Easy-Bake Illustrations

How I go about churning out Hike One UX Playbook Illustrations

Hike One’s Sprint 2.0 illustrations

Intro_

We are constantly looking to share our way of working at Hike One. A role that I play at the digital design agency, Hike One, is being a member of the Illustration Guild. This guild serves as a playground for us to develop and practice our illustration prowess. I figured why not share my process in how I quickly design illustrations for Hike One’s UX playbook, social media, template, medium articles.

Brainstorm_

All of my ideas that I have made started out with a mental dump of all possibilities of which the visual could take on. This starts anywhere from browsing dribbble, muzli, or the interwebs for inspiration. Next, to this, I always make sure to read and reread the article for which the illustration will accompany. When I am full of inspiration I work towards defining a suitable metaphor for which to build the illustration around.

Overcoming challenges that arise from competition

Tools I use for this are The Noun Project to see what icons exist for a certain keyword or a simply do a quick google search. From here I pick out the keywords that drive the article’s message home.

Rough Sketch_

Once I have an idea of what the illustration could be in my head, I put the pen to the paper. More specifically I put a light grey pen to the paper.

• I find that using a light grey pen to throw down the first lines on paper enabled me to be looser with my lines and more explorative in the form and concept of the illustration.
• Using a grey marker first enabled me to be fast as hell with my sketching simply because nothing was definitive and set in stone, which is normally the feeling when using first a standard black ink marker.

Building upon the keyword: Challenge. I went with the mental image of a character preparing themselves for the challenge by training, in this a case a boxer training with a coach and punching bag.

Overlays_

Once having the rough outline of the illustration in grey marker the next step then is to define it and bring forward the most important lines.

Cool grey Copic markers are my go-to for laying down the first lines.

• The handy thing here is that by using a light grey marker to set up the initial sketch you can easily go over the lines you want to actually have with a black marker.
• When I am satisfied and have a sketch with the main lines outlined with a black marker I take a photo of the sketch with my mobile phone, in my case an iPhone XR. A yellow one in case you were curious :)
• I upload the photo to either my laptop or iPad Pro. This depends on if I will be making the final illustration utilizing the iPad Procreate app or Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator with a Wacom Cintiq.

The holy trinity of programs I utilize to quickly illustrate.

• Once I have uploaded the photo into whichever program I am using, I turn the opacity down to somewhere between 15–20 %, depending on the contrast of the photo. This is done so that the photo can serve as a second iterative overlay.
• Within the program I am using, I sketch over my rough sketch photo, making sure that my lines are at the least more precise and deliberate. You could describe this process as a sort of outlining.

First digital outline of the paper sketch.

• If at this moment I find the lines of the sketch still too undefined or not deliberate enough, I repeat the previous steps by turning down the opacity of the most recent sketch layer and proceed to use it as a new overlay.

The Illustration after the above-mentioned process.

Finishing Touches_

Finally, when I’m happy with the lines of my illustration I set out to add the final touches. This includes;

Color

With color, in order to keep the process quick, I fall back on simply using Hike One’s branded color. When there is more time available or rather when I’m not bound to Hike One’s color scheme, I pick out a fresh palette from colours.cafe. I’m no wizard with colors so I really appreciate sources such as this. It saves me the time and energy of being nit-picky with colors and gives me more time to focus on the content of the illustration instead.

Shadow & Highlights

How I go about shadows and highlights is pretty straightforward. I turn the color I use for the shadow (black, purple, blue, and red) opacity down to 20 percent and draw over the color layer. I do the same with highlights except I may tweak with the opacity depending on how bright I want the highlight to be. One thing I always make a point to emphasize is that all the shadows and highlights are going in the same direction. I don’t necessarily make the shadows theoretically correct but last I checked Earth doesn’t have two suns :)

My quick cheat sheet to how I add shadows on top of my colors.

Textures* if time allows for it

Textures I find are always tricky when I’m under a short deadline. What I do to overcome this is to be mindful of the brushes that I use got the illustration. For the image below, I utilized a grainy pencil brush in Procreate for the outlines to give it that sketchy texture. With the colors, I used a dry marker brush to further give the illustration some subtle texture. For my procreate brushes I rely on the library that Tip Top Brushes provides as they are of high quality and have a wide array of varying brushes that they offer.

The finished Illustration in all its simple glory!

Thinking in layered ecosystems_

What helps me be as efficient and organized as possible is to think always in grouped layers or rather layered ecosystems.

A typical structure to my layers is as follows;

This is a typical structure for my layers within Adobe Photoshop

• Line Group→ contains all the line work of the illustration.
• Layers reflect key objects in the illustration i.e People, Objects, Background etc.
• Top Shadow & Highlight Group→ contains all the shadows and highlight work
• These are the shadows and highlights that will go over the illustrations colors
• Color Group→ contains all the color work in the illustration
• These are the colors of the illustration, they are further divided, if necessary, into layers matching the content for which they are attributed to
• Bottom Shadow & Highlight Group→ contains all the background and “under” shadows and highlight work

I use this structure usually for an illustration that needs to be made on a short deadline with little to no feedback.

While there are times when I simply don’t have time to set up this structure, I try to do it whenever I am able to. This enables me to easily adjust any feedback I receive which in itself makes my life easier as I don’t have to go deconstructing my illustration pixel by pixel. As a colleague once told me, “if you start your project in a logical structured manner, then the end/closure of the project will also be so”.

I hope that this quick read helped make my process a bit more transparent and perhaps inspired you to either reflect or tweak upon your illustration process.

Cheers,

Lodovico Marchesini
Digital Product Designer | Illustrator | Habitiual Visualiser