Tutorial: Character Illustration
A few people have mentioned how much they like the monster illustrations created for clothing retailer Kicsi and asked ‘how I drew them’ and therefore I thought I’d show you exactly how in the video below.
Enjoy! 
What this video also does is highlight the benefits of working in layers.
You can see that Aniko is made up of several layers, and this is how one should illustrate when drawing in professional software such as Adobe Illustrator, which is what I use.
The benefits of working in layers for every tiny bit of your illustration include;
- You will be able to easily edit each individual layer …for instance if you want to change the colour of eyes at a later date, change the style and/or colour of apparel or hair, and so on.
- Layers are very practical to work with rather than messy/awkward; You can lock individuals layers so that you don’t accidentally move them whilst working if required, and you can hide layers and make them invisible, so you can work on areas that are in bottom layers without the upper layers obscuring your view.
- Once you have layers you can keep them that way as the master file, because it is easy to update at any time in the future. From that master file you can then export other file types if required for other purposes…such as high resolution jpegs and tiffs. Printing firms using your images are also very happy to print directly from your layered file.
- You can name your layers so that they are easy to identify in your ‘layers toolbar’. I never do, which is very lazy ( or is it a time saver? 
), but in Adobe Illustrator there is also a tiny icon of each of your layers in the layers pallette, so you can usually just about figure out where things are even without naming them! This is probably in force in most programmes for professional vector design.
When I say ‘vector‘ design- this is essentially what a layered file is, it’s described as a ’scalable vector graphic’, which gives you full flexibility over your designs, and scalability to any dimension without loss of quality.
Hence the reason why vector graphics are so crucial for commercial design - it offers flexibility, and designs that can be printed on a pencil, or a billboard, with equal clarity.
