I take my humourous illustrations as seriously as I do my serious illustrations

It's very odd,creating an idea and an image which make people laugh, is actu­ally taken very ser­i­ously. Not a smile comes to my little face, while I'm work­ing on what will make my audi­ence smile.

This is one of my vari­ous approaches to cre­at­ing an illus­tra­tion: Read­ing and reread­ing  the article/editorial. Lots of jot­ting down of ideas and very rough pen­cil roughs. Then pen­cil rough the char­ac­ters. Your art dir­ect­or will have giv­en you the illus­tra­tion area. So I'll open a new doc­u­ment in Pho­toshop or Corel Paint­er and open each character/scene sketch and pos­i­tion and res­ize in indi­vidu­al lay­ers. I'll pen­cil rough out the back­ground to sup­port my little peeps in their little scen­ari­os.

In this case I cre­ated two too many ideas and the illus­tra­tion would have been too small to squeeze them all in. So I have to reject some, which can be dif­fi­cult. The vicar char­ac­ter you see in the gal­lery I rejec­ted, but I liked him so much I col­oured him up any­way.

Click on thumb­nails to view the gal­lery:

I col­oured the char­ac­ters on a trans­par­ent back­ground, again all in lay­ers, and worked on the simple back­ground.

I often build up a load of lay­ers, its a little time con­sum­ing but very import­ant to name each lay­er and group the lay­ers. Group­ing them is like put­ting the lay­ers in their own folder in an illus­tra­tions layered fil­ing cab­in­et.

I sign the art­work and send it off to the cli­ent and then I do my second favour­ite thing! That is to send my invoice! My 1^st favour­ite thing is get­ting the money in my bank account.