We’re pleased to welcome Tim Murphy, an illustrator from St. Louis, Missouri, as HileItes’ guest blogger today. We love the opportunity to showcase talented artists like Tim. Thanks, Tim, for being part of HileItes.

Hello all! Greetings from chilly St. Louis, Missouri. When Dave asked me to contribute a guest blog post to this space and discuss my work, I thought about the ongoing recession and how it mirrors the one during which I got my start. I decided to take a brief look at the early experiences that shaped my style, and detail how the skills I was forced to learn in a recession contributed directly to whatever success I may have eventually found. Hope you enjoy.

In 1995, fresh out of college and eager to become fabulously wealthy doing little more than doodling Wolverine in the margins of my notepad, I instead found that my hometown of St. Louis featured a creative industry centered around beer and little else. Never much of a drinker, and more naïve and snobbish than I realized at the time, I held my nose and accepted a role in a digital imaging group at a mid-sized sales promotion agency. Due to the recession, senior workers were being snubbed in favor of eager young (read: cheap) talent, so in retrospect it was a fabulous and rare opportunity to break into an industry that usually required years of experience. But, green as I was, I didn’t realize it at the time.

As a confident pencil artist but a terrible painter, I wondered at some point what would happen if I scanned my sketches and began to apply the Photoshop skills I’d been learning as a coloring technique. I had an opportunity for one of our larger beer clients who wanted to save money by eschewing the usual photo shoot, instead pursuing illustration. The subject matter needed to feature figures in kinetic motion (most beer promo involves sexy women, sports, and/or music), somewhat similar to the action-packed superheroes I’d been drawing forever in emulation of my favorite comic book artists like Art Adams and Jim Lee. I combined all of these experiences and the result was a signature style that has received strong positive feedback and led to a slew of new illustrative opportunities.

For the purposes of this post I elected to outline the process using a Corona case card I did after I’d left my original agency and was taking on a lot more freelance. This is how it generally works:

(Click on each image to enlarge it and read Tim’s comments.)

I sketch everything out roughly to get an idea of my composition and how it will fit into the dimensions of the piece. The layout may change radically throughout the process, and usually does, so keeping everything well-organized allows for greater flexibility down the line. (Fig. 1)

I overlay sketch paper and create an individual line drawing of each character, thinking ahead to how I will need to mask off each area for coloring later in the process. (Fig. 2) Each sketch is then scanned.

I create an individual path for each section of color. Anything that will be sectioned (e.g. different strands of hair) has to have its own path. This is where the hours of drawing paths for retouching come in handy.  Kind of my own “wax-on, wax-off” experience. (Fig. 3)

I usually start by filling flat colors for each layer of the character (skin, torso, front leg, back leg, etc.). Then I make a selection with each path and brush in my details with the painting tools. It takes some concentration but it’s probably the most fun. Using this technique also enables maximum contrast between hard edges and soft gradients. You might notice that after I’ve finished drawing a path over the “live” part of the figure, I just kind of sloppily wrap it around and close off the endpoints. This can lead to some fun little happy accidents when I’m painting in the details, especially with my particular cubist/futurist-inspired style that involves shapes in motion or blending into other shapes to flatten out the overall look. (Fig. 4)

I finish brushing in my shading and highlights, making tweaks to the original shape as I see fit. The finished color version almost always looks different from what I envisioned, but since I keep everything layered I have plenty of freedom to rework the piece at every stage. Additionally, all the old retouching tools like Curves and Channel Mixer layers (color adjustment) and dodge/burn (metallic clothing accessories) become useful. (Fig. 5)

Repeat with all necessary characters and background elements. It may seem time-intensive, but a piece like this is generally finished in fewer than five working days. (Fig. 6)

Now it’s time to put all these pieces together in one layered file and make them work together. I’m a huge fan of the illustrator Gary Kelley, and I think his method of flattening the illusion of perspective through color and shape is nothing short of ingenious. My humble tribute to his work is to try to achieve a similar kind of flatness by letting the shapes intermingle. The pool shape is behind the figures, but on a separate layer above the figures I used the pool’s paths to brush some of its shape through them. You can see a similar technique used throughout the other shapes, like the rooftop and the intermingling background buildings. (Fig. 7)

After laying in the product, logo and type treatment, I’m dissatisfied with the flatness. Feels like I’ve taken it too far, so the faces are falling into the background and it’s really flat, not just distorted perspective.  (Fig. 8)

Bringing in some shadows and glows allows me to control the flatness between shapes and define the space on my own terms. Now it’s got a lot more pop, which is the name of the game in POS. (Fig. 9)

Using the square/oval selection tool and the airbrushes, I apply the signature flourishes of this style on a new layer. The placement of each shape is very important; they reinforce my flattened perspective goal while adding motion to an action-oriented theme. On this particular piece they’re more subtle than usual; if you’ve seen the St. Louis sports mural on my website you can see that the style can easily become the dominant aspect of the piece and still allow the other elements to work effectively. It all varies depending on the piece and, often, the client. (Fig. 10)

Speaking of clients, this one decided late in the game to nix the afro, much to my chagrin. But, since I illustrated each character individually it’s a pretty easy fix. (Incidentally, separate working files also help keep this file’s size low, which is significant since it’s 16”x 23” at 300 ppi resolution. This could easily become a 2GB file otherwise). Additionally, I decided that the flat buildings in the background were killing the dance vibe, so I applied a Wave filter to allow them to join the fun. (Fig. 11)

It’s a pretty fun process, and in the end I’m grateful to some very generous people from those early days who shared their talent and knowledge, allowing me to blend it with my own particular skill set and create something uniquely my own.

What about the current recession?  The St. Louis creative community has been hit hard by a combination of the economy and the Anheuser-Busch buyout. In the past year alone I’ve learned more than I ever thought I would about Adobe Flash, Actionscript, Dreamweaver and a score of other tools that may come in handy in the coming decade. I couldn’t tell you whether they’ll allow me to keep up with the young talent coming out of college (!) but I can say that they’ve changed the way I think about certain challenges, which in my opinion is gold to a creative mind.

Tim Murphy

Like what you see? Visit Tim Murphy’s website to view more of his work.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Guest Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.