This is actually an article that I wrote at the blog at Intuitive Designs site in May this year. This week we did some changes at the site and I did a revision of the chef illustration to introduce a new area in the home with the latest features. The new chef is the one holding a cake with one hand. I thought it would be interesting to post here this article where I talk about the process of doing this particular illustration from scratch. I hope you find it interesting.

For the past few months, I have received some messages from other illustrators and designers asking about the technics I used to do the illustration of the chef at the home page of our web site. Personally, I subscribe to the words from Tricky (the English musician): ‘When a musician tells me about the way he did a song, I immediately distrust him’. I don’t believe in methods and I think each work should become a new adventure to figure out which techniques may suit it better. This way, work always becomes a fun game. On the contrary, without this sense of making mistakes and solving new problems it would become the most boring thing on earth.

So, I’m not going to write a tutorial for illustrators. For me, the best thing about tutorials is that by step #2, I get so lost that I skip the next 3 steps and by step #6 I find something cool of my own. On the other hand, I thought it could be interesting to show how my process was in this peculiar work. As I said before, I do not apply this same process in any of my other works, it’s just what I came with for this particular illustration. For me, the most interesting is not the techniques themselves but the beauty of how the things develop during the process until they end up becoming something close to what I originally wanted to express.

In this case, we wanted a welcoming figure of a chef, so we first thought of using the image of a Basque chef. I am half-Basque myself and I come from a family of Basque cooks. I love cooking and so does Naomi. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to use this theme for the web site: because we wanted to express our design work in relationship with something we love. So we decided to use this Basque cook archetype regarding how many Basque chefs are famous today. I tried to portrait the typical strong Basque man in a cartoonish way (see Fig. 1) and I have to say that many of my family members in Orduña they look pretty much this.

We decided we wanted something softer and more welcoming than the strong and straight lines of the Basque features. Then, I worked in a new version of a French cook (See Figure 2), which turned into something too much of a cliché. This new cartoonish approach allowed me to bring something more fun and welcoming, based on round shapes merged into dynamic curves. This could work, but there was not very much from ourselves in this version, which we always want to avoid. I still wanted to portrait something closer to my personal illustration style, but I wanted a compromise between my art oriented works and something design oriented and commercial that could represent the spirit of our work. This way, I worked in a new sketch inspired in my own art illustration, which has always had a big influence from Naive European painters and other artists from the early 20th century such as Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Tamara de Lempicka.

Finally, we decided to go for a mixture of a French and Basque character, which makes sense because that’s just what it is in the South of France. I first drew a preliminary sketch study of the geometrical shapes (See Figure 3), which I usually do in my artwork. The figure is basically based on two round shapes balanced towards opposite directions and connected by a curve axis that define the expression and movement of the character. In this case, I tried to look for a feeling of harmony in the body language and a gentle and warm feeling. That’s why I decided to draw the head slightly laying to the side.

This skeleton gave life to the final sketch (See Figure 4) where the expression of the drawing was developed and I played with the curves in elements such as the mustache, the hat and the bow. The version displayed here includes a new proposal with the chef holding a plate with a bottle which wasn’t used.

Once the main sketch was ready, I went to draw it in vectorial work, keeping all of the different parts of the figure separated in layers and using different working colors just to make it easy to work with(See Figure 5).

These colors would be later replaced by the real ones. Once the vectorial work is finished I usually like to export each layer to JPG image in the highest resolution as possible. No matter how small the work is, I always work in 300 px resolution because you never know what you may want to do with your work in the future. Also because this gives me the opportunity of working with more precision and in detail. As an artist who was taught to paint on canvas, I like to work with the image as big as possible on my screen. So I exported all of the elements separately and then put them in different layers in my painting program, which may be Corel Painter or Adobe Photoshop depending on the needs of the work.

Despite that this may look like painting by numbers, is not at all because I have all the freedom in the world to work on each layer individually and the result of any of them may affect the rest of them. It’s also a funny way to have the elements in sort of collage manner so I can play with them with independence. As you may see in the next sample (See Figure 6), I started correcting the colors for each layer in order to find the chromatic base for the illustration. At this stage, the illustration started showing up, which for me is always the most exciting part of the process. In this case, I started working in the shadow effects for the different layers and then added new nuances of color to bring chromatic richness.

In this particular case (See Figure 7) the result is a mixture between paper collage and volume pieces, which is just what I was trying to fulfill in the first place. Once this work (which is probably the longest part of the process) was done, I did a revision of all the parts to correct the color scheme and made the whole thing homogeneous. Then I worked with overall shades and highlighted the contrast of the different features to remark whatever I think it’s necessary, which you can tell by comparing this version with the final one displayed at the top of the article.

Now the work was finally ready to get merged, so… Kito!… I mean… Et voilà!… which is to say… Supper’s ready!

What more can I say?… oh, yes! Enjoy your meal!