(A micro micro micro-documentary with an all-caps title to make it look impressive) Let’s start with the finished illustration (you’ll want to zoom in on it, so click and read the small print):
1/10
After 1-2 hours of generating terrible concepts, I finally landed on the idea of a cat reading books on how do cat stuff, including manipulating humans. Fun! Started with maybe 30 “cats in chairs” renders in #stablediffusion to get ideas:
2/10
I liked the cat face in the first one but would need to hand edit the body to add a book so we could see the title. Then I decided I wanted him on a couch, not a chair, to make seeing his pile of books easier. But first I edited the prompt to give me library ideas:
3/10
Now I needed a couch. Did a quick google(!!) this time to even get my head around what I was trying to describe. First time in all my #promptography that I did that! Weird experience. Found and image, which led to a new prompt for a couch:
4/10
Composite time in #PhotoShop. Just needed to get all the elements on the screen in one shot, however bad. Rember, the goal is to create a reference to draw over. Here is what I came up with as the overall baseline concept. Rough but that is the point:
5/10
I’ve got a rough drawing now in good shape. The #cat got flipped horizontally and was mostly hidden by the book. Legs and tail added:
6/10
Let’s add some wash behind everything pen & ink to get that authentic look going:
7/10
Now, let’s push the background ink, but not the wash, further back to emphasize the foreground. I drew the library on a different layer than the couch so it was just a transparency setting in #procreate:
8/10
Final touch – let’s vignette it to give it that authentic New Yorker Cartoon vibe (the goal from the start) and we are done! #newyorkercartoons:
9/10
And that is the whole story! There are tools coming shortly (looking at you @artbreeder that could further optimize this process and make it more creative/exploratory at the same time. It’s a new dawn for #illustration creators…
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