My workflow on the second MELC job
I really wanted to post some notes on my workflow for this project before term time hits again, so here goes:
What is MELC?
Making Every Lesson Count is a book that Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby wrote a couple of years ago. In essence, it is about teaching for teachers. It strikes that rare balance between everyday practice and bigger principles derived from research. The immense success of the book among the teaching community speaks for itself - it has sold upwards of 7,000 with at least two reprints.
I got the opportunity to illustrate the book because I had developed a great working relationship with Andy illustrating lots of his blog posts. For some lovely unknown reason our visual-verbal chemistry just seems to work and so the door swung open when the book was being discussed.
I loved this project because I was able to be the pretty pink icing on an already delicious cake.
Now that the series has been developed into a range of subject-specific volumes I got another go at working with these guys. Over the last week I produced around 100 images for the next three books. What follows are some notes on my workflow - I hope that these are useful to you.
Manuscript Notes
For these I usually scrawl on a PDF of the manuscript using Notability. Doing this on an iPad in a pub allows the Author to talk freely as I highlight parts of the text and improvise ideas on the go. Notability is a workhorse for me - I have used it daily in my teaching for years now and it has rarely let me down. For multi-page annotation of PDF documents there is nothing better.
Rough Pencils
I took the original notes and put this together - the linework is deliberately loose - produced in Clip Studio Paint and Astropad Studio (see below).
Tidy Pencils
Getting a bit closer now - I create another layer and take a bit of time to tighten up the original strokes. Often I try and simplify things down to the essence.
Corrections and shading
This is the bit where my hand hurts and I need to go out for a walk before my body shuts down entirely.
Get on with the process chat, Ramjam
To create the final artwork, I used Astropad Studio via a large screen iPad Pro to draw these images in Clip Studio Paint. The experience was superb.
Here is the set-up for this particular job:
Please don't tell me how poorly presented this image is.
Some notes:
Clip Studio Paint - this is cheap, quirky, reliable and brilliant for multipage natural media creation. Seasoned pro artists swear by it, and I am in complete agreement. I use it in combination with a carefully selected bunch of Frenden's natural media brushes. It is a great piece of software.
Astropad Studio - some people will moan about the price, but if you produce artwork professionally, this is a serious alternative to the Intuos-style screens. The key benefits (on this job) were:
having a two-finger tap for undoing strokes (Procreate-style)
being able to easily set up a bespoke shortcut menu which freed me from my mac keyboard for most of the process
the virtual zoom is a major advantage - I tended to keep the main image at 100% on the mac screen and then used the iPad as a virtual zoom tool. I found that this was very fast and efficient feature
the Apple Pencil as an input method is a killer move baby. The sensitivity and handling is even better than using Procreate natively on the iPad pro. I loved drawing in this way.
the iPad screen itself
Gone are the days where I used to worry about the gap between something drawn 'on the computer' or drawn 'by hand'. With this set up the discussion isn't relevant any more.
If I missed anything or if you have any comments, please get in touch via email (saamvisual at gmail dot com), instagram or twitter.
Paper-Digital Workflow
The main issue with having a good creative workflow is being able to think and develop your ideas effectively. Over the years this has changed a lot for me personally, partly because the technology is different and partly because I am too.
In the past I had a tendency to overdo things and get a bit precious about every design element, but as I worked with a variety of editors/clients I realised that my best work tends to be more spontaneous.
This doesn't mean that I’m not thinking about things, just that the end material is more instinctive and less self-conscious, which is where my preferred workflow comes in.
I usually start with possibly the fastest medium available - a biro and sketchbook. I will scribble stuff out and often develop things across three or four drafts¹.
At some point I will then take a photo of this artwork with an iPad² and process the image using an app called Prizmo³.
After this I will work mainly within Procreate using an Apple Pencil⁴ (and yes I have a set of particular brushes⁵). My approach with Procreate is to use it like an old-school lightbox - a manipulated template layer at the bottom with reduced opacity as a guide. Beyond this I will have a black ink layer, a couple of grey tonal layers (one of which usually using multiply mode) and then further colour layers (also set to multiply). I sometimes bring in other textured bits and pieces depending on what I am doing.
My mac is still useful - particularly when it comes to doing the heavy lifting of composite video work and some text-design-layout based activities, but increasingly I am finding the iPad a tool of choice. The flexibility combined with with the immediacy of a thought-based workflow is something I often have to pinch myself over.
¹I will probably post something here soon about the use (and misuse) of a sketchbook, but for now I’ll just say that the dynamic of the viewing audience can ruin this most sacred institution. There are lots of flashy sketchbook samples posted online which are beautiful but vacant exercises. Well not exactly vacant - they look nice, and get lots of likes, but in the end my personal view is that a sketchbook is about externalising and developing thinking and reflection. These things don’t easily fit into something that the watching world understands or cares about and therefore should be kept under wraps unless there is a really good reason to share it.
²Another note on the use of an iPad: there are a number of people online who refer to themselves as iPad artists, or iPhoneographers. I would gently warn against this kind of self-definition. While it is true that I tend to use Apple products 24/7 and depend on their services to teach and create stuff (students often associate me with some kind of spineless Fanboi), I think that it is important to distance yourself from your tools and remember that you are a creative person and these are tools to help you get the job done better. One day those tools will change or disappear and you will have to find a different method, so please think twice before you define yourself in this way.
³If you haven’t seen or used this app I recommend it highly - I have been using it for years and it keeps getting better. You can ‘scan’ multiple page documents, process them and send them digitally. You can do surprisingly effective OCR with it, get it to read texts out and - in this instance - scan draft artwork and prepare it easily. It is also worth mentioning here the fact that the current camera on an iPad is now up to a superb standard, meaning that you just don't have to worry about taking reference images or scans of work.
In the olden times I used a scanner a lot and would stitch together images using photoshop. Now all of this is virtually redundant - my scanner is somewhere collecting dust.
⁴What can be said about this most wonderful development in the world of art-using technology? It is perhaps one of the greatest steps forward for me in recent years - the combination of iPad/Pencil and Procreate is very sweet indeed. Enough with the gushing.
⁵If you look around the Procreate forum you can find a load of free brushes, discussions and some links to paid stuff. I won’t post any further details here because really this is about finding your own path and what works for you (which might take a long time!). Whatever you end up with, it is important to have a sense of conviction and ownership. Happy exploring.