students will find it odd that the first thing out of my mouth when I talk about method is, “Don’t create your art in the computer.”

This coming from the guy who makes his living with a computer. I didn’t always make awesome digital illustration. In fact, it kind of sucked.

A little backstory.

The first time I sat down at a computer was at my dad’s office at O’Hare airport (riiiight. try that nowadays, kids). It was a green-screen airline reservations system hooked up to a dot-matrix printer.  I was seven years old. My first thought was “This is just like Star Wars.” My second thought was, “How can I make art with this thing?” My sister and I had all kinds of fun making rocket ship patterns with numbers and letters. Weee-hoo!

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Years later, when Windows 3.1 became the hottest thing since 10-lb. mobile phones, I started creating art in the computer again. It was terrible. Pixelated nightmares of birthday greetings and mutilated self-portraits.

When a friend loaned me a copy of CorelDraw, I created some equally bad art in the computer. The fact that I had a more sophisticated vector application did nothing to improve my digital work. Why?

It’s because I strayed from the wildly fun and inspirational process of drawing and doodling and focused on just making it all up onscreen.

My digital work has improved considerably since I “went backwards” and started sketching again. When I work on a project now, my first step is to move away from the computer. Even though the final art is all digital, it always (always, always) starts out with a #2 pencil and plain ol’ paper.

Copylicious was delicious

Here’s an awesome real-world example of my method. It’s not brain surgery, this method of mine. I didn’t file a patent on the process. It just works.

Kelly Parkinson is a copywriter extraordinaire. If you visit her copylicious web site, you’ll soon find yourself inventing excuses to work with her. She’s just awesome, and she’s also my ideal client. She’s independent, knows her business, and enjoys talking about it. That made it incredibly easier to get a handle on how I could help her with some illustrations.

Kelly has a pretty cool product called the Web Site Jet Pack. The design of her site is simple and fun. She just needed a simple bird illustration. A birdie wearing a jet pack. When I hear something like that you can’t pull me away. A bird wearing a jet pack. This is what gets me excited, what can I say?

Let’s make some birdies!

After Kelly and I talked about her site, I went to Step 1: I put my computer to sleep and started doodling little birdies. I just had fun with it, let loose. No high art here, no polished Leonardo DaVinci renderings, just some messin’ around.

Then I went away and had something to eat (that’s Step 2 if you’re keeping track). It’s good to go away for a bit because I find I overfocus and lose sight of the big picture.

When I came back I narrowed down my doodles and made some more finished drawings. Below you can see a few examples. I do this every time.

Digital Illustration Unplugged: pencil and paper.

You’ll also see the final drawing on the tracing paper (upper right, by the pencil point). That’s the thing I scan in and use as a reference in the computer.

I’ll get into that in more depth another time, I promise.

For now, the thing I want to stick in your mind is the idea that creating digital illustration does not always start in the computer. For me, it starts where all my better illustration starts, which is in the noggin and on paper.

Another interesting point is that I never sent Kelly my doodles and scraps. How much fun would that have been for her?

Ummm… what the hell is this? I thought this guy was good, I don’t want this sketchy crap on my web site. What is this, like, half a bird? Oh my god… is it too late to get my money back?

It would be the equivalent of Kelly sending one of her clients a torn-up notebook page of shorthand and saying, “It will be kind of like this.”

Disaster, right? So instead they just get awesome copy that works. Kelly gets a polished-up birdie in a jet pack. Everyone’s happy.

So again, the lesson for today, Kids? Turn off the computer. Give that pencil a workout. You’ll be very pleased with the results and you might just have a blast in the process. Isn’t that why you do this anyway?