Inspiration for art comes from experiences. Everything that interest me in some way can spark ideas. I love cats and ramen so I thought of combining the two into an illustration of a creepy but cute cat eating a bowl of ramen noodles. I think of cats as mischievous, friendly little goblins so when I sketch them out I try to capture that spirit.
Idea Sketch
I started by making a loose and rough sketch in the Procreate app using my iPad and Apple Pencil. I had some trouble getting the head shaped in a way that looked good to me so I had to re-draw and reposition it a few times. With art it seems my eye for what I find aesthetically pleasing is always several steps ahead of my actual skill level. No matter how much I practice I always struggle in the rough sketch phase of illustrating because of this.
While sketching, I like to reference old artwork of mine from my archive to help me keep things cohesive. To help me fix the head I looked at the last cat illustration I made and formed the ears and head shape in a similar manner.
Clean Up The Sketch
Line Art
Next I did the line art. For me, doing the line art is the most satisfying stage. I have all the shapes pretty close to how I want them so tracing the sketch to make clean line art is more meditative now that I don't have to fuss over things.
Flats
It's all downhill from here, unless I decide to get experimental. I decided to stick with my current process so now I make a flat block of color for each element, all on it's own layer.
Shadows & Highlights
Once all the flats are down I can make more flat color blocks to shape out the shadows like I did on this part of the ramen noodles...
...as well as the highlights like I did here below. I usually like to set the highlight layer mode to "add" in Procreate and turn down the opacity of that layer just slightly.
Final Illustration
After I change the background color and re-color some of the line art I'm finally done. Sometimes I like to experiment with different coloring techniques after I make the line art and flats but I'm not feeling it today! So here's the final illustration of a black cat with ramen noodles.
