Designing a Digital Stamp: Tess the witch

Hi everybody, are you all looking forward to Halloween? I’m looking forward to pumpkin soup myself. And pumpkin pie. Mmm pie . . . ahem, anyway today I thought I’d share with you some progress shots of how I design a digital stamp. Specifically Tess the witch, my latest and first Halloween design. I wanted to show you that the end product might be all clean lines and smiles but it doesn’t always start out that way.

To start, once I have an idea for what I want to draw I sketch out a rough skeleton (no pun intended) that looks pretty much like I stick man. This helps me work out the proportion and position of the limbs. As you can see I did not keep my first attempt, it just wasn’t working so I started over. That kind of thing happens. A lot. But you just have to keep trying.

So I drew out another ‘skeleton’. Changed some bits, like the position of the legs and her left arm. Once I’m satisfied that everything is where I want it I can start to flesh it out. Literally. I give her flesh. Curvy flesh usually.

Then after that I added in the details, such as her hair, clothes and in this case a witches hat. Shoes too, mustn't forget those. This is where the fun is, I get to design her outfit, her hair and her attitude really.

Then I added on the face . . . the first attempt doesn’t always work.

Yeeeeeeaaaah . . . Moving on!

Anyway I eventually got it and rubbed out and redrew certain lines until I was happy with the whole design. But it was far from over! Then I scanned her into the computer and I drew the clean crisp line work using Photoshop on top. It’s at this stage I can make any final changes. As you can see changes were made to the hat, some to her face and I decided not to give her stockings after all.

And after all that, voila! Here here she is.

Well I hoped you liked this little insight into how I create a digital stamp. I may show more of the ‘behind the scenes work’ in the future as this was pretty fun.

Oh whilst I’m here, tomorrow is the last day to apply for the design team and on Facebook I am taking suggestions for my next pin up design to raise money for children in need. So please comment there with your wonderful ideas!

Thank you and please come back soon.